Object No. 1 of 5: Epistolary Week

[The auction for his Significant Object, with story by Irina Reyn, has ended. Original price: $0 (found/donated object). Final price: $30. This is part of a series of five epistolary stories guest-curated by Ben Greenman. Proceeds from this auction will go to One Story.]

To: You

From: Saskia (the Monkey)

Subject: Help Visitor From Future – Earn Riches in Afterlife

My Dear Human:

Under normal circumstances, I would never be asking you for money. We monkeys consider this an act of coarseness, a vile human quality. But extreme circumstances have forced my hand, and now I must appeal to whatever spirit of charity nestles in your so-called soul.

I’m not sure how much you know about time travel. I will assume next to nothing and not confuse you with time dilation and the twin paradox. In any case, during routine maintenance of the temporal deflector console, I found myself transported from the future and landing in a place you call New York City. You may wonder what the future holds for humanity. The short explanation is: you will all be dead. A peaceful, civilized society is ruled by monkeys. If it’s any solace, please know that evolution has done its proper work.

Finding oneself trapped in the past is inconvenient, not to mention prohibitively expensive. I had read about your attachment to currency, but it is far more deep-seated than anything our historians have imagined. Even your Ritz Hotel, fabled for its hospitality, refused to provide a few weeks’ respite for a guest lacking a valid credit card. Outrageous. In our society, we would be lining your bed with the finest Frette sheets, greeting you with the most lavish of spreads, (well not you; if we discovered an actual living human, we would probably execute you).

I’ve done a modest inventory of the items needed to repair the time machine and blow this Casa de Morons:

Two weeks at the Ritz (Royal suite): $30,000

Transport (BMW or comparable automobile): $80,000

Tools and sundries: $1,450

Quantum mechanic: app. $250/hour

Cocktails: $3,000/week

In the past days, I’ve reached out to a dozen aid organizations (human only, they insist), to no avail. Is your race as ignoble as we’ve always assumed? Thankfully, you have the power to change humanity’s legacy. I could return to my community and say, “You know what, guys? That Mr. So-and-so (you) is not like the other inferior life forms. Let us inscribe his name in the Who’s Who Scroll of Humans or at least name a drink in his honor.”

Checks or money orders are equally accepted at PO Box 222, Soho Station, NY, NY. If you would like to directly deposit money through PayPal, please find the link below. I think $5,000 would be a reasonable, if modest sum.
Let this holy monkey in my image be a token of friendship. When you wind it, know that somewhere in the far future, I will be raising a (Your Name Here) blood orange mojito. I promise you this: you will not be forgotten.

Gratefully,

Saskia

The winning bidder will receive this story, from author Irina Reyn.

No. 44 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Trinie Dalton, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $9.50. This is part four of a five-story teamup with the literary magazine The Believer. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

It dumped snowed one evening, so I got out my velvet swatch, antler-handled magnifying glass, and ice crystal identification guide to take to the riverbank at sunset. This was obviously the most glamorous diamond dust flurry of the season, here in my mountain town. It felt even more like a magical grand finale because I had, warm against my chest beneath my puffy coat, a beaded medicine bag filled with my crystal collection. I’ve been collecting crystal points for years — Herkimers from New York, double-terminated selenites from Arizona, amethysts from Texas, pre-obsidian Apaches tears from California, smoky quartz from Arkansas — and had meditated on capturing, in solid form, the elusive snowflake.

Every snow-lover’s dream is to freeze ice crystals in time. While photography is okay and sketching snowflakes is underwhelming, I strove for the impossible: to preserve the individually frozen stars as glassine crystals alongside their quartz brethren. Capturing them on velvet is only step one. As the white, fluffy storm came, I stood on the frigid riverbank, watching an egret hunt trout while perfectly shaped snowflakes mounted and perched on the maroon velvet’s soft, toothy surface. I hunched over and spied a few cloud-borne flowers through my magnifier, the bird flew off, and my stomach growled. My big plan, to spray the crystals with Freon until they transformed into glass slivers, failed miserably when I got too cold and went in to heat up an old, crumby bagel. Anyway, I had no Freon.

Darkness fell upon our backyard stream, and my stale bagel dinner didn’t cheer me up either. The butter I had to moisten the bread with was misshapen and garlic-infested because it surfed like a fatty goldfish, in its dirty little wax wrapper, throughout the fridge. The butter looked pathetic like a once mighty mountain mined and dredged for gold. The velvet spent the night outside.

