Object No. 3 of 5: Epistolary Week

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Terese Svoboda, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $42. 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 Wicked One:

As in “wick,” your sat-upon heart suggests so much to all of us on this Planet Nolove, pronounced to rhyme with olive, which whirs toward our sun at an alarming rate reminiscent of sperm lash. We lack heat and your visage, so pinkly coy, so silvered as if off a chalice, so bent-buttocked in the curve, your heat if lit — though miniscule it appears — would be just enough to energize our zip so we could snap our airlocks tight to the sun at last and sigh and smoke the way actors in your features express their heat thus slaked. But such a suggestion is not appropriate from the female side of Nolove, the side inopportunely pivoted toward the sun for the last nth, so we realize, keening, nothing at all can come of the electron flashing, wick-kissing heat you promise. We mourn for another nth then we get on our exercise drums and lean so far into the cosmos that a revolution (manned and unmanned) occurs, and Nolove rocks. That is, the male side cheers. Gaining on the pointer side, they forget all too quick who did the leaning, who kept to the drums when nobody had even a pull-cord. We’re the ones who find old sticks floating in the no-air and rub them slowly, oh so slowly, ourselves in ricochet, until a spark appears — the elements after all that time (we have it, time, on loan sometimes) seep in if you wait, some of the more idle elements, the ones with only one electron available. With that spark so carefully husbanded by ourselves across so many thrillions of pixels, we trusted your sensual self to rise up on those silvered haunches of yours and receive and burn. Yet never have you so much as leaned, you who must know that leaning is how it’s done in the cosmos by our kind, leaning into the spark? Wick-ed yourself then — our sun is not yours, we call it Love, and you obviously care nothing for Nolove and its potential — still — to collide and produce endless synergy that would so far outRabbit your whole system that you wouldn’t exist after that, for system is all you have, you bitch, probably consoled and iPudded and wii-ed up the wazoo, but we have the — someone hold them up — pull-cords. It isn’t another little galaxy we’re wanting, believe me, you little wick.

Terese

The winner of this auction also receives Terese Svoboda's story, mailed by the author.

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2010/06/16/heart-shaped-candle-terese-svoboda-story/feed/ 3 http://significantobjects.com/2010/04/29/corked-bottle-maaza-mengiste-story/ http://significantobjects.com/2010/04/29/corked-bottle-maaza-mengiste-story/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:24:37 +0000 Maaza Mengiste http://significantobjects.com/?p=6412

No. 49 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Maaza Mengiste, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $19.00. This is the second of three stories in our Identical Objects series. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

There was a set of triplets in Addis Ababa born on the third day of the third week in the third month of the Ethiopian new year. Born so close together they could have been simultaneous births, their neighbors called them A’nd, Hulet and Sost: One, Two and Three. The oldest, A’nd, was the most logical. Hulet, the most charming, and Sost was the dreamer. Everything one did, all three did. One didn’t utter a word without the other two mouthing it in unison. They were so identical, so synchronized in every move, that sometimes A’nd, Hulet and Sost couldn’t decide who had been the originator of an idea, who the deliverer, and who the interpreter.

Young, handsome men, the trio’s proudest possession was a bottle of sand an American tourist had given to them nine years ago in a bar on a side street near Bole Road. Each year on the same day, they sat at the same table, drinking the same beer and imagined the secret message waiting to be written on the blank piece of paper rolled inside the bottle. Each year, one of them suggested a line. Each year, the two voted against the one, and all agreed on the outcome.

But then came one night when the trio’s favorite waitress served them three equally measured glasses of Meta beer, but brushed a singular soft hip against only Sost. She whispered into his ear while tapping the bottle with a long, red nail, speaking so softly the other two couldn’t hear.

“It’s my turn,” Hulet said quickly to cover up the tense few seconds when none of them knew what to do except stare at the waitress’ lush lips slide into a luscious smile as she walked back to the counter.

A’nd, ever logical, had nodded. “She knows it’s Hulet’s turn to think of a sentence.”

Sure enough, when the trio turned their identical heads at the identical time, the waitress was swaying slowly at the counter, her eyes teasing Sost, who blushed and looked instead at the bottle from a place named after a key.

It all would have gone back to normal if Sost, secretly in love with the waitress for the last seven years, hadn’t spoken: “It is the best sentence any of us could ever imagine.”

