Object No. 100 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jonathan Lethem, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $76.]

Listen, friend, forget about the bartender, you could wait all day in this dive, we might as well be invisible over here, I kid you not. Here, let me pour you a drink. No, really, I insist, it’s on me. I brought my own. Just swab out the dust and fingerprints with my shirttails, good as new. Love the way it claps down on the bar, gets your glands salivating, doesn’t it?

No, after you, I insist. My pleasure.

See that freaky little bird? That’s the state bird, my friend. The Missouri Hunt-and-Pecker. Never heard of ’em? Well, then I guess you’ve never been to Missouri, have you? Maybe passed through, didn’t get out of the car. Or changed planes in the airport, or went up in the Arch once, just to say you’d done it. But that’s not Missouri to me. St. Louis is the gateway, sure, but you want to know Missouri you need to drive a few hours into the corn, you want to visit St. Joseph, up through Maryville — skirt the Iowa border, though Iowa’s a sore point from where I sit. You need to get lost in Missouri or you never really were there in the first place. Even then you won’t be likely to meet the Hunt-and-Pecker unless you circulate a manuscript or two.

Manuscript, you heard me right. See, very few know it, because we keep it to ourselves, but Missouri is sick and silly with apprentice fictioneers, the whole state’s like one vast harrowed and furrowed MFA workshop. Why do you think the license plates call it The Show-Don’t-Tell State?

Yeah, sure, Iowa. We’re not promiscuous like them. Rather sit on a manuscript for a hundred years than publish before we’re ready. And when you really contemplate the motto’s implications… show, don’t tell… well, get me here, we’ve taken it to heart. By the time a roving Missouri critique outfit has detasseled your kernels, you better believe me you’ll have second thoughts about advancing into the marketplace. More likely cancel your subscription to Poets & Writers, renew your vows to craft. Scene, setting, voice. Look at that fugging bartender, he’d serve a wood duck in a halter-top before he so much as glanced at us.

You like that? Here’s another. Go ahead, you know you want to.

Or shut up entirely, always an option. That’s the ultimate endpoint, you know. Don’t write a word, just be a writer. We’re more than a little stoical out here on the plain, son. Write more? Write less. I strive to write less every day, some day I’ll get there. Not-telling isn’t as easy as it appears.

Lookit ’im there, cool as a flippin’ cucumber, straddling the state like nobody’s business. Crazy little red-tailed devil knows more than he’s saying too, can’t you tell? Love the way he flushes amber, then goes all transparent again. Strive to be like a windowpane, not a mirror, that’s how he makes his way through the world.

All right, I’m out of here. Here you go, you bastard! Keep the change! See, I always leave that sonuvabitch a tip — one red cent. Honest Abe, another fellow from the heartland who knew exactly when to shut up. Keep it real, friend.

Object No. 94 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Victor LaValle, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $51.99.]

Who the hell goes to Portugal? In my family?

The question arose as my sister and I were going through my grandmother’s things—her effects. She’d died of old age at Queens General Hospital and she’d been longing for it. Some people never want to go, but not her. She’d lived long (96 years), seen her grandkids and great grandkids.

The old lady didn’t own the apartment she’d lived in, alone, for 22 years. After she died my grandmother’s landlord (New York City Housing Authority) sent a letter: two weeks to clear her things. Then they would be bagged and bussed to a dump. So my sister and I spent evenings taking the 7 train to Jackson Heights, climbing nine flights to grandma’s apartment (her elevator was about as reliable as our older sister). We decided what to keep, what to sell, what to donate, and what to leave for the City.

Let’s be blunt: the mitt’s not pretty. Okay, it’s ugly as an unwashed butt. I didn’t find it in my grandmother’s kitchen. Or in the living room, where she’d sit and have tea in the afternoons. It was in her bedroom, slipped between the mattress and box spring. Some old ladies stow bags of cash, my grandmother hid a Portuguese cooking glove. I showed it to my sister, but she’d found my grandmother’s small Bible. Was leafing through, marveling at the notes our grandmother left in the margins. She got the good book; I kept the mitt.

