Object No. 76 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Terese Svoboda, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $15.50.]

You are fitting it in between the toilet paper and the shaver accessories, on top of the wart remover and the nose hair clippers. You say, tentacles for moon-people — this is where they store them.

Prehensile is prejudice, I say. But I’m not really agreeing.

Or a vehicle for invasion unwarned by Welles? you say. They’re everywhere and they’re transmitting.

Maybe, I say. Or maybe it’s for votives. The slimmer candles. Ancient Mesopotamian gods worshipped by Macy’s the II.

This is not a competition, you say. You kiss me.

Roaches crawl in and out and over an item like this, I say, unpacking it by nightfall with even less in the agreement department, more fatigue.

Roaches R us, you say, shaking the object so I can hear no little dry somethings. Whosoever finds parking for this baby will be blessed. All the bad is purged. Think of the ark-like covenant, the two-by-two or else, a pleasant symmetry where every inhabitant wears a stiff white beard.

I watch you stand it on the porcelain edge overlooking the Niagra-ed sink. No way breakage won’t happen. You darken your look as if that’s a dare. If the camel’s back stood ready, I’ve piled it on. Inspect that motif, I quicktalk, flowers in actual color, veritable domestic bliss.

If you say so, you say. All hygiene goes haywire. At least you aim to miss.

You are sweeping bits into a sweeper-upper-into, some of them floral. The Maltese Falcon, you say, somebody’s got to see inside it.

Noir toothbrush, I say.

Resuming normal speech but avoiding the bathroom — it had eyes, you cry — you find matching flora and defenestrate it all over our bed, making it, as it were, a bed of roses. That’s what I think life is, you say.

We take to it.

[NOTE: The object we are selling is NOT broken. -- eds.]

Object No. 58 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tim Carvell, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $35.]

On December 17, 1948, the Humboldt twins entered the world, Jerome screaming, Luke laughing. This pattern held. Jerome grew up to be as petulant, difficult and miserable as Luke was cheery, optimistic and polite.

Their father, Max, owned the Humboldt Tiny Decorative Box Corp., the main employer in Osipee, New Hampshire. He grew to hope Luke might one day take over the business. After all, Luke loved crafts — at the age of nine, he’d papier-mache’d a doghouse in a perfect replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread House. (The doghouse remained sadly unoccupied, as Jerome’s cock-fighting ring had placed the family on the ASPCA’s “watch list”.) But at his wife Sheila’s urging, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, in 1969 Max willed the business to both boys.

This was a horrible mistake. Not six months after drawing up the will, Max died from what is known in the decorative-box trade as “varnish lung”. (The coroner tactlessly described Max’s lungs to Sheila as “the shiniest I’ve ever seen”.) At the time, Luke was in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, teaching tribal children appliqué and decoupage. And so it fell to Jerome to lead the company.

To everyone’s surprise, Jerome leaped at the opportunity. Far from lacking interest in the family trade, he’d quietly written a manifesto, “On the Morality of the Small Box”, arguing that tiny boxes were a means to liberate the world from falsehood — and any box that failed to do so was “a plywood sin”. He swiftly redesigned the company’s wares, banishing all forms of decoration; the factory soon produced only severe black boxes, adorned with 9-point Courier declarations: “Love is a precursor to sorrow.” “Joy fades.” “Pets die.”

The boxes were a disaster. Within six months, business had tapered off to zero, and the payroll dwindled to one: Jerome. Ignoring the pleas of the townspeople, Jerome persisted, drinking heavily and hand-making his grim boxes late into the night.

What happened on Christmas Eve, 1970 was, Sheila insists, an accident; out of deference to her, let us say that it was. That night, Jerome accidentally fell into the hydraulic laminator, having accidentally disabled its safeguards. The machine swiftly rendered his body into a shiny oblong disc of viscera. Horrifically, his body was found by none other than his brother, who tiptoed into the factory early Christmas morning, hoping to surprise his father and share tales of his Ecuadoran glitter co-operative, only to find his brother’s pressed corpse.

Such an event might have broken another man. But Luke worked through his grief, throwing himself into designing his brother’s coffin. To accommodate the corpse’s unusual shape, the container was necessarily round, and he decorated the lid with a tender photo of Sheila cradling Jerome. (A photo, Sheila later confided to friends, snapped moments before Jerome bit her.) But the night before the funeral, the casket remained maddeningly incomplete. Then Luke’s eyes lit upon the inscription on one of his brother’s boxes: “To one person, you may be the world, but to the world, you’re only one person.” And he realized that it needed but a slight tweak. In what became number 3 on “Small Box Monthly”’s list of the 100 Most Significant Moments of the 20th Century, Luke Humboldt reached for the paint. He wrote: “To the world, you may be only one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

The next morning, as the casket was lashed to the roof of a hearse, an onlooker muttered, “Now there’s a box someone might buy.” And Luke — looking out upon the unemployed citizens of Osipee — knew what he had to do. That very evening, he started producing small replicas of Jerome’s splendid coffin. To you, this may be just one small box. But to Luke Humboldt, this box contains the world.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jessica Helfand, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $24. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

