Object Slam Story By Sam Reiff-Pasarew

[This past Saturday night, the above object was revealed to the audience at the first-ever Significant Objects live event. Anyone brave enough to play along had 10 minutes to invent fresh Significance for this $1 thrift-store item. Seven rose to the challenge; only one could prevail. Sam Reiff-Pasarew, a Brooklyn resident visiting San Francisco, says he was on hand by chance -- but perhaps it was fate? After all, it turns out his work with Story Pirates includes writing workshops in which kids invent meanings for objects! Whatever brought him to Root Division that night, he won the world's first Object Slam, and the Bee Bucket. We are pleased to share his winning story with you here.]

I like to put things in little containers. I’ve been searching a while for the perfect little container. It needs to have a few practical characteristics that will really set my mind at ease when I’m worrying about its possible applications. It should be big enough for a hearty bouillabaisse or enough suntan lotion for 6 or 7 weeks at the beach. It shouldn’t be too hard to clean — I don’t want my bouillabaisse  tasting like suntan lotion.

It should also be heavy enough that if it’s the only thing in my backpack and it’s empty and I lift up my seemingly empty backpack that my back pack should feel like it has something in it. That way if I’m looking for it and I want to know if it’s in my backpack I just need to lift it up, and not open the backpack.

Also it needs to look like a black hole and be covered with bees.

Object No. 4 of 5: Epistolary Week

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Scott Snyder, has ended. Original price: $0 (found object). Final price: $80. This is part of a series of five epistolary stories guest-curated by Ben Greenman. Proceeds from this auction will go to One Story.]

Dear Emma,

I’ve left you this tiny wrecking ball because it’s what brought me back.

I found it in an antique shop two weeks ago. I was with my girlfriend; we were on our way to visit her parents upstate. She was looking for shaker furniture and I was wandering around the shop, killing time, and suddenly there it was, sitting in a row vintage toys –  little dump trucks and steam-rollers and a crane made of tin.

The sight of the thing stopped me in my tracks, because suddenly I was back inside an afternoon we’d had. We were in the back of your father’s van and we’d just slept together for the second time ever; we were lying on our backs, sweaty and naked from the waist down and I remember feeling stunned by how much better it’d been than the first time and just then you rolled toward me and said:

“What do you want to happen when you kick the bucket?”

I held up my shaking hands. “Look at that. Are your fingers tingling?”

You threw your leg over mine. “I said… what do you want to happen to your body when you die?”

I told you that I didn’t know, but that I’d probably get cremated.

“Well I’m getting frozen,” you said in a matter of fact way.  “I read about it. The moment after you die, a doctor injects you with anti-freeze – the same stuff that animals in the arctic make naturally, penguins and polar bears? And then he submerges your body in liquid nitrogen and seals you up in a canister.”

“And?” I said.

“And what?” you said.  “And then you wait for someone to wake you up.”

“Some weird guy in some weird future,” I said.

You smiled and pressed harder against me.  “Ooh, you sound jealous.”

“Sooo jealous,” I said, but in truth I was actually a little jealous.

“Well I promise,” you said, “I’ll wait just for you and only you to wake me up, prince charming.”

“I’ll be sure,” I said, kissing you between words, “to bring my can opener and a wrecking ball to bust the ice.”

I soon forgot about this conversation. I never thought of it again – not when we headed off to college. Not when we broke up. Not in the years after.  Not even when you died.

I was teaching English overseas when it happened.  I didn’t get the news until almost a year afterwards, and still I didn’t remember the conversation.

But then out of nowhere I see this wrecking ball and it all comes back.  So I dug up your parents’ number and the funny thing is, I knew even before your mother told me that you’d gone through with it.

Now I’ve come to see you.  Each steel container has a blinking green light on top, and a valve that periodically gives off a little sigh of vapor. According to the doctor (is he a doctor?), this one – number 77 — is yours. He said the facility keeps safety deposit lockers for its clients – for any personal effects they might want to keep nearby.

I know they might not wake you up for a hundred years. And I’ve read about the possibility of brain damage – ice crystals rupturing the pathways of your brain.  I know you might not remember that afternoon at all. Or me.

But even so, I want you to go to your personal locker when you wake up, wet and shivering, and find this letter, and this tiny wrecking ball, and know that I was here.

The winner of this auction will also receive Scott Snyder's story, mailed by the author.

No. 48 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Wesley Stace, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $52. This is the first of three stories in our Identical Objects series. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

We were the unluckiest band in the world.