Then, I brought the thing home and forgot about it! My sister and me, we helped our mother through the next few months. Eventually I found myself getting back into life. Like I started going on dates again. My head clear, my heart ready, my bed cold. So one night I’ve got this lovely woman at my place. She comes over to split a bottle of wine while we prepared a meal. My part consisted of uncorking the bottle. Meanwhile she made squash soup. The second or third step is to bake the two halves of a split squash, hot enough until you can peel back the rough outer skin with a butter knife. She opens the oven door and asks for a mitt to pull out the tray and what do I reach for? That’s right. Had it in a cupboard over the sink.

My friend slides the glove on, reaches into the oven, but as she’s pulling the tray she loses her grip and the squash goes to the ground. I just laughed. I was drunk, and this pretty lady had already let me kiss her. What could I be upset about?

But she wore another expression. Not anger.  Not pain. Bewilderment. She slipped the oven mitt off and turned it inside out. I thought she was going to rip it so I shouted, but then I saw the inside of the oven mitt. It was covered in words.

Not writing. Letters stitched into the fabric! We read the words, starting at the top, where the middle finger would reach. It read: My dearest Grace (that’s my grandmother) I hold your memory like I held your form. I feel sunlight across my body and the warmth of you. The warmth of being inside you…

And it went on like that.

A lot.

Turns outs my grandmother was kind of a slut!

My friend and I poured wine. Toasted the old woman. Good for her.

Object No. 90 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Ehrenreich, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $50.]

I pull a marble from your skull each time we kiss. “Give it back,” you say, each time.

“Darling,” I say. “Baby,” I say. “No.”

I put the marble in my pocket. Later, I will hide it with the others. But not now, because now you’re watching. Now you’re getting mad. I knew you would, and now you’re doing it. You cross your arms. Your features droop. Not just your lips but your eyelids and ears and the cleft ball of your chin. All of it droops. I laugh at you. “Come here, Droopy,” I say, and I try to kiss you, but you pull away.

“Give it back,” you say.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

“Give it back,” you say, again.

“Each marble is a moon,” I say, “but the moon is not a marble. Did you know that?”

“Give it back.”

“I just read an interesting article about a hunchback,” I say. “They put him on display in a museum until he withered and when they did an autopsy they found that his hump was filled with marbles. And they marveled at the marbles. Don’t you think that’s unfair?”

“Give it back,” you say.

“Give it back give it back give it back. Come up with something better. Think a bit. Ask yourself: how would Professor Noam Chomsky respond in a situation like this? Or Beyoncé. What would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad do?”

“Give it back.”

“You are a funny bird,” I say. “But I’m bored of this. I’m going for a walk.” I put my shoes and my jacket on and I go outside, but I don’t really go for a walk. I just stand beside the door and count to 35,000. Then I go back inside. You’re tidying up. I can tell that you’re still angry because you’re tidying up and because your nose is drooping as you do it. “Are you hungry?” I say, but you don’t answer. “Is there still chicken in the fridge?” I say, but you say nothing, so I open the fridge to look. The chicken is gone. How could you eat all that chicken? Did you give it away?

From the other room, you speak. “How was your walk?” you say, placing the remote control beside the other remote controls, arranging them attractively.

“It was lovely,” I say. “I ran into Vladimir Putin in the form of a crow. We’re Facebook friends. He sang the most beautiful song. It was called, ‘Give it back.’” I sing it for you, swinging my hips like a metronome gone mad. “Give it back, give it back, give it back now. Give it back, give it back, give it back now.” And I take your hand and pull you to me because I want to be close to you and I want you to dance with me and to love me as much as I love everything in this world. But your hand is balled tight and your body is stiff and you’re not drooping at all anymore. Instead you’re crying. You’re covering your face. “Oh baby,” I say, “Don’t be sad.” And I unball your hand and squeeze your fingers and run the fingers of my other hand across your cold and teary face. “There’s nothing,” I say, “but nothing, to be sad for.” And I kiss your fingers and your dry lips and with my free hand I reach up and I stroke your hair and I poke about until I feel the bulge and then I dig in with my nails and pull another marble from your skull.

Object No. 79 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Naomi Novik, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $31. ]

Found at the base of a street lamp near Madison Square Park, beneath a rain-bleached photocopy with a picture of the same object, in black and white halftones but recognizable. Beneath the picture it said IF Found PLEASE RETURN. The bottom edge of the poster was ragged where all the small strips with phone numbers had been torn away, and the strip of tape holding it to the pole was peeling up from the corners.

