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.

Object No. 45 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Heidi Julavits, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $102.50. This is part five of a five-story teamup with the literary magazine The Believer. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

According to my wife I am a willful misunderstander, but regarding this tendency of mine I understand her feelings too well.

The daughter of dour pragmatists who prefaced many a conversation with the phrase, “In the wake of Rorty,” my wife initially mistook me as a source of peculiar brightness. One day, however, I noticed that my wife, after weeks of inexplicable bleeding, had tired of me. I took her to see a specialist who diagnosed her with a melancholy cervix — his beautiful Chilean way (the specialist was Chilean) of conveying to us that we would have no children.

I’m sorry your cervix is melancholy, I told her, rubbing her shoulders insincerely as she wept, because I had never wanted to have children with her. But in fact, she claimed, the specialist had told her that she was dying, an interpretation of recent events that I frankly disbelieved.

Soon she’d stopped eating (the smell of food, she claimed, made her ill), as if to prove that she was right and I wrong regarding certain things. So I started to carve, in our garage, from pieces of oak left by the former owner, a so-called neoclassical orthodontist who whittled, in his spare time, the many sets of wooden teeth he’d left behind on crooked shelves, her favorite fruit. I carved whole pears and whole oranges, but found that I hated to see, at the end of a breakfast, say, my plate empty and hers full. I returned to the workshop and carved wood into the shape of already-eaten food; halfway through our meals I would exchange the uneaten food for the already-eaten food, and I would congratulate her on her excellent appetite, and this would make her cry at how well I understood her.

But one afternoon, as I was exchanging an uneaten apple for an already-eaten apple, she took the already-eaten apple off her plate and threw it into the yard.

I retrieved the already-eaten apple.

“You are a tiresome fool,” she said, and threw the already-eaten apple into the yard.

I fetched and she threw, we carried on like this (the exercise, I could see, did her good) until finally I left the already-eaten apple in the yard, because one must relent to the livid pessimism of a so-called dying loved one; to do otherwise, or so I believe she believed, as she lay face-down in the soft grass, was to deny her this last skeptical foothold on life.

Soon it was fall, and then winter. In spring, a tree began to sprout, not far from the place where my wife had thrown the already-eaten apple. I desired to drag her out to the yard and say to her, lovingly of course, “who is the fool now? Who, now, is the fool?” Unfortunately come spring my wife was dead. Alive she would have scoffed at the idea of a tree sprouted from a wooden apple, because she had not yet won the battle we were apparently fighting to the death. But I knew that now she could allow herself to see things from my perspective, that dead trees beget live ones, and wooden apple cores, if you hold them to your ear like a shell, contain the reassuring echo of a human voice that does not believe in you.

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 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. 37 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Colleen Werthmann, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $11.50. Significant Objects will donate proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

During the Sacraments, cheat out. That way the whole church can see you, and your parents can get a nice picture, not just the back of your head.

“In my thoughts, and in my words, in what I have failed to do, and what I have done.” Pretty much covers your bases. Except when you do something partway. I guess you add those kinda things in during the silent part before “Amen.”

Overhead swoops and dots for eyes. Manufactured craftsmanship. Keep ’em affordable for the poorer folks, the factory folks. The Ford plant donates the shirts for the softball team at St. Agnes.

Cute when the kids get their First Communion, though. Usually draws a big crowd. They like to schedule it on Holy Thursday, but that’s a bit of a downer. Makes the kids feel sorta crummy. Best to do it on a Sunday morning.

The altar kids (boys and girls, now!) pick their nails during the homily, hoping nobody’s watching. They wear nice pants and nice shoes under their cassocks, no sneakers, definitely no sneakers. Scheduled depending on who has a swim meet, who’s got ice time, who’s visiting their relatives. In the sacristy now, one of the Eucharistic Ministers is always around ahead of time. You know, just in case.

Disillusionment is a box of Communion wafers. 1000 quantity. Sale price $11.89, originally $16.99. You save $5.10!