On reflection, and it’s all I’ve got left, Key West was not a great name. I was thinking Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, Doug was thinking “Songs In The Key of the West” and all that, but that was right when “Margaritaville” went global, and it was too late to change. We were an edgy post-punk combo, reading the right books, listening to the left bands, and suddenly people were asking if our music was “Gulf and Western” and I didn’t even know what it was.

The first single was “Message In A Bottle”. I know, I know. It seems mad now, but at the time I honestly didn’t think it mattered. Besides, there was a lot Sting left unsaid. He only skimmed the surface. The worst is when you get booed for playing your new single because the audience discovers it isn’t a cover of a Police song.

I said to Angie from the record company: “Sure you can make a tchotchke, but please avoid the obvious.” She laughed at how dumb that would be. Mind you, she was also the one who told me with great enthusiasm that our new record was a “Tour de France” and I asked her whether she meant “Tour de Force” and she said she didn’t know.

Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when I open the sample at our management office.

“Butch,” I said, “it’s everything we didn’t want. Our vibe isn’t Key West and our logo isn’t palm trees.”

“I couldn’t put a hammer and symbol wrapped in barbed wire on this.”

I let it go. “Barthes would have a field day.”

“Besides,” he enthused, “the mini-scroll inside has the lyrics on it.”

“Oh well, that’s something,” I said, ever the peacemaker.

“Unfortunately, it’s the wrong version. There was some miscommunication.”

“We have to throw them all away.”

And with them went the single budget, and, in fact, the single and, in fact, the band.

What to do with 30,000 tchotchkes?

When Kanye West turned up to freestyle  on that wretched song with The Police at Live Earth in 2007, I couldn’t believe my luck. I went to the trouble of getting little stickers made which transformed Key into Kanye, but even I wasn’t convinced. He butchered the song anyway. Sally said you shouldn’t throw good money after bad.

Weirdly, due to a glitch at Harry Fox or PRS or somewhere, I am currently receiving royalties from some version of Sting’s song that has mistakenly attached itself to my name and account. It’s difficult to be honest about this, however, because it’s now my main source of income.

Sally said the tchotchkes were a monkey on my back and that we should get rid of them while waving around some sage. Dumping them into the sea was not her greatest idea however. Almost anytime I go to a beach, I find one of them bobbing in the surf at my feet.

No. 46 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The bidding on this object, with story by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, has ended. Original price: 69 cents. Final price: $30. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

The dogs waited outside whenever Hilary came. Well, at first, there was just the one dog and then as time passed, it spawned, as if with my desire.

“Trevor?” she called.

I opened the door but there were so many strays jostling, I couldn’t see her at first. Then, she wolf-whistled, and shrilled, “Laikas, sit!” They all lowered, panting, some cocking their heads, some not. Seventeen mongrels, I counted.

I knew they’d give her (maybe) an hour, and then she’d be laughing at me for my fabulous attempts to keep her there.

“I don’t know why you tolerate them,” I said. We were in the sofa, by then, the Greek ashtray nestled into the concave of my belly. “If they turn on you, then what?” Hilary had scars where she’d been bitten and an oozing wound that she wouldn’t let me tend.

The dogs were practically feral.

“I don’t tolerate them,” she said. She leaned over and twisted her cigarette softly on Orpheus’s leg, watched his skin peel off.  “I have no idea about them, at all,” she said. “They like me. They lick and nip. It’s play that goes too far.”

I could hear the dogs whimpering, beckoning.

I flexed my pectoral muscles tight and tried to look naturally hot. I draped the red velvet curtain across myself and pouted elegantly, desperately. I proffered more Cuban cigarettes. I exhaled earthen smoke into her ears, her mouth, whatever opening I felt like.

When I went too far, she giggled and pushed my face away from down there with her bare legs. “In the old stories,” she said, “there is always a door through which the hero must never pass.”

“Death’s door?”

She drew on the Cohiba so deeply it almost disappeared. “It’s a portal to this unimaginable place.”

The dogs were scrabbling, yipping at the porch screen. A howling set up in response to a siren off in the Annex. I grabbed her ankle; I had noticed a long scratch, like on torn nylons, only raw, fresh skin.

“Damn dogs,” I said. “Jesus. They’ll eat you one of these days.”

“It’s something stupid I did,” she said, holding the ashtray in one hand now. I didn’t dare ask what stupid thing she might have done. I just watched her cigarette wantonly remove his face, char his cloak, and burn his private bits. The dogs began jumping onto the windowsill, drooling on, and worrying the glass pane.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Wait!”