Object No. 75 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Teddy Wayne, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $20.50.]

At the Ramada Hotel and Conference Center Qualcomm Stadium San Diego, on a June weekend in 2007, eighty-two men and women from Sealy, the mattress giant, converged for their national sales meeting.  Sealy was falling behind in the burgeoning memory-mattress market and its finances were, in industry parlance, “sagging.”  One right rectangular prism made of Lucite with a “Catch the Wave” decal, half-filled with viscous liquid, was awarded to Richard Caulkins, a mustachioed sales manager from Omaha whose branches had outperformed all others in the previous quarter.  Upon his return to Nebraska he gave it to his eight-year-old son, who sloshed the liquid around for a few minutes and unsuccessfully attempted to crack the prism’s clear walls before getting bored and running out of the house to play.

But its history is immaterial.  You will receive the Lucite prism.  You will marvel at its viscosity.  You will think of a motor oil commercial from your youth touting its product’s ability to resist viscosity and fight thermal breakdowns.  You will place the prism on your coffee table as a kitschy, ironic gesture.  You will wonder if you are too old and bourgeois to be decorating ironically.  When friends come by, they will, in puzzlement, ask if you received the prism from work.  You will titter, explain that its placement is ironic, and nervously gauge their reactions.  They will smile politely and tilt the prism’s liquid around a few times, then return to the previous conversation, which will be about work problems, or sexual problems, or interpersonal problems.  These are problems with which you are familiar from either previous discussions or your own identification with them.  You will recite rote solutions or expressions of sympathy from muscle memory, meanwhile casting a surreptitious glance at the still-sloshing prism, watching its encased waves that cannot be caught, thinking about thermal breakdowns, closing your eyes and dreaming about diving into the bracing Pacific, imagining the Caulkins son’s escape from his father’s suburban row house with the aimless adventure only children possess, and, when you open your eyes, the liquid’s viscosity will have brought itself to rest, thickly, silently, within its six clear walls.

Object No. 74 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Michael Atkinson, has ended. Original price: 34 cents. Final price: $21.50. ]

… Somebody’s grandfather’s pipe stand, back when men smoked pipes that they cared to buy handcrafted out of specific hardwoods, made by Europeans, maybe old  artisans they found in narrow-street shops while away at war as young men, all grandfathers now or actually grandfathers years back, they’re all dead now of course, but the pipes weren’t made in a factory but at a bench, carved and sanded, out of walnut or teak or rosewood, and so you’d buy one and take it home and it was your mark as a man, your insignia, your totem, the tobacco and smoke was beside the point but that too came infused with Mitteleuropa, suggesting in herbal ways a day when people smoked grape leaves and sassafras and cherry stones with their tobacco, things they picked and dried themselves or had their wives do it while the men were out plowing or hammering horseshoes or hunting faun, the Alps in the distance, the beer in wooden barrels, the afternoon gathering and talk at the public house, so you’d have this pipe and you’d need a place to put it or it will tip and its soot will spill, and a grandchild buys you a stand, a molded little brick of pig iron in the shape of a sea captain rather peculiarly bent over, as if expecting to be spanked or buggered, and whichever it is he does not seem adverse to it, he smiles, but however odd his position the sea captain in his Mackintosh seems grandfatherly to the preadolescent who buys it from the novelty shop for two weeks’ allowance, as her grandfather’s birthday approaches and she dreams ahead of wrapping it, after gliding her hand a few times down the cool swale of its cradle, and giving it to him as he takes his chair in the living room before the ballgame begins, and she can climb into his lap and he will see for certain that she is not just a girl he should love because she is his granddaughter but a special and smart and unusually thoughtful girl, the kind that can take care of things and keep the world running even after he passes and his pipe is settled and his worries have long vanished along with his smell and his voice and the watery fondness of his eyes.