Harriet squeezed the last flecks of lemon pulp into her Diet Pepsi and thought about all the men who had loved her. She counted chronologically, beginning with kindergarten, and moving forward year by year, class by class by class. In kindergarten, Steven had given her penny candy sticks — a whole box of them — lemon-lime and tutti-frutti and root beer, which was called sarsaparilla and made her gag. There was Robert in middle school who baked her muffins, and Danny in high school who spiked Harriet’s seltzer with miniature vials of vodka he’d swiped from home. (His mother was a flight attendant on Aer Lingus.) In college, there was Luke, who smiled at her in the library stacks and read her sonnets. Later, he broke up with her over shrimp cocktail. “I don’t have room for you in my life anymore,” he said to her casually one evening — as if he were discussing something mindless like the menu or the weather or her shoes.

She’d hated shrimp cocktail ever since.

Harriet associated each man in her life with a word — tall, skinny, bald, funny — and each of these words with a taste — bitter, sour, herbal, sweet. Flavors were personality-specific, each a connection to a particular face, or voice, or an experience she couldn’t possibly place without a cue. Lavender, licorice, popcorn, pesto — the list was long and as time wore on, largely interchangeable. Like so many things in life.

But not chocolate. Chocolate was Elvis: Harriet’s most guilty pleasure. She loved that Elvis was an anagram of Lives — his lives, her lives, did it even matter? Harriet prided herself on being the farthest thing from sentimental, but where Elvis was concerned, all bets were off.

She’d met him once as a child. It was Valentine’s Day at Graceland, and Harriet had shuttled down with her family. At five, she was by far the youngest, and her older sister had bought her a milkshake to occupy her hands and keep her quiet. Wedged in among legions of fans, she stood quietly between miles of grownup legs, nursing her drink, when suddenly — the crowd parted.

Harriet felt the ground tremble, heard the click-buzz of the Polaroids, and held her breath. And there he was: the King himself. She gazed up at his massive face, framed by that huge mane of black hair, thick and shiny as an oil slick.

He grinned, pointing.

“Chocolate?”

Harriet nodded, then held out her hand to offer him a sip of her milkshake. He smiled and leaned over, sending this astonishing aroma — a hypnotic blend of Tareyton and Brylcreem — cascading into the air, and kissed her on the cheek.

It was her first kiss.

Strolling through a flea market some years later, Harriet had spied an old Russell Stover chocolate tin in the shape of a heart, a youthful portrait of Elvis on the front. She’d bought it instantly, and had then misplaced it, only to rediscover it sometime later through a random online search. Lives indeed: unlike all those boys who broke her heart, Elvis could not, would not disappoint. And neither, it appeared, could chocolate.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Todd Pruzan, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $14.50.]

The worst thing is: he sees the golf-ball bank two, maybe three full minutes before it breaks his nose. It’s sitting right there on the table, in full view of the whole room, next to a tiny recorder. This is 1980, and he’s never seen a recorder so small, except maybe in a James Bond movie. There are dozens of cameras in the room, but the photographers who will be craning for a shot of it just a few minutes from now, something to get out to the wires before five o’clock, aren’t paying the slightest attention to it. But oh, they will.

The woman who’s about to wing the golf-ball bank at the senator’s face is brandishing it with comic menace. She’s running her finger along the red laces, tracing the ball’s dimples. The senator is answering a question, but he’s thinking about the golf-ball bank, trying to figure it out. Let’s see: banking subcommittee, bill protecting The American People, he’s out playing the 18th hole at Burning Tree when he should be voting on it, hey, sorry, welcome to Washington.

So what the hell: he just calls on her. Young lady, with that golf-ball bank with the tennis shoes. Heads turn her way. Deadpan aside into the bank of live mikes: You look like maybe you’re wantin’ to throw that thing at me. Chuckles from the other reporters — and then she just does it. She really does it. She stands and picks it up and throws the bank at him, hard — not at all like a girl, he’ll remember later — and nobody reacts, because it’s too fast, and then it’s flying and getting bigger and bigger until it breaks his nose, and finally, everyone gasps and shouts. The senator screams at an octave nobody realized he could reach, including himself. The audio will be replayed for months at inopportune moments on “Saturday Night Live.” Years after the general public has stopped recognizing it, a d.j. in the Bronx will unearth the audio and turn the scream into a popular hip-hop sample.

The golf-ball bank hits the lectern first, then lands on the floor, on its feet. Two secret-service guards lunge for it, as though they really think it might run away, and clunk heads, hard. There’s a scrum of arms around the woman, who’s got straight blonde hair and enormous tinted glasses. Her chant, whatever it is, fades as she’s pulled further away from the front of the chamber. One of the guards, without thinking, hands the golf-ball bank to the senator. He probably thinks the senator dropped it. The golf-ball bank is unbroken, and there’s no blood.