Morning sun melted the snow bank blocking my front door, so I could get outside to gather the abandoned props. Down by the river, in my rubber boots and down apparel, I located the velvet and noticed a star-decorated object resting on it as if ready for an antique magazine photo shoot. Picking it up with gloves in case this was an ice sculpture that would meld painfully with my fingertips, I was pleased to discover that although this object resembled a dish from the days when people ate fancy dinners off chiseled Lalique crystalware, this was the real cold deal. The photo you see before you displays the first and last ice crystal-forged object. I kept it in my freezer all winter, accommodated with a brand new butter stick. I ate many fresh-flavored bagels thanks to it. However, for Spring, I feel obligated to share this wondrous work of nature with you. Snowflakes decorate it like petroglyphs. Buy it before it melts.

Object No. 43 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Miranda Mellis, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $22.50. This is part three of a five-story teamup with the literary magazine The Believer. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

Once you went on a school field trip and were shown the constellations in the false night of a planetarium. You looked hard trying to see… something more meaningful than the connect-the-dot resemblances to hybrid animals that had so captivated the ancestors. Finally, space was more interesting as an idea. Space suggested alternate worlds, different ways of life even. Perhaps there were aliens not ruled by the rhythms of school and production, living in the hooky state of mind, an abdication practiced by children and teenagers in search of the meaning, or the meaninglessness of time. Being on a field trip was not exactly hooky, but it had the expansive flavor of freedom. The class met only to disperse in a herd, loose enough to move across the city, tight enough for collective purpose.

The tour of the stars at an end, you filed back outside with the others into the blinding afternoon light to eat lunch in a courtyard with gnarled, leafless trees and a penny-filled fountain. Your friend Cassandra ate next to you across from her mother who stood casually but watchfully by. Cassandra’s straightened hair was coiffed in the usual respect-arousing topknot. A flame-shaped bang swooped across her forehead tapering down by her temple. At times Cassandra’s mother and father tried to convert you to the ways of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but you were a committed atheist. Once you told them that your mother was a communist, they let you be. Cassandra didn’t mind at all that you did not share the same cosmology. You never tried to convince her that God was a made-up parent figure for adults, and she had no interest in converting you. Moving closer to her, you opened your lunch box and then closed it immediately before she could see the contents.

Although you understood by now that bad desires were implanted in you by advertisements — messengers all bearing the same message — and that your desire for a tiny pencil-hugging koala bear and a miniature license plate with your name on it let alone a television, were forms of false consciousness, you were still full of normative desire. Yet you had developed a broad appreciation for objects not marketed to you. Comrades gave you carpentry tools and unusual rocks on your birthday, and you were not ungrateful. You knew that history was written by the victors, that reality was mutable. But was it too much to expect real food in your lunch box? Why the plastic sandwich, the rubber carrot and the brass apple on this happiest of days, when everyone had permission to leave school for more stimulating environments? Nothing in your experience had prepared you for this blind-siding prank on the part of those you were now considering running away from, when you realized that you had mistakenly picked up the toddler’s toy pail by the door in your fervor to make the bus. Relieved of anger and blame, you were more than content to be simply hungry.

Object No. 42 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Justin Taylor, has ended. Original price: $1.49. Final price: $81. This is part two of a five-story teamup with the literary magazine The Believer. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

So I bought the metal flowers as a present for Felice, not for any particular reason or occasion — the lack of occasion being itself the point. There were two of them, each with a base of about a square inch and two distinct blossoms. The petals on one of them — the one which, unaccountably, I kept thinking of as the right-hand one — had their tips painted green. Anyway, I ended up not even having the chance to show them to her (obviously, given what happened) and so there I was at the far end of a subway car, sulking and digging around in my bag for my headphones so I could drown out the woman at the other end of the car who was singing, presumably for donations, though she wasn’t standing in the aisle, but sitting down, so maybe she was just a passenger — and nuts. The song had no chorus, refrain, or even verses, really; it was more like she was just singing the thoughts off the top of her head. And all she ever thought about, apparently, was how good God was to the wretched of the earth. “And the glory,” she sang. “And the glory and the glory and the — oh yes, it sure is.” She drew a breath and held it for a beat, then unleashed: “Glory yes, Lord, oh you know it —” and so it went. I finally found the headphones but the cord was tangled up in the flowers (well, just the one of them, the unpainted or “left-hand” one). The cord, white and wrapped around the flowers-stem like a vine, looked like some dangerous invasive species. I set to work disengaging the flowers from the cord, and as I achieved this feat the train happened to pass out of the ground and up onto elevated tracks, washing the whole car in briefly blinding light. Surprised, I let go of the flowers, which, free of the cord now, fell to the car-floor but did not slide away. They landed upright on their little base and, ridiculously, held their position. Metal flowers growing out of the ground of a subway car floor. It made sense. I plucked my flowers back up and inspected them. Then I was on my feet. What exactly was I doing? I had no idea. I re-bagged my headphones, got the other set of flowers out, shouldered the bag itself, and walked down the length of the car and stood before the singer. I handed the unpainted flowers to her, a gesture I hoped meant great show, kudos, cheers. She took them from me as if they were utterly expected, and perhaps they were. She stood up and I had to step back, fast, to get out of her way. She put the big blossom up close to her lips, and, taking the flowers for a microphone, began her encore. I stood beside her and we sang.

