“Let’s see how you look,” he says, pulls up a chair in the doorway so she can’t run out.

The mother had beautiful things, and the racks behind the governess sag with the silk and satin dresses the mother wore only once and couldn’t throw away. One is the dark blue of the night sky sewn with silver, one is the bright gold of the sun, one shines like a diamond.

When she shakes her head he says, “Come on, you took the boots she gave you. She’s not coming back for these. Let’s pick something nice.”

She feels as if his hands were on her, but he sits in his chair while she pulls the blue dress from the hangar, slides it over her naked bones. She trembles so much that he has to pull up the zipper himself.

He turns her to face the mirror.

“That’s better,” he says, moves the chair aside, closes them in.

After the children are asleep, the governess goes to her room and sees the dress of gold laid out on her bed, unzipped and waiting for her. The lining is embroidered with bees (from the mother’s name–the dress was made for her).

She looks out the window as if she could signal someone, but it’s night out, and the window might as well be painted over black.

She puts on the dress and goes to his room.

“Very good,” he says, and she feels like her mouth has been stuffed with cotton and no light will ever reach her.

When he zips the dress closed, she can feel the bees spring to life inside the dress, a thousand tiny stings.

A gilded cage is still a thorny prison, and meat is meat.

Cris Fisher

Shira Lipkin and I collaborated on this project, working together to record the story in as many different forms as possible: audio on cassette tape and CD, video on DVD, handwritten on parchment, computer printed on paper. I then shattered the disks, tore the paper, and cut the tape into small fragments and used one fragment from each medium in this piece, to reflect the story’s theme of data loss and recovery.

Kythryne Aisling

I have always loved old things, lost or serendipitously found objects, keys and doorways and passages. I earned degrees in computer science and medieval studies; both data and history are important to me. So is memory, and the nature of who we are.

I have dabbled in a host of media and crafts — stained glass, collage, songwriting, off-loom bead weaving — but have been captivated by wire work for the last two years. My main focus is wire wrapping antique keys, decorating them with watch gears, glass leaves, crystals and charms and other bits and pieces. My keys are often a fusion of stylized natural and mechanical forms, as if a bit of machinery were animated by a spirit of growth, and unfurled its own little leaves.

My pieces often have stories reaching backwards in time, through the past history and the associations of the objects I use. This piece reaches forward as well. I marked the glass chips wrapped onto the key with phrases written down by the narrator in Shira Lipkin’s story Valentines, but not all the chips were attached to the key. A handful remain lost, unmoored. These fragments are included with the auctioned pendant, but what is done with them is up to the recipient. Make them into matching earrings. Give them away. Hide them. Bury them. Continue the story of these shards of data.

Kendra Tornheim