In the ’80s, when AIDS came out, the Church was like, “It’s OK to take Communion with your hands, not have the priest put it on your tongue.”

It’s not the words, it’s what’s in your heart, that’s what the priest said to my grandma, when she cried, age 102, that she couldn’t remember the words to the basic prayers any more, tears sliding into her ears. Clutching and picking at the blankets. Remember what we talked about, Eileen? It’s not the words, it’s what’s in your heart. And she would repeat her new prayer, her prayer of trying so hard, over and over.

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 2 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 and 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. 24 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Matt Sumell, has ended. Original price: free. Final price: $50.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

This beautiful lady is a handmade-by-me replica of my sweet Grandma E. after she had a stroke four years ago. You can see I did a pretty decent job, considering I’d never sewn anything before, except for a soccer ball pillow that I made in home ec class in like the 8th grade and to be honest I didn’t pay attention cause I was secretly worried that if I did pay attention it would somehow turn me gay. And now that I think of it, there was a special ed kid in that class (we had to integrate thanks to budget cuts) who snuck up on and tried to strangle Rob Englebert with a length of yellow yarn, but yanked it too early so he strangled him just under his nose, in the mustache area, until the yarn broke. That kid, Powers I think his name was, went gay for real. At least that’s what my friend Tommy tells me.

When I was finished with the soccer ball and turned it in for a grade, Miss Palatta—who we all called Gotta Lotta Palatta cause she had a big ass—said that it looked more like a checkered heating pad and gave me an D. Anyways the thinking behind me hand-making a replica of my grandma was voodoo, but the opposite: instead of treating it bad and sticking pins in it and cutting its head off or whatever voodooers do to their dolls, I treated this one real nice; talked to it, petted it, groomed it, and even sewed Grandma’s favorite drink on the front, a martini. The one flaw is that I got a small amount of antibiotic cream and Vitamin A on its back when she got bed sores from not moving around enough—I blame the nurses—so there’s one or two small stains. Really though you can only see them if you lift the headscarf and know where to look for them in natural light.

Grandma E. was a super great lady who had a tough life with my grandfather, a half-Singaporian half-English complete a-hole who killed stray cats that wandered into their backyard with a shovel. She deserved better, I mean we all do, but she really deserved better. She lived through severe poverty, an abusive husband, a bunch of wars, diseases, a dead kid and Catholicism, but still she giggled a lot and always gave me candy and religious cards with five dollars in them. And how nice is that?

She passed away recently, and I see a lot of truth in what Beckett wrote to a grieving pal a long time ago: “I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow.  So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.” And me getting rid of this doll is me gathering the strength to walk with a limp, and I can’t think of anything better than sharing Grandma E’s strength and endurance with someone who needs it more than I do.

Also, if you’re a fan of the Ziggy comics, take the scarf off and it’s pretty close!

Object No. 23 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Jenny Offill, has ended. Original price: free. Final price: $30.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

“Everything that has eyes will cease to see,” says the man on the television. He looks credentialed. His hair has a dark gleam to it. His voice is like the voices of those people who hand out flyers on the subway, but he’s not talking about God or the government.

“When is everyone coming?” my daughter says. “Isn’t everyone coming?” She drags her dollhouse out of her room and begins arranging and rearranging the dining room chairs. It is hard to make them as they should be, it seems. One is always askew. She is so solemn, my little girl. So solemn and precise. Carefully, she places the tiny turkey in the center of the table. It is golden brown. Someone has carved a perfect flap in it. Why, I wonder. Why must everything have already begun? “Hurry,” she murmurs as she works.“Hurry, hurry!”

The credentialed man is talking about the heavens now, about their most ruinous movements. The time lapse shows a field of plants perishing, a mother and child blown away by a wave of red light. Something distant and imperfectly understood is to blame for this. But the odds against it are encouraging. Astronomical even.

Still, I won’t be happy until I know the name of this thing.