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. 2 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Binelli, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $10.49.  Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Shortly after I made my First Communion, my cousin Rodney showed up at my mom’s. He’d also just made his First Communion, though at a different church. It was so recent, I still had this plastic First Communion cross, a gift from my great-aunt, propped on my bookshelf. My mom always disliked my aunt, and had commented in some oblique way on the chintziness of the gift, as if it should’ve been a cross made of solid gold or poached elephant ivory or something, as if Jesus would’ve been psyched about that. I didn’t mind it, though.

Anyway, it turned out Rodney, that morning at church, had, in a rather impressive feat of legerdemain, only pretended to eat the communion wafer the priest had placed in his outstretched hands — only very old parishioners still took the wafer directly on their tongue — and instead had palmed the thing and snuck it home. It was a pretty motley act of civil disobedience, a nine-year-old’s equivalent of writing in a porn star for mayor or burning a twenty-dollar bill. Still, now he had this piece of Eucharist, which he unwrapped gingerly from a square of toilet tissue. He didn’t know what to do with it.

On the grass-colored carpet between us, the host, slightly speckled, looked like a bit of shell from a broken bird’s egg. I said how do they make them so perfectly round and flat. Rodney said there’s probably a factory upstate. I pictured a conveyor belt, with monks snatching up the bad ones. (You don’t want anyone getting a host that’s burnt, or cracked, or shaped like a profile of Nixon.)

Finally Rodney suggested that we could have a black mass. The host had been consecrated, after all. I thought this sounded like a cool idea. In a fit of inspiration, Rodney grabbed my Communion cross and flipped it upside-down, making a Satanic altar.

Upside-down, the gold chalice on the cross looked just like a bell.

Rodney said the way this would work was, you got to say a prayer, only it would be to Satan, so you could ask for anything, not just good things — you could ask for wishes God would not only not grant but actually punish you for thinking.

We dimmed the lights and closed our eyes. At one point, I opened mine a crack, and the light from my desk lamp was hitting the cross in a way that made it seem to glow. I quickly closed my eyes again. That was the first time I thought my evil prayers might be answered. But I was never able to levitate, and Tina George’s blouse never spontaneously popped open on the playground.

About six months later, when the most hated homeroom teacher at our school got cancer, Rodney did pull me aside and whisper that that’s what he’d prayed for. I didn’t believe him, though.

Still, you should be careful with this thing.

Object No. 89 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Maud Newton, has ended. Original price: 59 cents. Final price: $24.50.]

This astonishing “Cracker Barrel” artifact appears to be a souvenir of modern vintage, representing a down-home North American restaurant-and-country-store chain that upholds Christian values by refusing to hire gay people. In fact, the object dates to the Bronze Age and was unearthed last week in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, on what is believed by several prominent archaeologists to be the site of the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Alongside the artifact lay a charred cuneiform tablet that listed all five towns of the Pentapolis (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar) that were destroyed by the Lord with fire and brimstone while Lot and his family fled.

As scholars at the site quickly translated the tablet, they discovered a parable that directly contradicted the reasons given in Genesis for the devastation God wreaked on the inhabitants of those late, sinful cities. The Sodomites, in this account, were punished not for gay sex, but for for failing to offer the proper hospitality to several strangers, who were homosexual men, and for trying to force their daughters on the men. The Sodomites had barred the visitors from their homes, bars, and restaurants, engaged in discriminatory hiring practices, and invented and frequently employed the insult “faygele.” Same-sex unions, under any name, were prohibited.

Enraged that the people had apparently failed to apprehend the full meaning of the rainbow promise he had made to Noah after the flood, the Lord waved His hand. Volcanic lava rained down, killing everyone but Lot and his family — and a few Cracker Barrel employees, who escaped, carrying this artifact with them.

On initial inspection, strange markings on the underside of the cuneiform tablet appeared to tie the Cracker Barrel escapees to The Illuminati, but this linkage could not be verified, for, although it was handled with utmost care and in accordance with the strictest archaeological preservation methods, the tablet turned to salt the moment the initial transcription was complete. Then a ram began to baa nearby, its horn caught in a bush. Seconds later a rainbow appeared in the sky. Fundamentalist groups in the United States have now denounced the rainbow as a sign of the End Times. They continue to frequent Cracker Barrel, however.

Object No. 84 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Betsey Swardlick, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $26. This story is the third in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Rebecca Wolff, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $19.50.]

There was this family, and their eight-year-old son developed a tumor on, or in, his jaw. They had it removed, and treated with radiation and chemotherapy, but a short while later it came back. They had it removed again. Their son learned to play the guitar, and the ukulele, and the banjo, and grew tall and lean. He would have been handsome but for the narrowness of his face, the lower part of which on one side had been shaved away. Now he’s thirteen, or fourteen, and the new tumor is large and cannot be further pacified, removed, denied. A small ark has been constructed for the family by terminally ill children with great reserves of unspent joy in the children’s ward of the Hospital of Our Lady of the Rocking Waters.

There was this girl, in Indiana, and in 1992 when she was twelve she got in this car with four older teenage girls and these other girls tortured and murdered her. My neighbor down the street is reading a true-crime paperback about it; she can’t put it down. My neighbor is completely under-educated and has no resources. She works weekends at the hospice and stays home with her daughter during the week while her son is at school with my son. She’s an accidental hipster; it’s just a trick of physiognomy that her tidy shape, clothed in the cheap duds she buys at Target, is the shape of a 1960s London mod. She’s Catholic from Long Island and tells me that she never complained about her ex-husband because the laws of Christianity told her not to. She says “Thank God” after everything.

So then this morning I hit a dog with my car. My two little ones strapped precariously in the back, I screamed “My God” in an agonized way that I remember from previous death experiences and started sobbing immediately. Parked in a driveway and ran out of the car, out of my mind, hyperventilating, back to where the golden lump of sweetness and innocence — never hurt anything — I must never hurt anything yet a moment ago — where it lay. Ark in my pocket. A working ark, hand-beaten of tin, painted in bright jewel tones to reflect the inexhaustible resources of the miraculous. Your faith alone will buoy it on the waters of Armaggedon, or Yahweh’s displeasure, whichever comes first. Miniatures are hard to come by and in great demand for their portability as well as for the exquisitely precise effort of Hopes and Fears required to exact true functionality.

Turned out I knew the dog’s owner slightly, a man who had parked across the busy road and let his dogs run free for some reason. He knew the reason: “It’s my fault,” he said, when I said “My God I’m so sorry.” Then he said: “I think he’s going to be okay: I think his leg is just broken.” The dog looking up at me, not saying. Later I’ll call and find out if the dog lived or if the dog died.