Object No. 11 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Scott Jacobson, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now..]

Donald “Dax” Florin stood behind the bar, balancing the hard-boiled eggs. Dax — 44 years old, face just a lifestyle change or two away from being handsome in a Treat Williams kinda way — placed the eggs upright on a small metal dish. There they sat: six little Dax-directed insults, dumpy and lazy in their stupid egg craters, like fat kids strapped in and waiting for a carnival ride to start. Dax flipped a tin cocktail shaker in the air and caught it behind his back peevishly.

Dax was a “flair bartender”. Which is to say he tossed stuff around. Dax did bar tricks because he was good at them. And because his acting career was pretty much kicked. Jesse, the owner, got annoyed whenever Dax skipped limes or lobbed shakers or sent a Grey Goose bottle spinning into a triple axel. Dax didn’t care what Jesse thought about his flair bartending. But this egg plate was a problem.

For all his talent, Dax could not work the plate into his routine. He’d tried spinning it, but the plate — too light, obviously not manufactured to the rigorous technical specs so crucial for stunt-serving — just wobbled arhythmically on Dax’s finger before clattering on the bar. And the eggs themselves were perfect for juggling, but what was Dax, a clown? Not to mention the obvious egg symbolism, hardly lost on a guy who’d taken his share of Joseph Campbell-larded screenplay seminars, of birth and renewal. These eggs were taunting Dax, and his increasingly ovoid gut, and his dead career.

But eh, thought Dax. Maybe I’m reading too much into these eggs.

Two guys walked into the bar. One was dressed in a suit, the other was… somebody.

Jesse leaned over the bar and whispered: It’s Dax Shepard!

Dax grunted acknowledgment as Jesse shifted into kiss-ass mode, fist-pounding the young actor, racking his brain for obscure cameo performances to praise. Dax the Elder did what he always did when he felt awkward and uncomfortable behind the bar: he spun two liquor bottles by his hips like smoking six-shooters.

Whoa, Dax! You think you’re tending bar at Chili’s? Jesus, ha ha!

Dax Shepard didn’t laugh. He didn’t smile. But Dax the Elder thought he saw something cruel in his eyes. He spun the bottles faster.

Jesse laughed: Someone’s in the mood to perform!

Dax tossed a bottle of Prosecco over his shoulder and caught it. He took two beer bottles by the necks and twirled them like drumsticks. He reached for the little metal egg dish, balanced it on his finger, and spun it hard.

Eggs shot off in all directions. One hit Dax Shepard’s sharply dressed companion. One, blessedly, hit Jesse. But even amid the chaos and shell shrapnel, Dax Shepard went unscathed. Dax the Elder took a breath. He thought about stuff, all kinds of stuff. He ran a hand through his hair. Then he fixed Dax Shepard in his sights, and flung the metal dish like a Frisbee at the actor’s forehead.

Object No. 6 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[ Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Benjamin Percy, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

I brought to school a rubber-band gun I bought at the mall. I bought it at that store with the tarot cards and the stink bombs and the beer T-shirts and the posters of women in thongs bending over on beaches with sand stuck to them in all the right places. So I brought to school the gun and showed it off to Stacey Swanson. I was a little in love with her. By that I mean I regularly jerked off into an athletic sock when thinking about her naked.

Normally she would not talk to me except to say, “Don’t even talk to me — you haven’t even gone through puberty yet.” But this time, when I held out the rubber-band gun, she said, “Let me see that.” She grabbed the gun and weighed it in her hand a moment before lifting her arm and staring down the line of it and shooting me directly in the eyeball.

The eyeball did not fare well. The rubber band hit the pupil directly, punctured it, buried itself like a worm. The doctor removed the eyeball and put it in a bottle of formaldehyde. I keep the bottle on my dresser. I can tell the temperature by the eyeball, its buoyancy. Whether it is up or down makes me throw on shorts or a sweatshirt. Sometimes the eyeball seems to stare at me. And sometimes, when the pressure drops and a thunderstorm rolls through, the eyeball spins in circles like some possessed weathervane.

Every night I clean out the socket with a warm washcloth, a squirt of soap. There is a smell otherwise.

Used to be, people would make fun of me, a little rough in the hallways with their shoulders, a shove at the urinals. Now nobody touches me. They call me Cyclops and they beg me to lift my eyelid, show them the scooped-out socket. Sometimes I do.

I put things in the socket. A penny. A marble. A strawberry. You should have seen the look on Gabby’s face when I walked up to her desk and without a word dug into the socket and pulled out the mushed-up strawberry and popped it in my mouth to swallow.