Object No. 27 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Katie Hennessey, has ended. Original price: $2.00. Final price: $50.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

This little statue stood on the window sill in my favorite aunt’s front hall. Perched between plants of varying shapes and sizes, surrounded by shards of broken pottery and miniature ceramic elephants from the Red Rose Tea box, dappled with sunlight shining through the leaded glass figures of St. Francis in his garden and the mossy Celtic Cross, the woodland creature stood by her cauldron, day after day, night after night, for all the years of my childhood.

Indistinct at first, her jack-knived features came, for me, to represent benevolence itself. What was she cooking, there in her pot? Was it a witches’ brew of bark and herbs, meant to quell my fears and slow my speeding thoughts? Was it essential oils, drawn from petals and seeds, distilled into droplets and lovingly collected to act as a salve, summoning spirits long forgotten to soothe my aching unconscious?

I wondered who had made her, and of what type of wood. No one seemed to know. Was her burlap outfit, glued together and barely hemmed, some sort of disguise?

My aunt put holy water in the cup on special occasions, but from time to time my uncle used it as a shot glass. To each his own, I guess.

No. 22 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Stephen O'Connor, has ended. Original price: free. Final price: $24.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

Nobody could remember back before everything was Astroland, but some people pretended. Hop-a-Long was one—so-called because of his gigantic tinsel-furred ears, his rabbit-eye-red eyes, but not because he hopped. He didn’t hop. He rocked from foot to foot as he walked, like a chair coming down the hall by itself. “Back then everything was real,” he said. “It was boring. Fishtails weren’t worked by levers and springs. A world without a sense of humor.” Hop-a-Long the stinky. Hop-a-Long with the bubble-gum-wad nose. With the almost-topple-every-step walk.

“Blat!” said Flippy-Foot.

“How?” said Injun Joe.

“I don’t know,” said Hop-a-Long. “It was brainless existence. People had to make excuses to live.”

It was sunshiny as usual in Astroland. It was a world of dazzlement and the frozen laugh, and of gigantic eyes with the pupils all the way to the right. A worm of gleam rested on every edge. And, you know that purple fog that sometimes coats shiny red things in the bright, bright, bright? It was that too.

“Life then was just who-cares forever. You looked out on all that stuff all mixed up with all this other stuff and you said, What’s the point? Who’s making any money here?”

In Astroland even the clouds were mechanical: electric motors and whirring cogs on the inside, cotton on the outside, and tiny, tiny propellers. Tuesdays and Thursdays were cloud-washing days, so then it was all sun, sun, sun. The purpose of the clouds was to create sunbeams. Just as the purpose of the sunbeams was to create worms of gleam. Just as dazzlement was the purpose of the worms of gleam. And dazzlement was a variety of fun. There was never any rain. Well, there was rain, but it was confetti. Everything had a purpose.

Flippy-Foot opened his mouth and out came squiggle lightning. Flippy-Foot had painted-on scales: dark green on his back and sides, yellow-green on his belly. He had red plastic eyes that the squiggle lightning flashed inside.

Hop-a-Long tapped him on the head with a fingernail: click.

“How?” said Injun Joe.

“Love,” said Hop-a-Long. “Back before Astroland everything was love. The world was wasted by it. Do you know what love is? Love is a beard pretending to be cotton candy. You break-up everything and say it’s new-improved, better-than-ever—that’s what love is. It’s me down in the sewer hole dreaming about all the razzle-dazzle on the outside, but really there’s just this steamroller waiting up there to squash me flat. Crunch! Ka-RACK! Pow! Shardtown to the horizon!”

“Blat!” said Flippy-Foot.

Object No. 7 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Lance Gould, has ended Original price: $1.50. Final price: $14.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

Carpenter usually took a bathroom break at 11:15. Today, the skinny bastard was still going through e-mail at 11:47. He hadn’t gotten out of his chair since he first parked himself in it at 9:03.

“God DAMN it — what the hell is he doing?” Kohler muttered into the phone.

