Object No. 11 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Barbara Bogaev, has ended. Original price: $0.75. Final price: $81.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

He’s close to death, but he’s giving my mom a look as if he’s about to leap over the hospital bed rail and throttle her. I think, this is going to be his last earthly act, he’s going to strangle his wife of 55 years in front of his whole family, as we look on, holding plastic cups of ice chips and getting stiff in our middle-aged children’s joints. And yes, she is being unusually annoying. She’s rummaging in her handbag. Is there anything more irritating than a woman rummaging in her handbag? Especially when the euphoria phase of kidney failure has given way to the disorientation phase and my father is no longer dramatically proclaiming things like “I can see Death’s door opening!” and instead occasionally awakens from a doze to mutter “I don’t know why it’s taking so long.” He opens his eyes wide and raises an eyebrow, even now, still mugging for his audience, and begins his interrogation, “Are you looking for something?” She pulls out a brown paper bag and puts it on the floor. “I was downstairs in the gift shop, spending your money!” My mother is teasing her dying husband, her tightwad tyrant. It’s mean, and a little funny. We are laughing. We didn’t know a deathwatch would be so funny.

Years later, when my mother passed away, I picked her things up from the hospital. It wasn’t much, some clothes, her Timex, and her handbag. I rummaged through the purse, the way I used to when I was a child waiting in the car and bored. I opened up her lipstick and took a whiff, so familiar, and then I found it, just as I had often come upon it when I was little. It was a small white porcelain goblet, with “Just Married” in gold lettering. A clerk had handed it to my mother as my father hurried her out of the chambers of the Justice of the Peace. The Judge had mistaken my uncle for the groom, since he was smiling, while my father scowled. Her wedding wasn’t happy, so much of her marriage wasn’t happy, but she carried around that trinket until she died. And I think she was looking for it that day in the hospital. Maybe she had wanted to show it my father, and to make a joke. Or maybe she had needed to brush up against a souvenir that had endured the long span of something so fraught, yet, despite everything, had kept its innocence, the hopeful banner still unfurling around a sprig of spring flowers, a promise still hovering over its gold-encircled rim.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Annalee Newitz, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $10.]

At this point most people realize that getting marketers involved in space travel is a bad idea. But fifty years ago, right before the Martian economy collapsed, there was a craze for luxury space cruises to the Belt. Usually that meant a visit to Ceres — dipping into the exotic attractions of Bachelor City — and then a tour of the lesser asteroids along with a drive-by photo op at the mines.

A million little cruise companies started running these things, trying to come up with the most unusual and cunning destinations. Space Beach is the most famous of these, partly because of the scale of what the company did. They took about a teragram of Belt dust that miners and trawlers had collected over the decades, wrapped it an atmosphere bubble, wired it for gravity, geoengineered a quick seaside biosphere, and called it “the only beach floating in space.”

Who wouldn’t want to float in warm water, looking out at a field of stars, with the color-streaked, glowing blob of Jupiter in the distance?

For a while, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing ads for Space Beach or getting swag with their logo on it. Every thrift store in Bachelor City has a few of their coconut cocktail cups, mementos of a time when people still thought coming to the Belt was a naughty adventure. Usually they’re not too expensive, though in another decade that could easily change.

This Space Beach cup is particularly special because it’s in mint condition — it came directly from the estate sale of an old video celebrity who retired to Valles Marineris. She took one of the first cruises to the “beach floating in space,” before the horrible accident that led to today’s atmosphere bubble regulations.

Things may be a lot safer in the Belt now, but you can still revel in nostalgia for a more dangerous, bygone age. Sure, you’d be taking your life in your hands, but wouldn’t it be worth it to bask under sunlamps on a beach made of ancient, pulverized asteroids?