Trophy Room Chain Letter

In mid-2020, I decided to create a series of miniature trophy busts. I combined creative writing and crafting to create a backstory for each one. The overarching story of the trophy busts is that they are black market items previously owned by a shady man named Dickii Solo, who recently died.

Please note: Dickii Solo is named after the character Dick Solomon of 3rd Rock from the Sun, which I was quarantine binge-watching at the time. In hindsight, this was a bad idea because the name sounds like something else. Don’t google it.

Every bust has a story attached to it. The stories explain how the late Dickii Solo came to collect each one. Below is a summary of several of those stories, in the form of a chain email from the executor of Dickii’s estate, Bambi Campbino.

---------- Forwarded message ---------

from: Grandma <[email protected]>

to: me, and [46 others]

date: June 10 2021, 3:07 AM

subject: FWD: FWD: // FWD: FWD: URGENT SECRET OPPORTUNITY!!

To Whom It May Concern:

Hi, and welcome to Dickii Solo’s Trophy Room mailing list.

The vast and fairly disgusting estate from which I’m writing you was once the property of the late Dickii Solo, a local deviant and oddities collector who disappeared suspiciously some time in the last year or two. We're not sure. Nobody really liked him that much so it's not like we were all worried.

After he was declared legally dead, I, the executor of his will, sought out the seven named inheritors to sort through his junk and get rid of it. According to an antiquated local law, still on the books, none of the inheritors are allowed to leave the estate until every last item in Dickii’s vast collection has been claimed or destroyed. This is known colloquially as the “eyesore rule”.

The group of misfit inheritors, none of whom are related to Dickii, are chained to their beds at night to ensure compliance. This method is cruel and also very legal. The imprisoned inheritors are therefore desperate to sort through Dickii's estate as quickly as possible so that they can return to their normal lives. They are especially motivated by the fact that the estate is located near Gooberfal, a now-defunct nuclear power plant that suffered a meltdown in the 80’s. The surrounding area is still considered dangerous for human inhabitance.

As previously stated, Dickii was a collector, and is rumoured to have traded in black market goods. His most prized possessions were the mounted "animal head" trophy busts in his trophy room. Only a select few people have ever been in the room, and they all coincidentally suffered horrible misfortunes after the fact. Dickii Solo’s trophy room has been the fodder of local legends for years, but few believed it to be real. Until now.

As a recipient of this chain email, you have been chosen as part of an elite group of underground collectors who might be interested in some of the more unsavoury items in this collection.

Or, maybe your grandma sent this email to you, because she hates you, and now lives only to see you suffer.

Either way, please be aware that the following auction items contain sensitive images. We kindly ask you to pretty please not contact the authorities to report the black market trades we are offering, or, for that matter, that the seven inheritors are being held prisoner. It is our obligation to warn you that if you do, Bloody Mary will show up in your mirror and chop you with her blood axe.

Also, you have to send this to five people. Or Bloody Mary will chop you, with her blood axe.

There are currently 5 items available. Dickii Solo wrote in his logbook that only up to 30% of the trophy busts are cursed or toxic, so that’s nice to know. All information presented on each object is sourced from Dickii Solo’s logbooks, diaries, and creepy neighbour, Gertrude the Crone. We submit for your consideration the following list:

EXHIBIT 1

💧𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖔𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊 delicate surveillance flower 💧

⛓{After a string of break-ins that Dickii Solo forgot that he, himself, had committed, he started to get very concerned about the security of his home. His homemade booby traps kept catching only his myriad accident-children, and once, a small raccoon, whom he had no quarrel with. To protect his home, Dickii went to a nearby field of enchanted sentient eyeball flowers and picked a few, which he then mounted and hung in his trophy room as unconventional watchdogs. He forgot that the sentient eyeball flowers are sentient AND highly sensitive/fragile, and also that they have no mouths to report any crimes that they do happen to see. So, they became just another collection of useless items in a house of uselessness. But, after Dickii’s unsolved disappearance and assumed murder, the flowers began to mysteriously cry. Some say they must have witnessed unspeakable horrors that day, and, cursed with the inability to communicate in anyway, their tears are their only true form of expression. Others say, no.}⛓

EXHIBIT 2

🦶🏼𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖔𝖋 the foot🦶🏼

⛓{House arrest is the great American pastime.

Dickii was involved in a loving relationship with a felon from 1990-1992. He later described their time together as “Rose and Jack from ‘Titanic’, if both had lived, and then one of them was arraigned for gross criminal negligence.”

Dickii’s beloved had always wanted to own a hardware store, but local laws (which admittedly need to be looked at in general) prevent the selling of power-tools out of residential dwellings. There was but one ankle monitor between his beloved’s dream and her stark reality.

The couple broke up after a political disagreement over the make and model of Bill Clinton’s saxophone. It was important to them at the time. Dickii’s ex-beloved found another home to be arrested in, and moved out.

Several years later, Dickii signed for a large, cold package, and opened it to find his beloved’s severed leg, with the ankle monitor still attached, on ice.

“You’re finally free, precious,” he whispered, smiling gently, “Go make your hardware store dreams come true.”

Dickii shed a single tear… and was subsequently tackled by a bush that turned out to be an FBI agent in disguise. Dickii was then arrested for the suspected contract-killing of his ex-beloved. The authorities had tracked the leg to his house using the monitor. The package was assumed to be proof of services rendered.