The next morning, the New York Post is first out of the gate: FORE SCORE! One of his friends shows up at his Georgetown house with a copy of the paper. The senator signs: Craig — only 17 holes to go! Best wishes. The friend has a favor. He’s got a nonprofit doing a silent auction that Saturday. Can they auction off the golf-ball bank. A piece of Washingtoniana, a piece of Congressional history. It’s for a children’s hospital. All yours, says the senator, and hands it over.

The winning bid on the golf-ball bank gets raucous cheers — it gets as much as a pair of season tickets to the Redskins. The bank then sits on a coffee table for four years. Then the family moves, and it sits in a box for more than two decades, until the youngest son is in college and finds it in the attic when he’s looking for old VHS tapes. He mutters: No way.

The protester is retired now. She rarely does interviews, but when she does, she gets fired up again about the banking bill. It still gets to her. She doesn’t regret the 72 months in jail. She’s glad she did it.

The senator’s legacy isn’t in banking law but in Congressional security. Just try bringing a walking golf-ball bank into the Capitol Building today: you’re liable to spend a few hours explaining yourself to stern-looking police officers before they let you go. (You’re probably not really going to pull anything, they’ll decide, finally. Probably not worth our trouble.) Sir: We’re going to let you go, but you can’t be bringing that in here. Leave that bank at home.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Matthew De Abaitua, has closed. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $15.50]

My Daddy shouts at me when I go near the piggy bank, and he screams when I turn it upside down. So l leave the piggy bank alone and tell my baby brother and sister to leave it alone too. The piggy bank is the family curse.

One day a week my Daddy is good to me, and he teaches me that words that sound the same can mean different things. Like were and wear. Like sentence and sentence. He listens to me as I read my stories and when I am finished he tells me how talented I am. I like those days. But on working days he is mean and tells me to shut up, before he has even heard what I am going to say. My Daddy’s working days are hard, so hard. You wouldn’t believe how hard they are.

Because of Grandad, our family has to keep the piggy bank with us always. Grandad met the devil coming out of his wardrobe and the devil promised him death, death right there and then, and Grandad said no, and so a deal was struck. If the piggy bank goes out the back door, death comes in through the front door.

On pay day, one half of all the money that crosses the doorstep goes into the piggy bank. Daddy comes back from his job making safe the gas in the iron lungs that rise and fall across our town, rise and fall like the valves of the trumpet he plays on our birthdays. He takes out his pay packet and pinches half of the notes between his fingers and hands the money to Mummy, without looking at it. It is Mummy’s job to place the tribute into the cursed pig.

Daddy gets angry so suddenly, it makes it hard to breathe. I know he doesn’t mean it. I tell him not to be so angry with me and he stops, and he looks sad. I’m a big girl. I know how hard the days of grown-ups can be, so hard you wouldn’t believe.

Saturday is shopping day. Mum and I look around the shops. In the toy shop Frank, my little brother, plays with the train track, and he screams when the time comes for us to leave. None of the clothes fit Mummy right. There is nothing for us to buy. I see the scooter I want, the one with the special wheels. I go to the pig to see if there is money in it but the pig has eaten all the notes and left only coins.

Once I walked into the living room and found the piggy bank choking on our money. Greedy piggy. I slapped it on the back and the money rattled back into its belly. When I turned it upside down, the money had gone.

This is the family curse, the same thing every week, the same for my Daddy as it was for Grandad and the same it will be for me, when I am older. Mummy looks for the bad hairs on her head and pulls them out. Daddy rolls moaning in his bed. I take a deep breath. The pig swallows and winks.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Lizzie Skurnick, has closed. Original price: $1. Final price: $11.50.]

When I was four I thought it was a periscope, or what I thought at the time was called a periscope. My father in fact owned a number of such items — tooth-stained daguerrotypes, box cameras with their fussy, pleated collars, 3-D twinned images propped on a lorgnette that drew into focus as you set it on the bridge of your nose. This last was of Paris, or what I thought at the time was Paris. It may have been Versailles. In the wavy back and forth a river masses in front of a low building stretched through the entire frame. Each window winnows back as well; I don’t know how they did that. My parents’ spare room was a jumble of such items: company pens, campaign buttons, tax statements, plastic nameplates from companies that haven’t exist in a quarter of a decade. I think such things become valuable over time. When I was five I found a black pen abandoned from another desk pen stand and spent significant time attempting to fit it into this one holder. It was a fat pen, dulled on its golden tip, and it was a constant frustration that it would not descend, that the modern ballpoint rattled loosely, a spoon on the side of a coffee cup.

When I look at it now of course I remember these faces, though I haven’t seen them for years. If I sat with the jumble of my father’s vintage photographs in my lap, flipping through, I might remember them as well. Perhaps I would merely think I was remembering. How quickly one becomes familiar, how the present slides into focus set against the past, propped to the bridge of your nose. And which building was that? Maybe it was a park. I see the dust remains its gummy, unliftable film. I would flip it on its back, hold the cold wood to my forehead, trying to see backwards through to them wherever they were, their strange eyes to my strange eyes.