prompt: visitor, title: the ephemera brothers in misc. flash fiction

SiestaWare, a name both silly and obscure in reference, which cosmically aligns, goofy and oft forgotten such as it is as well. SiestaWare was named after FiestaWare, a line of vibrantly-hued art-deco dishes, now largely remembered only by middle-century nostalgics. Someone thought it funny to play on Fiestaware’s naming conventions there and indeed it was for some short while, but now that referent is distant and the reference it made doubly so.

SiestaWare was the inaugural brand for those translucent-brown barrel mugs with the wooden handles that tourist traps had their logos sloppily screen-printed upon, in hopes the visitor might be inclined to purchase a memento upon exit through The Gift Shop. Others came along to do it cheaper and with even less care, this is America after all, but just as Band-Aids came to mean all bandages, so too all those smudgy mugs. They all became Siestaware.

Every theme park, every road-side trap, every Ball of Twine and Wal-Drug, every South of the Border used to sell their own SiestaWare mugs. Millions of American families in terrible station wagons bought Siestas then about forgot them in closets then someone moved or someone died and they went off to dumpsters or thrift shops, to die themselves in dusty neglect. But goddamn it, they were happy memories once, for a moment they were a summer and a smile and it didn’t matter how they were cheap and stupid, exploitive and ephemeral, hell, that’s what made them beautiful. They’re the imaginary America we all pretended at once, the unhappy families briefly pretending they were the Cleavers, disposed fantasies of a culture trying to fake utopia until they made utopia while ultimately failing miserably at it.

SiestaWare was a beautiful moment of our culture saying the quiet parts loud and so my brother and I collect it, collect the hell out of SiestaWare. I have hundreds of the damned things, rescued from garage sales and the Salvation Army’s Lands Of Misfit Toys. Some with little bells on the bottom, some doubling as oil lamps, so many of them from places that don’t exist anymore at all.

The thing my brother and I have come to understand over our lives is how ephemera is the key to really knowing a culture. History books are written with agendas of constructed remembrance by rich folks wanting to be judged gods, the real answers lie in the trash intended to rot in landfills after their brief usefulness. The future will know this epoch by what we valued in our disposable moments, not in Ken Burns The Fourth’s future holo-documentaries. The words of our prophets written in ad circulars and burger wrappers, on what was presumed to be our easy and immediate impulse purchases. That will be the heart Anubis weighs for us against his holy feather.

We don’t collect cups from defunct fun-parks, we collect subconscious wishes of a past telling on itself. Into siestas, they spilled their beautiful ridiculous ephemeral dreams that we get to see.