The other two, one as equally surprised as the other, sat back, unsure of what to do with this disregard for order. Both of them shook their heads but Sost’s stayed still, his gaze frozen on the bottle, until he could bear the separation no more. Then he met their stares.

The silence, long and drawn out, then tripling in duration, was agonizing for each.

A’nd, Hulet and Sost, unaccustomed to separate opinions, afraid of any discord, finished their Meta beers in four large gulps and left, the bottle the bar’s only witness to a pretty woman dancing slowly by herself in the dark.

No. 39 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Rebecca Coffey, has ended. Original price: 79 cents. Final price: $15.50. Significant Objects will donate proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

It was all because of what happened the Halloween she was eight. We’d had pumpkin soup and near-beer for dinner. The soup gave her gas.

But it also gave her a dream. A full moon was falling. Getting bigger and bigger as it fell, it made a wind that moved everything on earth in fast motion and that blew into Masie’s brain a vision of the shape of her life. She was going to die when the moon hit earth. Her life would be short. But considering that she’d get to see the world end, it would be unusually full. The shape of her life was going to be spherical.

Masie’s gas pains woke her before the moon could hit the ground. The next day, she started playing marbles alone every afternoon in the dust outside. “This game was brought to you by the number 8 and the letter O,” she’d announce at game’s end. She also wore my padded bras to give herself something round up top. Now, of course, she’s grown two big globes on her chest. Each morning, in a movie star voice, she says, “You, girls, are the shape of life,” and puts on her bra.

Well, the shape of life is also what spit bubbles, ants’ butts, bowling balls, and cat testicles are. Roundness is the whole deal for Masie. Spheres are best, but circles will do. Her favorite thing about Harry Potter is his glasses. Her favorite part of sadness is tears. My pills are what she likes most in our bathroom. Sitting on the pot, she pours them into her hand and watches them roll around.

The other night, she dreamed one of my green chloral hydrates got huge just like the moon did in her dream when it fell. But that’s not the night my chloral hydrate almost killed her.

Last night was the night. Happy Halloween, right? I offered to make pumpkin soup, but she wanted to order Chinese. It took her forever to eat Buddha’s Delight. She removed each snow pea from its pod and rolled it on her tongue. After, she had a Tootsie Pop. And when she got into bed, she dumped a whole sack of marbles around herself. She had her ants’ butts collection in a jar by her pillow, and hubcaps at the four corners of her room.

“Tonight is the night, Mom,” she said from under her covers. She wouldn’t answer when I asked, “For what?”

I took my chloral hydrate and fell asleep in my underwear on the couch.

But then the wind started to blow. Something made a noise. Masie’s gas? The moon crashing through trees? Whatever. Lucky me.

I woke not 20 minutes after Masie and I had gone to sleep. Which was good, because she had eaten all my green pills, three smiley face buttons, and an orange.

Object No. 36 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by John Wray, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $20.50. Significant Objects will donate proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

“It’s certainly — well. It’s certainly a something,” Lily murmured, upon being introduced to the Object. “But what kind of something is it?”

“This,” said Oliver, cradling the Object reverently in his open palms, “Is the something that is going to save our marriage.”

Not having been birthed yesterday, Lily had her doubts, but she was willing to be persuaded. She was desperate to be persuaded, in fact. And there was something about the something in Oliver’s palms that resisted all her efforts to resist it. Unlike most of the objects in Lily’s environs, it seemed to raise more questions than it answered. First of all, what was it?

“What is it?” said Lily.

“I just told you,” Oliver said patiently.

The Object expressed no opinion.

“Well, we might as well give it a try,” Lily said. “How do we make it do?”

Oliver squinted down at the Object for a while, then shrugged. “I think we just set it down in the corner,” he said finally. “Give it room to do its work.”

Lily considered this a moment, then took Oliver’s hand, and they deposited the object, gently and circumspectly, in the room’s nearest corner. “How long will it take?” Lily wondered.

“Ten and a half days,” Oliver said firmly. Lily couldn’t help noticing, however, that he avoided looking her in the eye. You’ll never persuade me that way, Lily said to herself. The Object chittered and hummed in its corner.

“What a strange thing it is,” Lily said. “It reminds me of something.”

