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’re 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

Object No. 37 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

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

This cold ceramic bear witnessed some electrifying poker hands. Saw leather-faced wide-brimmed Doyle Brunson run a ten three offsuit. Watched matchstick-thin Amarillo Slim bluff his fictive straight to the river. Set his beady eyes on longhair Chris “Jesus” Ferguson as he parsed stats hand after hand like a machine till small-baller Daniel Negreanu fried his circuits by chattering his all-in with a lowly three seven to a win.

When playing No Limit Texas Hold ’em, the greatest game in the world, some of us take faith in a lucky weight, a talisman that squats on our hole cards, a little trinket with an invisible antenna pulling for luck. Amulets that we rub and stroke. A dinosaur. A sneaky fox. A strutting rooster. A river stone shaped like a frog. Even an inch tall they pretend to be fierce warriors guarding cards and shazaaming the table. Bluff Daddy, he had his inane white bear; thing didn’t even have a body. Just a head on top a’ feet. Not even feet, just six black toenails. Tongue-hanging-out bear. Blank white eyes ringed in black. Holes in the head. It’s a salt shaker is what. Bluff Daddy is ever lifting his teddy between bets and tossing salt over his shoulder.

We’re in a big hand, me and him. My gut says he’s got ace-high rags on his way to a longshot flush at the river. I’ve been praying for this hand all night. Playing loosey-goosey, mixing up my play then closing the gate like a clam. I’m impossible to read. The way to lure suckers into a pot when you’re holding the nuts, you gotta spend time projecting false tells. Jiggle a leg, chatter too much or go stone mute, work it all night till the other players think they’ve got you pegged. The tell and reverse-tell is a maddening thing. When the tell is flipped, a monster pot can be stolen.

Just before the dealer turns the river card, that white bear puts the whammy on me. Tongue hanging out, face smeared in bear lipstick. No. Not lipstick. It’s bleedin’ out the mouth. I swear. Then Bluff Daddy hits his flush. His bad luck. He goes all in, he has to. You can’t beg off the high card flush. My stack is bigger than his; he can’t match my all-in. So I say to him, want to match it? I’ll take that bear. He shoves it right in and instantly blanches white as his bear. That donkey betrayed his own lucky charm. I mean, Bluff Daddy even looked like that bear. Like that bear was his lucky spawn.

I show him my full house. Pass the salt, I say. I won that bear, fair and square. After that hand? Me an’ my new bear, we dominate the table all night.

Bear Shaker — closeup

Object No. 12 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mimi Lipson, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $24.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

She’s Jewish, so why does she insist on giving me Christmas gifts? For that matter, why is she giving me a hippie bear Christmas tree ornament? I’m not a hippie. She’s certainly not a hippie. There is no hippie of our mutual acquaintance to whom this could be a fond or winking allusion. But it’s a long tradition: last year she gave me an enormous salmon-colored sweatshirt embossed with a puffy vinyl seagull, and the year before, a two-gallon tub of caramel popcorn. With her unerring instinct for soul-free objects, she’s naturally drawn to the microwavable, the Navajo-patterned, the vanilla-scented. There have been cake plates shaped like snowmen, eye-watering potpourri satchels, decorative jars of multicolored pastas, candles of every description. These things will not mellow or acquire sentimental cachet. It is not their destiny to become vintage. To look upon one of her gifts is to see its future in a free-box and, ultimately, a landfill.

Does that sound harsh? It isn’t meant to be. I know that, for her, to love is to give. But I’ve also seen the closet where she hoards piles of gift-wrapped junk, replenishing her stock on regular trips to the mall like a squirrel gathering inedible, mass-produced nuts. It’s a compulsion, and a lonely one. She doesn’t go to Goodwill, either; I know she’s spent good money on this bear — money she could have spent on bingo cards and Virginia Slims.

For something so bland, this hippie bear ornament is chockablock with signifiers that are hard to ignore. I can only assume it spoke to her of me in some way, or spoke of the connection between us, and I think that’s what depresses me most of all. This thing has nothing to do with us. It occurs to me that a shapeless lump of putty-colored plastic would have expressed more. Each one of the carefully rendered details — the blue jeans, the flowers, the peace signs, the tasseled string that laces its leather vest — each one subtracts a bit of meaning, until all that remains is a sucking hole of negative significance.

On the other hand, it’s the thought that counts.