I was frantic for her. I placed a small piece of dark chocolate on my penis. “I know this trick!” I flicked my abdominals and caught the arcing chocolate between my teeth.

But she was already dressed. She laughed to placate me. “Nice,” she said. “Brilliant.”

I stood in the threshold when she left. The dogs were whirling outside, anticipating her. They nibbled each other’s ears, moaned, and showed their gums in undeniable grins. And I counted them as they followed her receding sway. Twenty-nine.

No. 41 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Damion Searls, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $59. This is part one of a five-story teamup with the literary magazine The Believer. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

She had gotten used to the long subway ride, the 3 uptown and past uptown to what came after. She usually saw patients in her office near NYU, but Damien Toussaint was admitted to Mercy’s the week of the earthquake and she treated him there, then thought she’d keep seeing him somewhere familiar for their follow-ups after he was discharged.

His parents lived in Port-au-Prince; both his aunts and all his cousins were visiting from Jakmèl and Les Cayes to help with the preparations for their 40th anniversary. It took three days after the quake to get a call through from New York and find out that the roof had collapsed and killed the whole family. The aunts’ houses were undamaged, any other week they and the cousins, who rarely traveled, would have survived. Two days later Toussaint was admitted to the hospital. She and Toussaint didn’t talk about his family — there were psychological counselors for that. Her job was physical therapy. He was unable to unclench his shoulders or his fists, the back pain was crippling, he couldn’t drive his taxi and couldn’t sleep at night except for a few minutes when his body finally collapsed. He woke himself up with the sound of his teeth grinding.

After his discharge, three weeks later, Toussaint gave her a present. She usually refused these gestures from patients but she could tell it was important to him that she take it, that he be able to do something for someone. It looked like it came from a 99¢ store but there was something jolly about it, and several times on the long subway ride back she took it out of her purse and looked at it, turning it over in her lap, her face in a frown of what was probably only concentration.

She poured the liquid into the bathtub. The lemon scent had a stinging, artificial note — maybe it had spoiled in the years since manufacture? Assuming the little tangerine still had its original contents, not a refill. Does bubble bath go bad? If artificial lemon scent smells so different from real lemons, why do we perceive it as lemon at all? Her mind wandered. She was tired, she soaped her stomach and breasts, she soaked her sore wrists. She didn’t usually take baths after work; it was so she could use her present, it was because of Toussaint’s gift. It was his gift. She tried to imagine him happy about it, which was easy, people always like doing something nice. She had a theory that this was the most selfish part about wanting to get married — people marry because they want someone around all the time that they can be nice to.

After dinner alone in the apartment she went out. That was the night she met me. I recognized her from the train that day, sitting across from me with a little orange knick-knack in her hand. She was as beautiful all those years ago as she is tonight.

No. 40 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Christine Hill, has ended. Original price: $1.49. Final price: $126.39. Significant Objects will donate proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

Collecting is in my family. I got the bug early, but never got the value part correct. I keep frivolous collections of worthless objects — inventoried, catalogued, color-coded, feather-dusted and meticulously cared for.

M comes home extolling the virtues of this bottle made of wood he paid actual money for in town and then we argue about incorporating it into our living environment. He gets suckered by these pitchmen all the time, but I can’t talk because I have turned the entire back porch into a reliquary for soaking off labels from jars that I am planning to use later for a special experiment.

At first, we use the bottle as a decanter for a variety of liquids that can go in the refrigerator. M hates packaging, and everything in the fridge is devoid of branding so as not to offend his delicate visual sensibilities. After a few weeks of wood-flavored juice, wood-flavored iced tea, and wood-flavored salad dressing, I make a strong case for the bottle as decorative element rather than functional object. M concurs and the bottle moves into the living room.

The bottle is sometimes joined by a growing collection of items that only come out when mother is visiting. She believes we have an altar in her honor on the sideboard right next to M’s instruments. These objects otherwise live in the broom closet next to the vacuum and the Tupperware tub full of coins in case of emergency.

On Sunday when we are feeling lighthearted, M is waving the bottle around in dramatic poses, playing judge and jury, and then orchestra conductor. When it is my turn to act out, I thunk him over the head with it playfully and he says, in his German accent, “Aua, that actually hurts.”

I come home one evening late after we’ve had a disagreement and the bottle is next to our bed, playing the role of a bud vase, sporting one little pink blossom. M is contrite and I worry that the cat will knock it over and cause my copy of Maintaining Your Polyamorous Union to get soaked.