Other things, too. Like a tongue. Stacey Swanson’s if you can believe it. Ever since she shot me in the eyeball she has been touching me on the shoulder, asking, “How are you today, Jimmy?” One time she asked if there was anything she could do for me. I said there was. She said, no, not that, that was terrible — that was the most disgusting she had ever heard. But I said please, it would mean a lot to me, and offered her the forty dollars I had swiped from my mother’s purse.

She wiped her mouth afterwards and demanded the money and ran from me crying and I stood there, behind the school dumpster, breathing heavily and shaking with an electric pleasure that I never would have experienced had it not been for the rubber-band gun.

Object No. 38 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Randy Kennedy, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $16.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Later, in the glove box, the police found a letter. It said:

“Letter To The Police,

All the stuff in the trunk and underneath the sleeping bag on the back seat is stolen (which is embarrassing because it’s just old adding machines and rotary phones and things people don’t use anymore, things I wasn’t going to be able to sell.) But the armadillo on the dashboard is mine. And it would mean a lot to me if you didn’t send it to the evidence room, where things usually end up for good, at least in my experience.

I paid six dollars for it at a monastery gift shop outside of Los Alamos last December after I spent an hour and a half watching a Benedictine brother carve it from a knob of evergreen pine. I was going through a shaky time then and seeing something old-fashioned like that really calmed me down. It gave me the closest thing to a religious feeling I’d had in years.

I’m sure he thought I wanted it because the armadillo is a kind of universal symbol of the West now. But I wanted it because I remembered a strange thing about armadillos, the kind I grew up with, the little black-eyed desert rats. It wasn’t that they jump straight into the air when they’re scared or that they can catch leprosy like humans, but the real evolutionary head-scratcher: that the females gestate four embryos and give birth to quadruplets, always the same sex.

There were four of us boys growing up, not quadruplets but pretty damned close, mom didn’t waste time. We beat each other senseless until we went our separate ways. But I still figured it might mean something to her, now that Jim and Bobby are dead and Pete’s doing whatever he’s doing down in Chile, to have a thing like that from me for Christmas, a nice monk-carved armadillo, a thing I put some thought into.

Hey, so much for good intentions, right? But maybe there’s somebody in the department who has a minute and could drop it into a padded envelope to her, C.O.D. – just Inez McF—-, Sligo, Texas, 79355, the post office knows her, they’ll get it to her. And a note, too, something like, “From Dan, your fat little baby.”

Thanks in advance for any consideration.

Yours truly,

[Redacted]”

Object No. 36 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Nicholas Rombes, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $147.50. This story was chosen from the S.O. Fictionaut Group. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

The box.

Of course, the box.

How could he forget? The music box disguised as a gift box that everybody knew was a music box. She had kept it in the parlor (she called it that though no one knew what a parlor was) as if it had always existed, as if it had been part of the world forever, one of God’s First Creations, as if this box with this squashed pink ribbon and fake metal butterfly charm had been the very first object exchanged between Adam and Eve in the green-splendored garden.

He hunches low and forward on his bike, his 14-year old self, flying down the dusty back roads of this Great Midwestern Land, his head full of the smell of the algebraic girl he sat behind in math class just hours ago. Imagines himself Evel Knievel about to jump, cape flapping in the Bicentennial wind, over and across the minds of a hundred girls who would be there to kiss him and hand him flowers at the end. Yet still  the music box plays its same song over and over and over in his head, primitive as Mesopotamian pottery.

He pedals at impossible speeds, the limestone quarry falling off to his left, what seems a thousand feet deep, the turquoise water calm at the bottom, the rusted machinery on the distant shore like alien artifacts abandoned suddenly centuries ago.

He pedals harder, zooming through the abandoned downtown, past Valley Drugstore with its missing “D”, smiling at the stupid Rugstore jokes at lunchtime. Around the bend with the enormous white oak that they said Abraham Lincoln had stood beneath in July 1864 even though his science teacher, drunk, told the class one day the tree was only, at most, 120 years old.

At the top of the hill, her house. Lawn gone to pot. Weeds sprouting up in driveway cracks. Doors bolted shut. Hot sun against warped siding.

He into the house through the unlatched window around back. Dust on everything. Fridge still humming. Through the living room with its deep blue shag, empty now of furniture. The stale smell of ages.

Into the parlor, so-called. Cobwebbed.  All objects carted away, missing. Except for the music box disguised as a gift, there in the middle of the room, on the floor.

For him.

He touches the butterfly. Smiles. Cranks the small handle, afraid it will snap with age. Sits down Indian style. The music is her voice, speaking directly to him, as if she knew he would be here now, as if she knew that he — this nobody neighbor from the other side of the quarry — the boy with the scarred face who mowed her lawn and raked her leaves, would ride his bike furiously back, back, back to her.