“His insides must be bursting,” Goldberg replied.

Carpenter rose and stretched. He took three somnolent steps toward the restrooms. Kohler and Goldberg exchanged arched eyebrows, and signaled to Velasquez, who had also been eyeing the suspender-wearing pigeon. Then Carpenter’s phone rang. The middle manager ambled back to his desk, answered it, smiled, and settled in for what seemed like it could be a lengthy exchange.

“JESUS,” yelled Velasquez, so loudly that all business in the office briefly came to an abrupt halt. Goldberg rebuked him with a murderous stare, and Velasquez shrunk back behind his laminated steel desk. Kohler picked up the phone and called Goldberg. “Maybe I could be a piano page turner or somethin’.”

“What’s that?”

“A piano page turner. You know, a dude who all they do is turn the page at a recital or whatever.”

“But you don’t know jack all about classical music.”

“I know how to turn a page.”

“There’s so much more to — ah, forget it.”

Carpenter stood up, stretched again, and this time nearly sprinted to the restroom. Velasquez, too obviously, raced toward Carpenter’s desk. Kohler winced, but he and Goldberg also hurried over to Carpenter’s corner cubicle.

Velasquez got there first. The red-metal gumball machine with shatterproof polycarbonate globe was filled with peanut M&Ms. Velasquez spun the handle furiously — five, six, seven times, gluttonously filling his palms with the colored candy. The accountant’s sweaty hands started bleeding red, yellow, and green.

“That’s enough, Alejandro,” scolded Kohler. “What’s your problem, dude?” He shoved Velasquez out of the way. Velasquez stumbled, knocking the pink, green, and yellow cornhusk doll off the desk. It was a gift from the Trinidadian mailroom guy, and had faced out into the office as if standing sentinel against pilfery.

“Watch it!” hissed Goldberg. “You’re making a mockery of the whole operation.”

Velasquez stared at the doll on the floor.

“Bitch’s hands looked like they held explosive pompoms,” he said, laughing and gobbling M&Ms.

Kohler picked the doll up off the floor, staining it with his candy-soiled fingers. He placed it back next to the gumball machine, facing inward.

Wilson, observing the whole affair from nearby, shook his head. He opened his mouth to say something, but Velasquez shoved a finger in his face.

“Shut it, fat man,” warned Velasquez, scrambling back to his cube.

Kohler and Goldberg took the cue and also shot back to their cubes, sitting down just as Carpenter turned the corner. They had emptied the ¾-full machine. Carpenter reached his desk, went to turn the handle of the gumball machine, and came up empty. He frowned. He looked at his cornhusk doll, now sullied, and quickly glanced around the office. The three perps were studiously on pretend phone-calls.

Carpenter looked at Wilson, tsked, and said, “If you want candy, Peter, all you have to do is ask.”

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

[The auction for this object, with story by Tom McCarthy, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $68.00. 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.]

1. Pollution of coastal waters can have / the black sun of melancholy / signature of all things I am here to / test for indicator organisms such as / Love or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron / based on weekly or fortnightly water sampling

2. The beach zone is modeled as / the grotto where the siren / (see Fig. 1) / wind-generated surface advection and / have lingered in / with parameter estimation / limit of the diaphane / with uniform pollution concentration

3. Wild sea money / dc and dt: decay and mixing / language tide and wind have silted / to a build-up of pollutants during / the night of the tombs, you who consoled me / (see Fig. 2)

4. The coastline is roughly aligned with / the sighs of the Saint and the cries of / prevailing wind positions at this / lolled on bladderwrack / in the chambers of / pollution forecasting, modeled by / the grid where vine and rose enmesh

5. Two brief field surveys, carried out to / walk upon the beach / accumulated rainfall and runoff pollution which / snotgreen, bluesilver, rust / where U is wind and T is days / have modulated on the lyre of / drainage flow-rates for / the mermaids singing, each to / the ‘first-flush effect’, as visible in Fig. 3 / forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss

PHOTO: Nura Qureshi

Object No. 46 of 50 -- Significant Objects v2 (Photo by Adrian Kinloch)

[The auction for this item, with story by Chris Adrian, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $162.50. 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.]

My brother and I could not agree on how to worship the mouse.  It was typical of us back then that we could agree that it should be worshipped—that was obvious from the day it arrived in the mail, a gift from our father, who had been in Vietnam for three years, which was one-third of George’s life and one-half of mine, on business more important than his wife and his sons. The last gift had been a green and yellow straw mat, and we agreed that it was, in fact, a prayer-mat, the use of which only became clear with the advent of the mouse. The evening it arrived we knelt in our room in our pajamas in the dark. George had his flashlight out and he shined it on the mouse’s face.