M thinks the bottle is gone, when actually I have hidden it and told him that it was starting to smell funny. I put it corked in the trunk he calls my hope chest, but which I know is my escape hatch. It is buried in there with abandoned trousseau linens I find in thrift stores, the embarrassing journals from my teenage years with their tiny locks and keys, and the wisdom teeth I had extracted all at once in an unwise move. I feed the bottle with the names of men I have loved, written on small scraps of paper, like fortunes in reverse. There is a code for how they found me, what they smelled like, and how they inevitably wronged me. Excised from the collection, they are added to another. I draft M’s slip of paper in my head and dream of a red felt-tipped marker.

Object No. 35 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Jim Shepard, has ended. Original price: donated. Final price: $15.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now. This object was part of a collection curated for Significant Objects by Paola Antonelli; the story was co-published on Core77.com.]

When I was little I’d ask my mother what I was getting for my birthday. I’d ask like the morning of my birthday. It always pissed her off because my birthday was December 27^th.

“Look under that tree,” she’d tell me. “You want to know what you’re getting for your birthday? Go look under that Christmas tree.”

When I got older I stopped asking. Then this last December when I’d been home a year she said “I got you something for your birthday.”

“I’m still not getting a job,” I said.

“Why are you so miserable to me?” she asked.

“So what is it?” I asked her a little while later. She went into her room and came back with a little package wrapped in candy cane paper. I tore off the wrapping and I’m standing there with a little box of Clone Wars collectible cards in my hand.

“You always liked Star Waters,” she said. One time in school a teacher asked what my mother’s first language was and I told him she didn’t have one.

“I’m thirty-three years old,” I told her.

“That means you can’t like cards?” she said. “That means you can’t enjoy anything any more?”

Everybody on the front of the box had a weapon. “That was nice of you to get me the cards,” I told her.

“You can’t be grateful for one thing?” she wanted to know.

“That was nice of you to get me the cards,” I told her. Later on I wrote the same thing down, and stuck it on the refrigerator.

Object No. 34 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Scarlett Thomas, has ended. Original price: donated. Final price: $21.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now. This object was part of a collection curated for Significant Objects by Paola Antonelli; the story was co-published on Core77.com.]

You can find all kinds of crap in the back of drawers. Here is the string we once used to tie the handles of the French doors together so that Julius wouldn’t open them and walk into the pond. Here is a thimble, and a seam-ripper, although I don’t think anyone in our family ever ripped a seam on purpose. Here is an incomplete pack of cards with topless women on the backs, the best ones stolen by my brothers. Here is dust, dust, and underneath a pair of dice: one small and black, one big and red. There is a blister pack with no tablets in it and the silver tape measure that bites your fingers when it snaps back. There are the birthday candles I bought when I was seventeen. After I bought them I walked home from the corner shop imagining the hot wax dripping onto my naked skin and Mark, who still owed me for the mayonnaise thing, peeling it off after it had dried.

Object No. 33 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story and collateral materials by Matt Brown, has ended. Original price: donated. Final price: $51.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now. This object was part of a collection curated for Significant Objects by Paola Antonelli; the story was co-published on Core77.com.]

When I first met Ron Chutney I was 16 and looking to cut a record. Sang a few songs for him at his studio and I remember my voice being horrible and embarrassing, so imagine my excitement when Ron heard the first track and said, “Yeah we can Crumpter that up just fine.” Crumpters. Today auto-tuned vocals are all the rage, but no one remembers the analog version Chutney created back in the late ’50s. It was a way for guys like me to get an acceptable track out. You see, if you sang through it, your voice would be pitch perfect every time, “like an angel,” Ron would say. Nowadays they teach advanced harmonics in the third grade, so I probably don’t have to explain to you how a Crumpter works — but I will anyway. Each one has to be made by hand, in the winter, in Detroit. The metal rods all have a special resonance, like tuning forks, and they’re all connected with this special metal mesh. When a note is sung into a Crumpter, it sort of corrects it and adds a little bit of a chorus effect — something that you cannot get rid of. If you have the time, do a Google search for “Harmonic Shuffling” or “Lowbrow Harmonizers.”

Thanks to vocoders and other new technologies, the Crumpter ceased to exist. Like the cloudberries of Sweden or truffles, Crumpters couldn’t be mass-produced. Each one took about two months of labor to make and it kills me to see them selling at garage sales for less than five bucks. Just last week I picked up a copy of Ron’s first album for ten cents at a thrift store. Ten cents!

This Crumpter is one that I saved from way back. Over the years a lot of famous people have sang through it: Betty Hunk, “Ambi” Davis, Thumbs/Fingers, and Shoots Donsson, to name a few. The package is actually newer, got that for a dollar about five years ago — it still has the shrink wrap, but has been slit open on the side, not a bad box considering how rare these things are.

