Ceramic Flower Mum Olive 5

At some point between ordering takeout and contemplating what to hang above a bed, my sister became obsessed with ceramic flowers. Not the gaudy imitation flowers our grandmother used to collect – plastic monstrosities that looked like they'd been salvaged from a defunct miniature golf course – but rather these eerily beautiful wall-mounted pieces that seemed to float like olive-tinted ghosts against her apartment walls. "It's modern artwork," she declared, as if daring me to disagree. "From some company called Chive." The medium-sized mum she'd just installed was neither small enough to be precious nor large enough to be ostentatious. It hung there, somewhere between art and artifice, like a chrysanthemum that had been dipped in sage-tinted twilight. I watched as she transformed her walls into what she called a "gallery of botanical curiosities." Each piece of wall art decor was positioned with the precision of a heart surgeon, though I suspected her measuring tape had been replaced with pure intuition and three glasses of Chardonnay. "You're not seriously going to leave that there?" I asked, pointing to the latest addition. "Darling," she sighed, using the word like a period at the end of a sentence, "some people collect cats. I collect ceramic flowers that judge you while you sleep."

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