Luckily, for dickii, the authorities then discovered via public tip that a certain hardware store owner with a fake leg was selling raccoon pelts out the back of her shop the next state over. She wasn’t dead after all, haha, just insane. Dickii was released and got to keep the leg for his trouble. }⛓

EXHIBIT 3

👄𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖔𝖋 the lip-kit victim👄

⛓{Little Cassidy Padweisser grew up to be a woman addicted to suction lip kits.

Being a pickpocket in a town where everyone’s credit cards were still maxed out from buying anti-spotted owl merch in 1990, poor Cassidy could never afford the fillers that she so desperately craved. She was forced to stick to her suction lip kit habit, which seriously endangered her health. Cassidy became known around town as the girl who back-spit whenever she tried to use a straw.

It all came to a tragic head one rainy afternoon, when Cassidy used a lip suction kit so forcefully that she accidentally sucked her entire face off. R.I.P.

Cassidy told many, many people many, many times that she wanted to have an open casket, even though no one had ever asked. So, after her unfortunate but predictable demise, the surrounding town banded together to remortgage their homes in order to pay for post-mortem facial reconstruction.

But it was Dickii, in an uncharacteristically charitable move, who paid for her post-mortem lip filler. After her funeral, the town allegedly “let him” keep her head. Or something happened, I don’t know, anyways, he wound up with her head on his wall.

At her wake, Cassidy was remembered fondly.

“I remember the first time she pickpocketed me,” Calvin the UPS guy said, “I totally thought she was just into me.”

The room exploded into sad laughter.

“But you know,” said Maci, the ATM repair woman, “it’s important that we as a community don’t normalize that kind of behaviour as flattering.”

Everyone agreed and ate lip-shaped sugar cookies and had important conversations about consent.

Another tragedy. However, in 2040, if your progeny asks what the 20-teens were like, you can just point to Cassidy. Your kids’ll probably never ask you anything ever again.}⛓

EXHIBIT 4

☢️𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖔𝖋 the mutant fawn☢️

⛓[Everyone has heard of Chernobyl... but have you heard of Gooberfal?

It was a nuclear power-plant located deep within the recesses of Cascadia that suffered an admittedly kind-of funny meltdown in 1987. It all started when an employee dropped a donut. As he bent over to pick it up, he accidentally nudged the control panel’s self-destruct lever with his butt. They should really stop building this into the control panel.

Interestingly, this event went on to inspire a certain hit animated tv show. That’s right: long-running Canadian series “Things Used to be Pretty Nifty but Then…”

The government moved quickly to cover up the incident at Gooberfal, but that didn’t stop a generation of mutant-fawn-thugs with super-strength and three eyes from forming teenage dirtbag gangs and drop-kicking local kids to steal their lunch money.

Said one resident of an encounter with a mutant fawn: “He didn’t look buff but he was in reality […] super buff.”

Although there is no photographic evidence of these nightmare ‘roid fawns who were rumoured to have started growing gills in 1997 and plunge into the ocean on a quest to gentrify the lost city of Atlantis, Dickii apparently has the only taxidermic bust on record. The trophy bust is a small mutant fawn who died naturally of explosives on Dickii’s wooded property. Dickii affectionately called him Rambi, like Bambi crossed with Rambo, even though he was super dead.]⛓

EXHIBIT 5

👼🏼𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖔𝖋 the plague baby👼🏼

⛓[***please note that the following artifact may be illegal to possess in port cities***

Diseases suck and they especially sucked back when doctors were also de facto astrologers who hypothesized that disease might be spread via eye contact.

The bubonic plague first took hold of Europe in the 14th century, causing people to get really weird psychologically. They would dance against their will and huff chamber pots. Look it up. Depressing for sure. But guess what! We never fully eradicated the plague. so.

Yes, this baby bubonic is *technically* super tragic and *possibly* still contagious, but at least ‘baby bubonic’ has the same number of syllables as ‘baby beluga’, so as you can see, there are some fun possibilities here.]⛓

Thank you for your patronage and discretion. Please return your bids with the subject line “SUPER SECRET NOT FOR FBI”. Be sure to include the phone number of a local phone booth you can be reached at between the hours of 11 pm and 3 am on weeknights in the body of the email. We will contact you as soon as possible, and remember, we will NEVER introduce ourselves as police or the FBI. If somebody does that, please hang up PROMPTLY.

Happy bidding, weirdos!

Kind Regards,

Bambi Campbino,

executor

***

FBI PLEASE READ:

The Boring Reality of How I Make the Trophy Busts

I create the busts by cutting tin foil into the correct shape for whatever creature I’m making, and then cover the tin foil with polymer clay. I sculpt the clay, bake it, and then coat the sculpture with sealant or gloss. Sometimes I cut down a pair of false eyelashes to size for the bust’s eyes and attach it with jewelry glue. After the head part of the trophy bust/animal mount is complete, I sand down and paint miniature wooden plaques before sealing them with polyurethane. To make the finished product look more like proper trophy room animal mounts, I add a felt backing to the plaques. I trace the shape of the plaques onto felt, and then cut out the shapes. I use fabric glue to attach the felt to the plaques. The finished product does not contain any human flesh or skeletal remains or baby organs of any kind. Come back with a warrant.