I have absolutely no idea what ever happened to Ron Chutney. No one knows — I’ve been trying to find out for the last 20 years. I’m hoping that someone, somewhere, reading this, can give me some information on what happened to Ron. And even if we never find out, I hope that someone can start Crumptering again in his honor. Thanks for reading.

Object No. 28 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Susanna Daniel, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $35.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

In the game of water polo, the goalie must be strong enough to rise from the water and stay vertical without sinking, to track the ball and lunge for it. This was the position I played for one season, when I was a sophomore in high school. I tried out because Stacia Kaminski mentioned me to Coach Mackey, and he called me in.

My father had told me once—he was watching a nature show at the time, and I’d made the mistake of walking into the room—that it’s better to be a shark than a seal. When Stacia Kaminski approached me, after a soccer scrimmage in which I’d scored four goals, this is what I told her. She said, “You’re strong, and I bet you can swim like a fish,” and I said, “Better to be a shark than a seal.”

It was the most I’d spoken all day, maybe all week. In my house no one talked, though every so often my father hollered at the TV, or at my mother. After my first match—we won—Stacia handed me a pink gift bag with a white bow on it, and inside were these two pens. She said now I didn’t have to choose.

I didn’t realize how much other families talked until Stacia took me to her house. Her father was in the garage when we arrived, and Stacia told me he was building an airplane that he would fly himself. When her mother called him for dinner, he came to the table wearing a headlamp. Mrs. Kaminski reached over and turned it off. “Who are you?” he said to me. Stacia told him. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “That plane’s got one hundred and ten thousand, five hundred and ninety-three parts, total.” He laced his fingers together. “Guess how many pieces were missing when those boxes arrived.”

“How many?” I said quietly.

“Eight hundred and forty-two. I went through every box, counting. I made a list. I called the company and they sent the pieces. They overnighted them, which gave me a chuckle. But you can’t make something if you don’t have all the ingredients. Like this lasagna. Right, honey?”

“That’s right!” said Mrs. Kaminski, and Stacia’s father went on: the cheese, both ricotta and mozzarella; the tomatoes; croutons for the salad. I thought at the time—and still I think it, though I’ve  learned to stand on my feet in the world, to speak my thoughts, even to chit-chat—that he was the most interesting person I’d met.

Stacia invited me again the next week, then the next. Every time, Mr. Kaminski wore his headlamp and Mrs. Kaminski said grace. After Stacia’s accident—they said what happened to her was something called shallow water blackout, and they blamed Coach Mackey, who’d taught us to hyperventilate before going under—Mr. Kaminski called my house and invited me for dinner. If I could find my way, he said, I was welcome. So that week and every week until I graduated, I took the bus to their house, and I helped set the table, and I spoke when spoken to, and I listened. Sometimes while he was talking, Mr. Kaminski wept a little. I watched the tears sink from his eyes to his lips, which kept moving.

Object No. 21 of 50 — Significant Objects, v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Marisa Silver, has ended. Original price: free. Final price: $41.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

I failed my learner’s permit test three times. The first time, my father was angry, because he had gotten out of bed at seven thirty on a Saturday morning so we could be first in line when the DMV opened at eight. Still, we had to wait three hours. “The world is not as simple as you make it out to be,” he said, shifting in the uncomfortable plastic bucket seat, his fingers itchy for a newspaper or a coffee. “It’s not just, ‘you make a choice and stick to it.’” His words ran through my head while I took the test, and when my time was up, there were some answers I wanted to go back and change, but I didn’t. When I failed, I knew he had been right.

The second time I failed the test, my mother said, “You think you can pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, but you can’t. I know what you are.” We were in the living room and my little brother, Neil, looked up from the floor where he was rolling his toy cars back and forth on the light green carpet, making ruts that my mother complained about. Sometimes, when my parents were fighting, Neil would make his car noises loudly so that they would start yelling at him. His face relaxed while they berated him, like he was relieved.

“Words have meaning,” my mother said, hotly, when I walked out of the test room the third time. I’d stopped trying to figure out what my parents were talking about most of the time, but something about what she said struck me as wrong because the more I studied, the less obvious the questions seemed to me. For instance: To avoid last-minute moves, you should be looking down the road to where your vehicle will be in about a) 5 to 10 seconds; b) 10 to 15 seconds; c) 15 to 20 seconds. Suddenly it made no sense that distance could be measured in time, or that you could avoid a future that was going to happen to you in only 20 seconds. Even though I had studied that question and knew the answer, I could not mark the right box with my stubby golf pencil because I was sure that the answer the DMV wanted was wrong.

