The Thing

A short story I wrote last year, hope you enjoy The Thing:

She was a woman of particular taste. The vase had a gold trim which clashed with the purple body as well as with its white floral detailing along the edges. To say it was ugly was an understatement. It didn’t help that it was shaped like a penis that had been stepped on at the end, Miranda thought, as she looked at the thing sat on the mantelpiece of her newly inherited childhood home. Everyone was dressed in black despite her mother’s request that people be in colour for her funeral, always overemphasising the FUN in funeral when she talked about it. Miranda’s husband, Billy, hands her a glass of white wine and stands beside her.

“Didn’t know they made custom urns.” he says.

“Could’ve got her stuffed if we wanted to.”

“Pssh.” he takes a large swig of his beer, “You alright?”

“Yep. Just-” she pauses, looking at the phallic ceramic, “Just admiring the new decor, I guess.”

“We’ll put it downstairs later.” he whispers then wanders over to thank some cousins for coming.

“Oh, Miranda.” an aunt, or an old woman her mother knew, was never quite sure, comes over and takes her hand, “I’m just so sorry for you loss. Really, I am. Your mother, bless her heart. Gone too soon.”

Miranda smiles and gently removes the woman’s hand, “Thank you. She would have appreciated that.”

“I just was wondering, wonder about the shed, see, there were some old plates of your mothers she said I could have. Have you seen them?”

“Plates in the shed?”

“Yes, yes.”

There is a moment of silence, Miranda had expected there to be more information. Alas, she’ll have to find it.

“I’ll have a look.”

“It’s just that, Juliet said your mother also promised her some plates and I wanted to be sure they weren’t my plates.”

“I’ll have a look. If you’ll excuse me one moment.”

Miranda makes her way to the bathroom which is occupied. Her eyes dart up and down the hall, terrified of someone appearing, another mouth garbling out the word “Sorry”. This whole house will be empty if her mother intended every promise to be kept. But the urn she didn’t need to worry about. No, her mother made sure Miranda knew on her death bed that she wanted her urn to be above the mantelpiece in the house she called home for 60 years.

A flush then the door opens, too close in succession for them to have washed their hands. A friend of her moms, Burt, comes out and stops to take both of Miranda’s hands in his and his giant mustache seems to frown.

“She was a wonderful woman. Truly. I loved her very much.” Miranda thought about him holding his penis and then her hands, then wondered if his looked like the urn. Was it as misshapen, discoloured and alien-like? She was excited to find a spot for it behind Billy’s boxes of magazines in the basement. “Your mother, how do you say this? Was so touching.”

“Touching?”

“Yes. Very touching. Smooth. Silky. Promised me she’d leave a tissue, the one she always tied around her head when driving back in the day. The green one.”

Miranda had no idea what he was talking about. “I’ll have a look.”

“Please do.”

He then walked away, hands still unwashed. Miranda locked the bathroom door and scrubbed her hands, trying to get off the musk of Burt’s piss dick while imaging the urn pissing into the toilet. Seemed her mother was a fan of dicks, but in a personality type way, not the appendage. As she sat down to finally pee, someone knocked on the door.

“Miranda?”

“Just a minute!”

“Um, Marnie said you were giving her the plates. But-but your mother said I could have them.”

“Just a minute, Juliet!”

“It’s just that your mother did say I could have them and I think it’s unfair that Marnie gets them, I know you’re closer-” Close in what sense? Miranda thought, I’m not even sure if we’re related, “but your mother did promise me them.”

Miranda washed her hands again as the talk of plates went on, “It was the picnic for Jodie’s birthday, or maybe it was Easter, but your mother, she brought the plates and I said to her ‘My, those are lovely plates’ and your mother said I could have them when she passed and uh, well, I would very much like those plates when you have the time.” The urn is flopping around in her head, unfired and wriggling wet clay sloppily making its way down her hallway to knock on the door and tell her her mother promised it would stay on the mantelpiece forever, that is to gather dust and her mother promised, you see, she promised and well, now it’s very much time it should be on the mantel for the next 60 years until she dies then she’ll be put into the urn and her children will care for it and their children and their children and their childr- “Marnie’s here now too, dearly, tell her what you told me.”