Object No. 72 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by William Gibson, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $101.00]

In 1969 my friend’s dad was a Pentagon technocrat. My friend said that when his dad came home with a new tie-tack, it meant there was a new weapon in the works. Not that there would be a new weapon, but that there was now a coterie of guys in the building who thought the idea was cool enough that they’d wear the tie-tack. It started with the tie-tack. If you couldn’t get the über-geeks to wear your tie-tack, your project wasn’t going to get off the ground. You had to demonstrate that your weapon had fans, and these guys didn’t wear t-shirts. My friend said that Soviet spies should hang out at malls and supermarkets in McLean and take micro-telephoto pictures of tie-tacks. Because it was all there, revealed, this utterly top-secret quadruple-classified shit, on a background of plaid madras. And you could be sure that the weapon of mass destruction depicted there was really the very latest thing, because, he said, it was uncool to wear them once they became a done deal, just as it was uncool to wear them if they definitely weren’t going to happen. What you wanted to demonstrate was that your tie-tack depicted something that was liminal, something still in the Dreamtime.

I imagined that David, my friend’s dad, had one of those ’50s dad boxes on his dresser. Where he kept his doohickeys. Cufflinks. Whatnot. And in David’s box was a fistful of tie-tacks, their little anchor-chains hopelessly tangled, a secret history of Pentagon blue-sky imagination.

He was a good guy, David. In 1969 he told me that what was going to happen with the Soviet Union was that it was going to go bankrupt. He said they were cooking the books, fooling themselves that their economy worked, that their system made sense. He wasn’t talking politics. He was an engineer. He was absolutely right, though I confess I didn’t buy it. I couldn’t imagine a world without the Soviet Union. He called it. The only thing he got wrong was the food riots. In the end, they weren’t necessary. In the meantime, he said, we just had to hold them at bay. With tie-tacks.

This ashtray, I imagine, came from somewhere further along the Hawk missile system’s developmental span. Ashtrays aren’t liminal. When you’re passing out ashtrays, you’ve actually got a product. When they passed a little spring-topped jewelry box, closed, to one of the über-geeks, that confidential “check this shit out” moment, it wasn’t a product, it was a glyph, something there but not there, half-juggled from the Dreamtime.

A fossil from a future that you knew might not even happen. Dashing, enigmatic, unworn. Not yet tangled in the darkness of history’s dad box, with the dead boys and the lost stupid war they died in.

Object No. 68 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Katchor, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $42.]

This beautiful, but slightly worn, example of early 20th century porcelain “bookware” was manufactured and distributed free-of-charge along with newly printed copies of the Maine Revised Statutes Annotated — a dreary compendium of state laws.

This example, formed in the style of a small, shallow aperitif or snack dish, holds fifty salted peanuts. It was meant to encourage lawyers and public advocates to acquaint themselves with the latest revisions to state law. On one dishful of peanuts, a reader could make his way through several Titles and Chapters of the book.

This example of “bookware” cemented the connection between justice and eating within the professional classes of Maine. Each chapter was keyed to an estimated number of peanuts. The worn edge of the dish is evidence of the late-night reading of an overweight small-town lawyer.

Title 17, Chapter  131: MISCELLANEOUS CRIMES
17 §3951. Abandonment of airtight containers (REPEALED) 15 peanuts
17 §3952. Dangerous knives (REPEALED) 23 peanuts
17 §3953. Disorderly conduct (REPEALED) 8 peanuts
17 §3954. Disturbance of public meetings (REPEALED) 12 peanuts
17 §3955. Dumping rubbish on another’s land (REPEALED) 15 peanuts
17 §3956. Electric fences: 8 peanuts
17 §3957. Failure to report treatment of gunshot wounds (REPEALED): 18 peanuts
17 §3958. False alarms and reports (REPEALED): 9 peanuts
17 §3960. Peeking in nighttime (REPEALED) 34 peanuts
17 §3961. Placing obstructions on traveled road (REPEALED): 15 peanuts
17 §3962. Regulation of radio waves; disturbing reception (REVISED) 8 peanuts
17 §3963. Riding with naked scythe (REPEALED): 17 peanuts
17 §3965. Defacement of state facilities; possession of paint (REPEALED) 7 peanuts
17 §3966. Animals in food stores (REVISED) 12 peanuts
17 §2904. Use of phonographs for profane or obscene language (REPEALED): 45 peanuts

The Maine Revised Statues are now available online.

Detail.

Object No. 65 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Laura Lippman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $45.01.]

Her husband saved everything. He had a box, for example, of cigarette lighters, useless plugs taken from every car he had ever owned. He saved ticket stubs and playbills. He had three hand-knit sweaters from an elderly aunt, long deceased. The sweaters were scratchy and unattractive; he had never worn them and never would.