The fourth time I went to take the test, my brother gave me one of his toy cars for good luck. My dad had bought him the car, telling him it was the same model as the first car he’d ever owned. The car was pink and my brother had tried to paint it over, but he didn’t have the right kind of paint so the car ended up looking like a school bathroom. I put the car in my pocket, turned off my brain, and took the test. I passed. I made no mistakes at all. By this time my parents had split up and my aunt was waiting for me in the waiting area because my mother had started back at her old job selling perfume at the department store. I kept my brother’s car all these years, even though the wheels have broken off and gotten lost, and it is so derelict even my own kids won’t play with it. It reminds me that even if you look down the road to catch a glimpse of your future, there’s not much you can avoid.

Object No. 18 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Dan Chaon, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $26.01. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

When you are a widower, you’re supposed to move your wedding band from the left ring finger to the right. This is etiquette, or something. An old tradition.

When I removed the ring, about a year after she died, there was a crease in the flesh below my knuckle, a little belt that didn’t go away, though I massaged it and rubbed it with lotion; it appeared that it would be more or less permanent. Weird! That was what made me remember the fork.

It was a two-pronged carving fork with a bright red plastic handle. When I was twelve, I stole it from the silverware drawer. I was very interested in the weapons of fantasy at that time: halberds and katanas, daggers and scimitars. The sorts of things your character would wield if you were playing Dungeons & Dragons.

For a while, I pretended the fork was a magical treasure I’d found in a barrow, and I hid it in my room under the mattress. During the autumn of seventh grade, I used to like to poke myself with the fork. Late at night, when my door was locked. This was before I’d discovered masturbation.

A carving fork sinks easily into a brisket or a roast turkey breast, but the tines are not that sharp. When you press the points against the underside of your forearm, you can exert considerable force without breaking the skin, just a couple of blanched indentations in your flesh. Then the dermis rises back, leaving only small red dots — like gnat bites — which fade as well.

Here: your wrist, where a bundle of blue veins shift thickly when you prod them. Here: your ruddy, meaty palm, webbed with fortune-teller lines. At this point, you are not really able to push the fork through. You’re just experimenting. Here: okay, admit it — your most sensitive spots, the nipples, the soft hollow in your throat, the glans of your cock —

What does this feel like? How much does it hurt?

The memory appears abruptly. A glint of metal, a prodding of synapse that hasn’t been awake for years. Suddenly adolescent again: that illness unfolds in me and it’s funny because I realize that it’s not something I would ever have told my wife. She would have wrinkled her nose. Boy stuff, she would have thought — like talking about shit or boogers, gross and uninteresting.

And yet, who else am I going to tell this little anecdote to?

I sit here looking at the impression the wedding ring has left in my flesh. I suppose that it will eventually go away.

My wife was the first and only girl I had sex with. We met when I was eighteen, and she died when I was forty-five.

I don’t know what became of the fork. I used it for a while, and then, I guess, more than likely, I put it back where it came from.

No. 15 of 50 -- Significant Objects, v3

[This is the first installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. The auction for this object, with story by John Reichmuth, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $15.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

A violiner, a fifer, some apples, a small girl holding a bunny by its fore-ears. These were the images depicted on my dad Dale’s mung pitcher. When I was 13 and learning how to use this the East Coast Way, as an inconvenience preferred because of its gravitas, like a fine old two-edged razor or a whale-hide jumping rope, Dad, the traitor, with a cigarette in his moist mouth, bailed out the cocoa in the toilet and sprayed grandiosely: “The Carpys practically invented mung bailers.”

This one depicts the first Halloween, but when I used it to bail mung at Wesleyan, in Vietnam, in Phoenix, and now on my deathbed in Miami, my start-a-zoo plan in the dump, I would imagine I saw Abe Lincoln, a state trooper, Mother Teresa, even a hippie girl, anything, anything to get my mind off the revolting stench of the mung.

Last week Gene Lightfoot, the guide, and I brought this pitcher in the swamp-boat for luck or to piss in. Now there’s a scuff on the top of where I tried to fend off the alligator that really ripped my foot off.

No. 14 of 50 — Significant Objects, v3

[This is the third installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. The auction for this object, with story by Dan Klein, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $38.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

I commissioned this sculpture of Fries n’ a Shake in 1990, or thereabouts. He was a great horse. A zoo horse. The sculpture commemorates the moment Fries n’ a Shake realized that zoos are a godsend and that work sucks. This is him kicking down the doors to get back in. I saw this happen while I was hosing down some lizards, and it made a huge impression on me.