Miranda opens the door and the two old women, both expecting her to have the plates in her hands and graciously place it in theirs but unfortunately all she had was the feeling of Burt’s nasty clam palms sweating onto hers.

“I will have to find these plates. They must be so nice since I keep hearing about them.” Miranda tries to push past them back towards the sitting room. “My mother’s generosity seems to have gotten carried away, but I suppose we could split the set.”

Both women look horrified.

“It’s a set, you can split them up. No, no, that wont do, deary.” Juliet puffs her lower lip, it must have worked great as a child but now she looks like a pufferfish half full.

“Now, Juliet, don’t you be acting like you can have them when I was promised them.” and with that Miranda left the two women to bicker in the hallway.

The urn looks at her with its one squashed eye, Mother promised Mother promised. She makes herself a gin and tonic that is mostly gin.

“Hello there, Miranda. How’re you holding up?” she turns to see man in his mid-50s, probably a student of her mothers.

“Fine, thanks.” she takes a gulp. The man is talking but she can’t help but look over at the urn, still watching her.

“-I was very flattered when your mother commissioned me, it’s the most serious thing I’ve every done I suppose. She had this vision that I found to be fascinating.”

She gets the shivers and breaks her gaze.

“Ah, I see you’ve noticed.”

“Sorry what?”

“How it watches you. It was your mother’s idea. She wanted it to be like ‘Mona Lisa but make it modern art’. Wonderful, really. Such a great sense of taste.”

“Taste. Yes, she did of course. People can’t get enough of it.” she take another long sip.

“There is just one thing.” he tucks his hands into his pockets and leans over, “She never got the chance to pay me.”

Miranda smiles and chuckles into her drink, “Oh, that’s a shame.”

“She did say you would take care of it for me.”

“Did she? Wow. Mad.” she sucks on the slice of lime in her drink then spits it back into the glass. “Seems she was so chatty near the end wasn’t she? Just talking to everyone. Yeah, wonderful, really great.”

“Maybe another time?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. See you around.”

He walks away, people are looking her. It’s looking at her. She smiles and goes into the back yard. There’s a few people smoking, despite her asking them not to. She gets one off them and walks with it to the treeline. She looks at the house. All hers now. It’s skeleton at least. The furnishings, light fixtures, linens, who knows how much of it was promised away, but those big windows would be nice in the summer. And maybe she’ll have children. Maybe she’ll keep it all to herself. But it’ll belong to it as well. She could see it now through one of the big windows. That squished disgusting eye.

After most of the guests had cleared out Miranda had hoped for some alone time with Billy. Some of her friends had stayed to help clean up, a couple of cousins too who had come in from out of town. She sat on the sofa, depleted from the day, rolling around another G&T in her palm.

“Hey.” Billy said quietly as he sat next to her. She lifted her legs to drape over his, half laying down.

“My Billy Goat, I’m tired.”

“Me too.” he looked at the mantel then back to her, then, after a pause, “Maybe we should leave it there.”

“What?”

“The urn, you know. Didn’t you say that’s what your mom wanted?”

“Are you serious?”

“Come on. It’ll be a nice way to remember her.”

“Wonderful!” He either ignores her sarcasm or does not hear it.

“Yeah, it’s really quite something when you look at it.”

She’d dreamed of this house being hers for years. How she’d redo the kitchen, the windows, the walls. She already even bought plaster to fix the dents in the hallway, placed there when she was 10 and decided to ride the bike inside. The pintrest boards and home renovation instagram pages she followed forever, waiting for it to be her time. And now. This thing. The dead eye of her mother coming to ruin everything she wanted.

Miranda jolted up, as if hit by lightning and stumbled down to the basement. Billy called to her from upstairs but she wouldn’t hear him, no, she was on it now. She grabbed the plaster and then headed up to the kitchen where she grabbed a large knife. Billy, her friends and cousins gathered around her in the sitting room, silent, shocked and still. She had Billy hold the urn before plunging the knife into the wall above the mantel, cutting out a rectangle. The fireplace had been built in so there was a small platform. Miranda took the urn from Billy, gave it a kiss on the head and placed it inside the wall before plastering it back up.

“Everybody wins.”

Thank you for reading,

Enya xx