“Shhh!” Oliver whispered. “Don’t talk about it. The less we acknowledge it, the better.”

It wasn’t until weeks later, when their marriage had long since been saved, that they saw the Object for what it truly was. By then, of course, it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

Object No. 29 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Carole Maso, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $57.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

The sun was rising and the tips of the trees, backlit, began to glow. The day commenced, dipped in fire. From her window she could see a saffron ribbon winding its way through the park.

As it moved closer now she saw it was a human thread– a line of monks, and she smiled.
She stayed seated and did not move, for she did not want to disturb the vision, if that is what it was, this little saffron thread of men walking, slowly widening now into a ribbon.

She was a small child when the artist had come to her city and had draped the great park in cloth. A multitude of saffron flags had been installed just beneath the tree line, following for miles the meandering footpaths. For sixteen days the park was swathed in orange.

The artist wrote that because it was temporary, there was a feeling of fragility and vulnerability about the flags in the park. It also creates in the viewer an urgency. Even immersed, those who saw it already missed it—for they knew it cannot stay. In Berlin the artist had wrapped the Reichstag in silver fabric and tied it in blue. For two weeks a flow of vertical folds was created, highlighting the features and proportions. In Paris the artist wrapped the Pont Neuf for fourteen days. Still looking out the window, she thought of that ancient bridge.

He had been there with her — suddenly she was sure of it. He spoke to her, though she could not yet speak back. On those days when the artist’s saffron gates graced the park, he was there. Afterward the others– diverted by grief, must have forgotten to mention it—nevertheless, there he was, a giant, bending to her.

Her father bent down to her, and from his head, light flared. And he smiled and spoke the fire alphabet to her and kissed her on the forehead. He knelt down, from those lofty, brilliantly colored heights to her in her stroller, and they were held in the orange gold hover of the world– framed by the winter trees.

Their lives at once so burnished, and so bright—

If you could wrap the Reichstag or the Pont Neuf –if you could wrap one million square feet of the coast of Australia, or encircle the islands of Florida, even for brief time, could you not wrap the father, she wondered, and keep him, encircled with twine, in brightly colored paper?

What was astonishing was that they were alive for a time together and that the air vibrated. The father drowned in saffron wheeling the baby safely through the burning world.

In her pocket now she fingered a piece of saffron paper, snatched from the art supplies cabinet. With it, she framed the sky, framing now an invisible, insignificant, passing part of existence—the place where her father might have once stood. She took the saffron paper to try and still the moment, hold it, encapsulate the empty space, vacated, where he was.

It was a small gesture. The monks had walked deep into the park and vanished. For a moment she held the paper in her hand, then put it down on the table next to the burning candle.

No. 16 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Kirsten Miller, has ended. Original price: $1.49. Final price: $35.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

This dome doll was purchased three years ago for $1.07 (including tax) at a Dollar Store in the Chattahoochee Shopping Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was originally part of a pair. On the bottom of the package (now discarded) I found a sticker with the message : “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.”

The dolls also came with the following instructions written in both English and Flemish. I have scanned the English side for you. If you would prefer Flemish, please let me know. Read the instructions carefully before use.

(Those who dislike following instructions should refer to page A3 of the February 18^th edition of the Knoxville News Sentinel.)

INSTRUCTIONS:

Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of twin dome dolls. Their names are Saakje and Saertgen. Treat them with love and respect, and they’ll be your most loyal companions.

Keep one dome doll on your person at all times. They prefer a pocket, but a purse will do.

Dome dolls thrive in temperatures between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Extreme heat or cold can cause cracks in the glass, which may lead to an unintentional release.

If you must travel by air, DO NOT pack your dome dolls in your luggage.

Never subject your dome dolls to the following: Fire, microscopes, foul language, infants, deep water, x-rays, excessive whining, the TSA, ammonia-based cleaning sprays, or French accents.

To break the glass, place a dome doll under the heel of one shoe. Apply even pressure. Do not hurl or bash. Once the glass breaks, remove heel immediately and take two steps to the left.

Close your eyes and do not inhale for five full seconds. (Best when used in a well-ventilated space.)

Once you are able to open your eyes, leave the scene as quickly as possible. Resist the urge to take pictures or videos.

Phone the authorities when you’ve reached a safe distance. Do not identify yourself.