Click to hear.

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2010/01/25/music-box/feed/ 4 http://significantobjects.com/2010/01/18/love-pillow/ http://significantobjects.com/2010/01/18/love-pillow/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:45:52 +0000 David Abrams http://significantobjects.com/?p=3448

Object No. 32 of 50

[The auction for this item, with story by David Abrams, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $36.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

In the end, the pillow came between them.  It was the last bone of contention, the impasse they faced after dividing the spoils of a nine-year marriage.

He said the pillow was his by rights; he’d bought it.

She took the stance that since he’d bought it for her, she could do with it as she chose.

He said he’d known from the first—the unmistakably crushed look in her eyes as he’d pulled it from behind his back—that she’d never really liked it, despite the fact it was her favorite color and plainly said LOVE in shimmering gold threads.  One thing he was always good at was reading her face.

She claimed she had too loved it, considered it one of the few valuable artifacts of their years together.  And, archeologically speaking, that was all that was left of their marriage: artifacts.  She pictured herself crawling on her knees, scraping with a little tool and blowing off the dust with a brush.

He said, if she loved it so much why did she leave it on the bed, untouched, and never said a word when he started using it to prop up his head while reading?  See, see, there’s one of his hairs on it right now.

She said he was missing the whole point: it was a decoration, not an actual pillow.  You were supposed to hang it somewhere, she’d just never gotten around to it.  But now she had plans for it, had already picked out a spot in her new apartment.

He said, Oh yeah?

She said, Yeah! And then she challenged him to remember where he’d bought the pillow.

That had shut him up for a moment.  He could remember it was Petaluma—or had they been in Susanville then?  Damn! He knew he’d gotten it at one of those stores he’d always hated—home décor boutiques, the kind of places that made him itchy, like when she forced him to traipse after her into the lingerie section saying “Here, hold this” and “What do you think?” as she held the bras against her chest.  Back then, he was still willing to do these things for her.  He’d gone into the boutique, face burning, because he knew royal blue was her favorite color.

She said, I’m waiting.  Can you or can you not remember when you bought me this pillow?

And he shot back, Maybe I can and maybe I can’t, but what’s it to you?

She called him a name, then he called her a name, and on it went.

So, when Judge Solomon Twain of the 25th Circuit Court gave them their options for property settlement, both knew what they would choose.  They kept it to themselves—didn’t even tell their lawyers—but they harbored secret plans for pulling the LOVE pillow apart, seam by seam, thread by thread, until there was nothing left at all.

Object No. 28 of 50 -- Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Erin Ellia, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $31.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Congratulations, gentlemen. And, er, ladies. Welcome to – what’d that guy call it? “The most important club you’ll ever join.” Like he said, this here’s a symbol of our brotherhood, and – what? Okay, “siblinghood,” whatever. And it means an especially lot to me on account of I’m the Dragon Slayer! Heh. Heh heh. Seriously, though, remember: it might look all pretty an’ shiny-like, but it ain’t candy.

Best if you devise some way to remind yourselves of this. Tape a note to it if you have to, or tie a string around your baby finger. Because it can be real easy to forget. Trust me. Y’all are going to be Big Important People someday, too, an’ it’s embarrassing. One minute you’re taking a break from all them Big Important Things they make you do – you’re watching a football game all by yourself, say, and you’re reaching for a snack. Next thing you know you’re on the floor with rug burns on your face, an’ that little Jewish fella is telling the whole world you choked on a dang pretzel so’s not to have to admit you tried to eat the secret-initiation statue you been carrying around for thirty years.

So in conclusion: yeah. Not candy. Maybe you could tie a ribbon round its neck…

Oh!

Not a real dragon, either, by the way.

Can’t fly for shit.

Object No. 27 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ed Skoog, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $26.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Back then, I taught introductory drawing at East Memphis Community College to save enough money for an engagement ring. Iris and I set our wedding for July. But two weeks before our wedding, Gomez and Olive reappeared, saying they’d eloped to Eureka Springs, and were back from honeymooning and ready to party. Olive bartended at Tilsson’s Bar, and Iris and others spent the day gussying up the bar with spangle and fabric. Tilsson announced all drinks were on the house. Gomez’s mother came down and danced all night to the jukebox before driving half-drunk back north to Moline.

Gomez and I stepped outside for a smoke. The old woman next door had just died; her children piled up what they didn’t want on the sidewalk. I stooped down to pick up two identical chartreuse glass cups. I thought the texture and tint of the cups, though mass-produced—probably a New Brunswick manufactory, late-60s—was the sort of thing you don’t see much anymore. “The dove of love,” I said, pointing at the bird on the glass.

