by
Bobby Derie
"Mine was a bizarre paperweight of exactly the sort to appeal to a Dunsanian fantaisiste—a globe of glass about three inches in diameter, set in a black base & containing within it a castle with white walls & red roof, whose open door & windows yawn weirdly & alluringly. The entire globe is filled with water—or some analogous fluid—& when shaken becomes permeated with white flakes, as if a snowstorm were raging about the lone tower. I, however, prefer to regard the tower as a strange edifice of forgotten Atlantis, long sunken under the sea, & inhabited by sinister & terrible polypous things, which float ghoulishly about in the cryptic currents of the deep."
- H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 26 December 1925, Letters from New York 261
She shook the globe. Watched the white flakes flurry around the little red-roofed tower. Sat it on the cluttered shelf. A blur of motion amid the idols of brass and clay and plastic.
Lovecraft's treasures had been lost with his death. Scattered. His aunt gave some to friends. Sold others. Ten-cent trash and bits of dinosaur bone. Things he owned moving through the world. 'Til this bit of it had found her.
She brought it home to the library. Sought out the passage in his letters. Compared it to his scribbled drawing. Read the description again and again. Hold. Shake. Set down again. Lovecraft's 1926 Christmas gift. His castle. The relic of a weird saint.
That night she lay it on the nightstand. The empty eyes of the windows stared at her as she went off to sleep. To dream of polypous things.
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