IMPORTANT:

Use only in emergency situations. The effects are permanent and cannot be altered or reversed by pleading or crying, no matter how sincere.

Each dome doll is single use only. Do not attempt to remove a doll from the scene of an emergency. Once free, they must remain free.

Keep away from children under the age of eight. Not intended for use by individuals over the age of thirty. Sale prohibited in the Netherlands.

Object No. 10 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[The bidding for this object, with story by Blake Butler, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $59.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

My granddad’s granddad had a box under his bed. If you got to open the box (you had to beg) you would find a little door. The little door had a combination on it that you had to know to get inside the second box, which I did. I had the combination tattooed on my spinemeat when I was four while on a trip to see the circus. The tattoo was free. My granddad’s granddad was very powerful and rich.

With granddad’s granddad in the bed asleep above me, I opened up the box inside the box. My knees were bloody from the begging. I could see way down into the box. There was a black pattern, then a ladder. I fell forward and grabbed ahold. The inside of the box smelled like the backyard where the money got made from skin. I began to climb along the ladder, getting older every rung. I was a very special boy.

The room under my granddad’s granddad’s room was octagon-shaped. As I climbed into the room, the mouth to it closed. The walls along the room were lined with little cubbies. There were more cubbies than I have days I’ve lived, or hairs that I have grown, which is also more than how many mouths I’d put my mouth against if I lived to be very, very old.

In each of the cubbies there was a little globe. Each globe held another little thing, each named with a label for what the thing was. There was a cubby with a globe containing FIRST EVER REDWOOD TREE. One containing PERRY MASON. One containing PEAS. The globe containing JOYOUS LONGING held a bright pink liquid smoke. PERRY MASON looked pissed off.

The globe containing UTAH made a burning sound against my head, and there were all these people chanting, and face got all sandy and all wet. I shook it and it made my blood tingle and some coins appeared in my hands. I had so many gold coins I could live forever. Some of the coins were chocolate, which was food.

The ladder would not come back down. I could find no door in all the cubbies. No doorbell or key or gun.

In one cubby I could see out of the room beneath granddad’s granddad’s room. I could see back into the house where I’d grown up. In a little mirror on the counter across from where I was I could see back onto the label underneath the cubby in the house that held the globe I was inside now: MY GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANDSON.

Object No. 9 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Duane Swierczynski, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $16.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

Hi there.

Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.

I understand your trepidation. It’s not everyday a torn suit hanging on a rack starts talking to you.

Yes.

Yes, I really am a suit, and I am indeed talking to you.

Come over here a minute.

See the pack of superfine needles over there? Right there, on the table? Pick them up, please. I need your help.

Argh… This is what I’m reduced to. Talking to myself, imaging that someone is actually listening.

***

Let me start again. My name is Ralph Rainey, and I’m a size 34 regular black Don Imprecio suit.

I wasn’t always a suit. I was born a man, a man named Ralph Rainey…

Ahhhhh fuggit.

***

Me again. It’s funny; this feels like good old-fashioned writer’s block — which I’ve had plenty of in my day, believe me. You can’t crank out endless reams of lurid pulp tales without hitting a mental ROAD CLOSED sign now and again.

But this is different, especially in that I’m not typing these words on my trusty Underwood. I’m composing these hideous sentences on an imaginary typewriter in an imaginary room in my mind. (The mind that is currently housed in the aforementioned suit.) I’m painfully aware that, at any moment, I can leave this imagined room and be right back in my tortured reality: the reality that is me, hanging on a wooden rack in the middle of a men’s consignment shop in Sherman Oaks, California.

It was a good suit, once.

Got married in this suit.

Nobody will buy me now, though, because one of my sleeves is ripped at the shoulder. And the owner of the shop doesn’t seem to want to bother with mending me anytime soon.

So if you are reading this, please do me the favor of taking one of those needles there, and some black thread, and fixing this awful gash in my shoulder?

And then we can get down to business.

***

You’re hesitating.

You think I’m imaginary, that I’m making this up.

Well — to me, you’re just as imaginary. So we’re even.

The needles.

Right over there.

On the table.

Object No. 49 of 50 — Significant Objects v2. Note that UNY found two toy airplanes at Dead Horse Bay; the toy shown here isn't being auctioned off, but the one below is.

[The auction for this item, with story by Robert Lopez, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $19.50. 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.]