Two days later is the day that Joanie left me the origami note. She and Dad were gone. The oldest girlfriend I ever had. But at least I had a new mission in life: a zoo that wasn’t racist against livestock.

Tomorrow, The Conclusion: “Brass” Pitcher.

No. 13 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[This is the second installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. The auction for this object, with story by James Reichmuth, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $10.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

One thing I won’t need if I open my own zoo is a lot of crap holding me back. Or sentimental/highly-valuable things:

This is a ’60s-era Mexican “Madero-type” of my dad, Dale Carpy; if you’re looking at this, you know what it is and how rare to have the original knots in excellent condition.

The photographer really captured Dale about to spring. Trust me, this wasn’t him just relaxing and smoking a joint. He was coiled up like a cat.

We probably drank 100,000 margaritas off of this tray, Joanie and I. I loved ‘em so much that she called me the “slushen-pumpy.”

Dad and Joanie getting a boat together, I admit it, really got me from my blind side.

Tommow: Part Three: Toy Bronco.

No. 12 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[This is the first installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. The auction for this object, with story by Rob Baedeker, has ended. Original price: $2.00. Final price: $15.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

One night I looked at my saggy old beanbag, a sad black lump just lying on my living room floor like one of Bigfoot’s breasts.

That beanbag represented the old me.

I wear a Leatherman on my belt, and I gashed into that beanbag and didn’t stop sawing till I had a two-foot piece of leatherette.

That night I found a guy named LeatheretteBrad844@aol.com on the Internet who said he could do what I was looking for — make a pencil case with the texture of caiman (which is basically just a miniature alligator).

A lot of people choose alligator skin for their boots and cases, etc., but I chose the caiman to symbolize the conquering of a personal demon, but a demon of manageable size — to me, the idea that you could vanquish a full-on alligator is delusional. Start by wrestling the little guys. After you conquer your caimans, you can set your sites on the alligators.

I’m speaking symbolically, but I also used to work as a zookeeper, so I am actually pretty familiar with these kinds of reptiles/amphibians.

Now, I am hopping over the fence into the mind-work side of things — going back to finish my degree, with hopes of someday designing my own zoo or aquarium.

There are five pencils in the box. That’s my lucky number. I keep them unsharpened as a reminder of possibilities.

Tomorrow: Part Two: Gaucho Tray.

Object No. 8 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Lakin Khan, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $21.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

The cardboard sign, neatly hand-lettered in black, was propped in the front window of the crowded little shop: “Fans For Sale.” I imagined an army of mercenary fanatics willing to cheer for, blog about whoever paid their wages. I sure needed some ego-boosting fans: here I was, 29 years old, five years out of grad school, two years out of a bad boyfriend, a flunky for Closets-R-Us L.A.

A crowded shop, not much larger than some of the his&her walk-in closets I laid out for people who had actual, bona-fide fans. Midday light dimmed by high fog barely made it inside; the door shut behind me with a sharp jangle from outsized bells on a red strap, just audible over the susurration of many switched-on fans.

Fans of every conceivable shape and size lined shelves racked along all three walls. Large, square window fans. Short, round stand-alone fans with blades protected by a bubble of chromed grillwork. Slowly whirling ceiling fans, with down-turned lights that were the only indoor illumination. Fans to mount on a car dash, small desk fans with clamps, portable battery-run fans, fans attached to the bill of a cap. Slick oscillating affairs on stands and stools were herded into the middle of the floor. Air currents tugged this way and that, ruffling the sleeves and hems of my linen jacket.

From the repair shop in back, a thin, stooped man angled himself through the dull gray accordion-fold door that was permanently left either half-open or half-closed, depending on how you looked at it. He stood behind a long glass display case that also served as the counter, pushed his graying ponytail behind his shoulder with one hand, gesturing a soundless hello with a wave of the other and two raised eyebrows.

And there, opened in semi-circles and layered on the red velvet shelves of the case in front of that half-open, half-closed door, were the handheld fans, the ones made of paper or foil or embroidered cloth. Some were elaborately painted with scenes of the French court or lush flowers or exotic birds; some were inset with lace, ivory, ebony. Others were of a more austere design created from rare woods and handmade paper. So many worlds; so many choices. The man took them out one by one, handled them gently, opened them, closed them, fanned them, stirring the air in front of my face.