“It’s leaning forward,” he said. “Like it’s about to fly off.”

“Here,” I said, offering him one. “My wedding present to you. I’ll keep the other one. We’ll toast each other at our anniversaries with these glasses.”

“I look forward to that,” he said.

“But Gomez,” I said. “I’m still puzzled how it all came together. I mean, you and Olive fell in love so deeply, so suddenly.”

“One afternoon,” he said, “we were in my apartment, skipping work to make love. I looked up from Olive and saw, through the window, a housepainter leering down from his ladder. I leapt to my feet, shouting, and the housepainter took a step back, lost his footing, and fell. Air-conditioner, fence, bricks. I threw on my robe and ran outside. Poor guy, bleeding, moaning. I wanted to beat him up anyway, but Olive was calling 911. The guy can hardly talk, but he says, and I swear: lucky. And I realized he was right. I am lucky. I’d always thought I wasn’t. I thought I was some other kind of person, doomed to sadness and desperation, but I saw myself through his eyes, and I knew that I loved Olive, what love was. Ambulance took the guy away. I went inside and proposed, in the shower.”

A few weeks after our wedding, they had us over for dinner. There was a tablecloth. We all acted like proper adults, with measured enthusiasm and topical discussions. Gomez and I toasted our mutual good luck with the green cups, the chartreuse birds regarding us quietly from their chartreuse branches.

Anyway, it’s ten years later and this is one of the cups. Which one is none of your business.

Object No. 26 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Patrick Cates, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $29.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

“Gastro-wot, Tone?”

The regular punters were not happy when Tony told them that he couldn’t afford to run the Haunch of Venison any more and that, after 20 years as landlord, he had no choice but to sell up to some toff who’d made a fortune in the City and now wanted his own gastropub. The Haunch of Venison was undoubtedly a rough old boozer that needed sharpening up — yellow walls from the days before the smoking ban; crumbling plaster on the Victorian, molded ceiling; carpet that was more stain than carpet. But it was a hub. A vital organ. A satellite of Smithfield meat market that tucked itself away up Charterhouse Street and brought together butchers, drivers, packers, farmers — anyone who had anything to do with the trade and who needed to soothe the pain of a seriously early start with a couple of pints and a fry-up.

“Jesus, Tone. The old man’ll be turning in his grave.”

Ray Burkiss had run the pub for 43 years until he retired. And in that time he had peppered the place with all manner of meat memorabilia. Tony was born upstairs, had started collecting glasses when he was still in shorts and, as soon as he had left school without so much as an O-level, had assumed the predictable position of Ray’s heir. And, when Ray died in 1980, Tony was crowned governor and carnal curator of the Haunch.

***

The Haunch’s final day came and whistled by. An all-day and all-night procession of meat-industry men lining up with chokes and tears to clench Tony tightly and tell him that it was a shocking state of affairs. At ten to eleven, a defeated Tony followed his usual routine. He pulled the wooden meat tenderizer out of the lamb skull where it sat all day, held it back over his shoulder and smashed it down on the brass bell that hung above the bar. Over the top of the fading clang, he bellowed “Last orders!” like a sergeant-major and awaited the onrush. And then, ten minutes later, another smash with the hammer. “Time at the bar!”

When there were just five of us left, gathered silently in a boozy huddle on the public side of the bar, Tony pulled out an unopened litre of Teacher’s from under the counter and set it down in front of us. He unscrewed the cap, reached up for a glass with one hand and filled it with the other. He threw the glass up to his lips, bolted the contents and slammed the glass down. Another: fill, bolt, slam. And another. And another.

“Steady on, Tone.”

Sean broke the silence. Tony glared at him and, without looking away, picked up the bottle, put it to his lips and started glugging. A few shocked seconds elapsed before Sean reached over the bar and tried to yank the bottle away from Tony’s mouth. Tony yanked back, and in the fumble that followed, the bottle flew behind him, crashed into two of the optics, knocked them off their mountings and cracked a sprawling web across the Haunch’s most valuable artefact: a giant, wall-mounted mirror engraved with the image of a startled buck hemmed in by the name of the pub.

In a one-two of disbelief and devastation, Tony let out a violent roar, reached for the nearest weapon he could find, the meat tenderizer, and, with a backbeat of regular, heaving sobs, whirled round and round swiping at everything within his reach.

Object No. 99 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Edward Champion, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $56.]