“Great Faaa,” he said. “Mighty Faaa, hear our prayers.” He said the name in a sing-song, high-pitched voice. We had just seen “Day of the Dolphin” the week before. I put my hand on the flashlight and pushed it down, so the little monkey in the mouse’s heart was more plainly illuminated.

“Mr. Peepers,” I said. “Source of the All, forgive our sins! Don’t punish us!”

“What are you doing?” George asked, and our argument began.  We quarreled subtly, at first—we still shared the mouse, but prayed differently to it—and then more obviously, stealing Him back and forth, and performing secret worship in the closet or the basement or the pool shed.  The violence, when it came, attracted our mother’s attention. “If you can’t share that hideous piece of trash, I’m going to throw it away,” she said, and that night we prayed peacefully, imploring Faaa and Mr. Peepers not to hurt her, but by the morning we were fighting again. “Faaa!” George said to me, sitting on my chest and pummeling my head with the sides of his fists, and I could almost understand how his whole argument could be contained in just the name. I wanted to tell him that there was a monkey in my heart, and a monkey in his heart, and a monkey in everybody’s heart, and there was nothing worse in the world than an unappeased, unworshipped monkey who lived in you and was mad at you. But all I could say was, “Mr. Peepers!”

“Why can’t you two just be good?” our mother asked, and she took up Peepers-Faaa in her hand and threw Him against the wall, breaking off His ear. I cried, but George screamed at her, telling something horrible was going to happen to us because of what she had done, and horrible things did happen to us. She took up the body and flushed it down the toilet, and George said later that it was a miracle of Faaa that it flushed, but that it made sense that He would exercise His magic to get away from our mother, and from me.

I still have the ear.

Photo by Nura Qureshi

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/08/kangamouse/feed/ 9 http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/04/aquarium-souvenir/ http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/04/aquarium-souvenir/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:06:48 +0000 Mark Jude Poirier http://significantobjects.com/?p=3970

Object No. 44 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this object, with story by Mark Jude Poirier, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $66.07. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

We drove to Wildwood Aquarium, left Alice at her apartment, even though it had been her idea to go. The week before, a German visitor to the aquarium had been killed, bitten in two by Sammy, the angry orca, as he held a fish for it. The crowd had cheered when the water turned red, then pink. People posted videos and photos on the Internet, but they had barely mentioned it on the news because the garbage strike was in full force then, and the city smelled like death.

They couldn’t very well just let Sammy go, and animal rights groups wouldn’t let the aquarium kill him, so he stayed there in the glass-walled pool, and people lined up for hours to see him. When we finally pushed our way to the front, Brad pressed his lips against the cold glass, blew up his cheeks and tried to attract Sammy the Killer with his tongue — ’til I reminded him how thousands of people had probably touched the glass right there after using the restroom and not washing their hands. I listed the problems Brad might suffer: “Impetigo, herpes, trench mouth, the flu, New Jersey gum rot, oral lice, lip chiggers, pink eye, the common cold, staphylococcus, pinworms, ringworm, hookworm, guinea worm, roundworm, tapeworm, and/or the clap. And mono.”

“Shut it,” Brad said.

We stole Alice a souvenir because we were afraid not to. I had wanted to get her a Sammy the Killer T-shirt, emblazoned with the image of a cartoon Sammy with half a German tourist in his jaws, but they were too hard to steal, hanging high up on the wall, so high you had to ask an employee to get one down for you with a hook on the end of a stick. Instead, we snatched her something else.

“Where the hell is it?” Alice asked when we walked into her apartment.

Brad handed it to her, a small cylinder of Lucite or something, not much bigger than an ice cube, filled with water, a sad dead seahorse, and a few vibrantly dyed shells.

“Very funny,” she said. “Where’s my Sammy the Killer T-shirt?”

“Those were up too high,” I offered.

She looked at me, her lips freshly lipsticked, gunked, her eyes sunken into purple circles.

She threw it at Brad then, really hard, really fast, like her wrist was spring-loaded. It hit him in the mouth. “What the hell!” he screamed, blood dribbling from his chin. He spit slivers and shards of teeth into his palm. “Get me a glass of milk!”

I hurried over to the refrigerator. “Only soy milk,” I said. “I don’t think you should put your broken teeth in soy milk.”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Alice said. She walked over to Brad, who cringed, thinking she might hurt him further. Instead, she picked up the souvenir, rinsed it in the kitchen sink, dried it on her denim skirt, and placed it on the windowsill.

You know, when the sun hit it, the seahorse almost looked alive.