The one I bought is small, but it was all I could afford. It’s small but exquisite, with cherrywood splines, hand-painted on silvered paper — a dark blue ocean swirling up from one side and bottom, an opposing wave of green vines and flowers flowing down from the other side and top. I loved to open it, close it, leave it perched on my desk in the halfway position, reminding myself that, at any point, you can choose to see your life either way. Closing down or opening up.

Object No. 2 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Padgett Powell, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $23.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now..]

It is little known that the singer Marcia Ball as a teenager worked briefly at Disney. One day at the close of the shift she was climbing out of her Goofy suit and was frightened to see two albino boys climbing out of their suits. It was Johnny and Edgar Winter. Marcia said something to the effect that she had never seen boys so white and Johnny turned on her and said, “I’m so white I am blind and I can’t take this shit that sun out there besides I can play the guitar.” Marcia liked his pluck.

Edgar said, “He can play but I can scream and I too have a frightening pallor and will look good on stage and, girl, you are so tall that I think even though you are full of melanin you can be a rock star too. Let’s blow this joint and—”

Johnny Winter was ahead of them, in the corner setting his Porky suit on fire. “Practicing,” he said. “I saw Jerry Lee do something like this on stage.”

This is Marcia Ball’s name tag, in the original packaging, circa 1962.

Object No. 1 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jennifer Weiner, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $62. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

We were married for sixteen years. When Christina was in Girl Scouts, she wanted to earn her sewing badge. I don’t sew: no time, no interest. Why squint, why prick your fingers, when you can pay the dry cleaner five bucks to hem your pants? Paul learned enough to teach Christina to sew on a button. She quit after she sewed that badge on her sash, but he kept going: latch-hook rugs, woven pot-holders, needlepoint pillows, Christmas tree ornaments with little animals or flowers.  If people came over and saw the canvas and embroidery hoops, I would say they were mine. Everyone but my mother pretended to believe it. Mom said, “You know where he goes at night, right? You know what he is?” Sure, I knew. There was a certain bar.  I didn’t think about it too much. Wherever he went at night, he came home to his needlepoint, to Christina. To me.

We got divorced in 1992. “I guess you know I’ve been unhappy,” is what he said. For a while, he’d come and see Christina, Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. He’d take her to the IHOP. Breakfast for dinner. She loved that. But it only lasted for a while. He moved to Nevada, then Los Angeles, then Seattle.

Three months ago, Christina called me crying. “Daddy’s dead.” In Seattle? I thought. Turns out he’d moved back to Delaware and lived – and died – not ten miles away from where we’d lived together. Christina flew up from Miami, and I drove her to the apartment, in a rectangular concrete building that looked like a high school or a jail. In a liquor-store box were all of her report cards. A newspaper story about a track meet she was in. Her wedding announcement.

I’m angry at him, I guess. Some lady I saw on TV once, some scientist, was saying that it’s not a choice, that it’s in your blood or your DNA, but if he chose to be with me, if he fought it for that long, why couldn’t he keep fighting? Why couldn’t he have stayed with us?

Christina put the funeral on her credit card. “He was my Dad and I loved him,” she said. She’s a good girl to say that, even after she had to see the mess he left behind. And read the autopsy report, which I don’t know why they had to send her. Knowing how it happened doesn’t change anything. Dead is dead. And funerals, I am here to tell you, are expensive.

I don’t know what it means that he had them, that he kept them through all the places that he moved. I like to think that it meant we were connected, that he still thought of us. That in some way, we were still a family – my husband, Christina, and me.

Object No. 47 of 50 — Significant Objects v2. PHOTO: Adrian Kinloch

[The auction for this object, with story by Deb Olin Unferth, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $63.50. Part of a special collaboration with Underwater New York, this object's story shipped rolled into a vintage bottle found on the beach of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn. Proceeds from this auction go to 826 National.]

I was an ambassador once—of a small African nation. All of us diplomats, that is our dream: to be an ambassador. At least once, at least for a little while. Many of us get a little Eastern or African nation for a year or two. We are eager when it happens because our life’s goal is complete. But it isn’t so special after all. Soon it’s over and we continue on. We are diplomats again, and our time of glory is reduced to a sentence we can say in passing at a party, “Oh, I was ambassador there once, for eighteen months.” Or at a meeting, “Well, when I was ambassador, as I recall, witchcraft was still a powerful force in the north. I knew a man who believed his daughter had turned into a tree.”

Or when entertaining one’s wife’s friends, “That flute? Oh yes, when I was ambassador, the prince of the country rode two days on a camel to present it to me. Don’t know where he got it. They love plastic, you know. Who are we kidding? Plastic was the real revolution.”