A man on a park bench then another man next to him.

The first man there for no good reason.

The other man the kind of man who sits next to strange men on park benches.

This other man has with him a toy airplane.

He holds the toy airplane in his right hand, which is battered, bloodied.

It looks as though the other man had been in a street-fight and was declared the winner. The toy airplane his trophy.

The other man holds the toy airplane like a trophy.

The day has in it the sky and sun.

There are clouds and women.

It is routine.

The first man looks at the other man. He looks at the toy airplane. He says nothing.

A week goes by. Then another.

Then the man holding the toy airplane speaks.

And of course to make a long story short, he says, anyone living in a pretty how townhouse can look beyond themselves into the kitchen breakfront and clearly see between two pieces of ordinary china that every second of every livelong day of an already long week in a rather long month can often lead to an even longer year and subsequently is almost always followed by a long decade which is only one tenth of a long century and compared to the long long millennium is practically insignificant on this or any other beautiful Sunday morning.

The first man says, I know what you mean, and leaves.

The other man remains on the bench holding the toy airplane for the rest of his natural born life, which concludes twelve years later on a Thursday evening, just before dusk.

The body goes undisturbed until the next day when a passerby alerts the authorities. Two hours later the body is removed and taken to the county medical examiner’s office.

There is no mention of the toy airplane in the medical examiner’s report, only a note concerning the right hand in which the subject held the toy airplane, which was strangely contorted and atrophied.

PHOTO: Nura Qureshi

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/11/toy-airplane/feed/ 2 http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/10/yellow-bear/ http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/10/yellow-bear/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:32:16 +0000 Kathryn Davis http://significantobjects.com/?p=3972

Object No. 48 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Kathryn Davis, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $51.00. 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.]

The sorcerer drove too fast. He always did but only because his mind was somewhere else, not because he was in love with speed. He was slow, really — sorcery is not a speedy business. What’s speedy are the events that make sorcery necessary. His mind was on his wife, Mary, who sat day after day at her sewing machine turning out small pink dresses, some trimmed in white eyelet, some in lace. Today he was more distracted than usual, this being the same block he’d been driving down the night he first saw her, a skinny girl wearing glasses, balanced on one leg like a stork. The sycamore trees were taller now, full of nests. A shadow leaped from between two parked cars. It was twilight and the papers on the back seat came flying in a white fan around him.

Mary wanted a child more than anything and he’d conjured one up, only to run it over — that was his first thought. Then he saw that what he’d hit was no human child but a yellow bear. It had leaped out though — he was sure of that. The car had inflicted no damage the sorcerer could see. When he picked the yellow bear up it was smiling at him, its little mouth slightly open and eager, revealing the tip of the tongue but no teeth. It held its forepaws against its chest in a posture the sorcerer knew signified submission. Mary wanted a girl and the yellow bear seemed more like a boy, but then again it didn’t have genitals. The sorcerer wiped it clean and took it home with him; every now and then he could hear a jingling sound come from it like it was a hard rubber cat toy with a bell inside. But the bear wasn’t made of hard rubber; it was made of something soft and warm more like skin.

Mary loved the Yellow Bear the minute she laid eyes on it; she held it to her cheek and smiled. “The baby’s tired. She wants to go to sleep now,” Mary told the sorcerer. She put it in one of the pink dresses and carried it upstairs with her, then she got into bed with it and turned off the light.

In the morning when the sorcerer brought Mary her breakfast tray of tea and toast he found her propped on her pillows, the bear at her breast. Mary was no longer smiling but had tears running down her cheeks. “I don’t know if I can do it,” Mary told him. The jingling sound was very loud now, ear-splitting. “She won’t stop,” Mary said. “She needs something from you, too. That’s how babies get made, in case you forgot.”

“She’s no baby, she’s a toy,” the sorcerer said, but when he went to show Mary the rubber seam running across the top of the bear’s head, the baby sank its teeth into his thumb clear to the bone.

Later, when Mary had cried herself to sleep, the sorcerer snuck the bear from her breast and filled it with something secret. “Pablum,” he told Mary when she asked, because now there could be no question, the child was alive and thriving and cute as a button. Buttercup, the sorcerer called her. But Mary knew better and treasured these mysteries deep in her heart.

PHOTO: Nura Qureshi