The resilient ruffians ran away with the geisha’s canes just after she refused to perform a classless act. While it was true that the geisha dramatized the occasional lowbrow feat, befitting an object of her status, even she had her standards. She’d wobble her elliptical hips within a studded hula hoop forged from painful tungsten alloy. She’d gorge on great sticks of fire while her blind part-time assistant hurled jeweled daggers round her anatomical outline. And if wanton clients had serious dinero — particularly that shiny new oval currency with the Prince Albert piercing — she’d even flash a bit of flesh, relishing her total control over the crowd. The bobbled harpies working the onyx alleys could hike up their skirts for a sou, but she knew every sector on her body was insurable and she remained committed to securing the compensation befitting her curvy carapace. It hadn’t been easy to work her way up from the snowbound steppes without a rep, but she stage-managed her prestige through her divine Venetian valet de chambre.

However, she needed her two canes to get around.

Now wobbling atop a safe surface, the geisha ruminated upon the false proposition with unintended consequences. The three men had imparted intent to pay serious cash, approaching her with necktie paradoxes she decided to disregard. The geisha asked what they would like, shifting her harsh all-business larynx into a soothing dulcet tone. One claimed that his nether enormity was so round and imposing that it confounded the sensors scanning allplace from space.

“Don’t speak like that to a lady!” snapped the trio’s ringleader, who slapped the boor with a mesh metal glove and jabbed him in the anatomical vicinity of recent boasts.

“You’ve bifurcated my loins!” cried this sausage-laden braggart.

“That’s overstating things,” said the ringleader. “It is exquisitely rude to speak of your insufficient indignities before one of the finest entertainers that this village has to offer. There are subtler ways to elicit a response.”

The ringleader then whispered his lewd request into the geisha’s ear.

“I will not!” shrieked the geisha.

Talks were aborted, but there was a struggle. The self-proclaimed longjohn purloined his trophy.

The final indignity came with the ringleader’s second sordid offer that involved swapping one art for another. But was it so venal? Which line was straighter? The geisha had initially squawked in commerce-laden consonants. Instead of shedding seven veils, she could pilfer from faux furriers and highwaymen expanding their chicanery to a global stage. She reminded herself that she wasn’t getting any younger and that vocations were adaptable. And the new art presented an atonal atonement, an opportunity to correct the scales. Who needed seven notes when there was a human register?

The ruffians returned for their answer. She assented, and the trio gained a fourth member. The run would last longer than any half-baked phantom of the opulent. The new vocation defied objectification and required no crutch.

Object No. 98 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stacey Levine, has ended. Original price: $4. Final price: $10.50.]

I’m not a collector, but really a purloiner, and there’s only a brief backstory to these novelties.

When my second wife died, I sought companionship. So I installed a soda machine in my bedroom — it would be a conversation piece and might make me more attractive to the ladies. I disabled the cash acceptor. I started going for walks to the little square in downtown Orange, and I thought: Why is no one talking to me? Yet soon I was helping a lady cross the street with her grocery bags. She was en route to a cousin’s wedding, she said, and I could come along with her. The grocery bags were full of almonds and snacks sweeter than that.

She was a Somali Jew. Her cousin came from a family of plumbers, and the relatives were working that day at the community center where the wedding was held. The kitchen sink had flooded the main hall. All kinds of guests streamed in, African and white. Grandmothers with shoeboxes of homemade cookies. Middle-aged men in sports shirts and a singer whose entourage of laughing musicians trailed behind her.

The woman who had invited me scarcely glanced at me, though for a few minutes in the press of the crowd, she held my hand. That action made my own hand feel dry. I was about to tell her so, but she ran off with her sisters or other women.

I assisted the three plumbers and another workman as they installed a sump pump in the floor near a storage room door. I thought they should put the sump pump inside the storage room — but no, that idea made them upset. Nearby, a crew of hippie-caterers in sandals began setting up a drinks table. We got the sump pump installed and were testing the alarm when the bride, groom, and minister walked onto the sump pump cover — they liked validating the workers’ labor in this way. We all stood back to see if the pump could handle the weight of three people.

It could. The ceremony began on the sump pump and I slagged to the back of the room. I paced. I had a great pain to mitigate. I saw the bookends in an unwrapped box on the counter and thought, “What a stupid gift to bring to a wedding. Who would do that?” Then I stole the bookends. What a coward I am.

Later I considered the bookends might have been a present destined for another event, and that someone merely set them on the counter temporarily.

I asked the lady to visit me the next day. So I hid the bookends under my couch. She stood on my doorstep. I told her right away: “I am strong as an ox.” She said: “Fine — I like people from foreign lands, because they are less polite and I seek umbrage in that.” I asked her what she was talking about, but the conversation moved to other things.