So a motel key, here in his cufflink drawer, didn’t necessarily mean anything. Yet she thought it might. And she knew that she that could, and would, make herself crazy about it. Or she could simply ask him. Why not ask him? She hadn’t been spying. She had been putting away his cufflinks, the ones that went with the tuxedo, which he wore more and more often these days, to events where he said she would be bored.

“I wasn’t spying,” she said. “But I have to ask – why did you save this?”

“Well, look at the name,” he said. “Perkins hotel.”

He waited, smiling broadly.

“I don’t get it.”

“Remember the movie Psycho?”

She did. Taxidermy, shower, mother issues. “That was the Bates Motel.”

“Yes, but the actor was Anthony Perkins. Isn’t that cool?”

“And what took you to Laconia, New Hampshire?”

“A road trip with a bunch of guys in our junior year of college.” He held the key, ran his thumb over it. “Drop in any mailbox,” it said, but he hadn’t.

Here it is, she thought. Here’s the moment where you choose to believe, or not to believe. A marriage is a kind of religion, defying rational thought. The idea that someone could love you – the idea that someone could love her – was about as plausible as water into wine, or reincarnation, or seventy-two virgins waiting in heaven. You believed or you didn’t. In or out.

The key is old, she told herself. All the motels have those electronic cards now, even in Laconia, New Hampshire. It holds a memory, and it’s something that occurred years ago, although probably not with a group of guys. Did he lie for her sake or for his own, to keep the story for himself, to enjoy the private thrill of whatever happened in Room 3?

Maybe she should stop putting his things away.

Object No. 62 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by David Shields, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $21.50.]

The Mute World War II Airman

ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.

BEN SHEPHARD In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up “Crackers or Coffins”; thereafter their time in the air was rationed.

DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG Frozen on the stick: paralyzed with fear

MICHEL LEIRIS If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.

PAUL FUSSELL The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.

BEN SHEPHARD From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of “flying personnel who will not face operational risks.” It was known as LMF or “Lack of Moral Fibre.” Arthur Smith ‘went LMF’ after his twentieth “op.” The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English, he had lost control of his fear; his “courage snapped and terror took over.” “I couldn’t do anything at all,” he later recalled. “I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak.”

JÖRG FRIEDRICH The Allies’ bombing transportation offensive of the 1944 pre-invasion weeks took the lives of twelve thousand French and Belgian citizens, nearly twice as many as Bomber Command killed within the German Reich in 1942. On the night of April 9, 239 Halifaxes, Lancasters, Stirlings, and Mosquitos destroyed 2,124 freight cares in Lille, as well as the Cité des Cheminots, a railroad workers’ settlement with friendly, lightweight residential homes. Four hundred fifty-six people died, mostly railroaders. The survivors, who thought they were facing their final hours from the force of the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, “Bastards, bastards.”

DR. DOUGLAS D. BOND (Psychiatric Adviser to the US Army Air Force in Britain during WW II) Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretence that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case…. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure … following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY It was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.

PAUL FUSSELL Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence — at least so it appeared.

Object No. 61 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Myla Goldberg, has closed. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $36. ]

This is not a toy. Only the young or the hopelessly commonsensical dip it into liquid soap, content with bubbles. Curl your fingers around the handle, lift it to your mouth, and flick the switch. Say what you long to say. The fan is small, but its aim is true. You will be heard.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Aimee Bender, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $36.]

When I was twelve, many decades ago, I was at a beachfront store in San Diego, one of those towns that smells like kelp and where all the men and women have hair so light they look a little like angels.

My parents were at the other end of the store buying shell jewelry to give to people back home. No one wears shell jewelry when you give it to them. Occasionally, you will see a woman who knows how to wear a shell necklace, but she is rare. My folks were about to split up; everyone knew. The trip had failed and the roads were forking.

In the corner, by the rows of abalone jewelry boxes, there was a bin of loose rocks. I dug my hand around in there, to feel the smoothness of polished rocks over skin. I had two dollars to spend, the last of my allowance for the trip. I had spent most of it on a blanket made of fishing net that is the worst purchase I have ever made in my life but for some reason I wanted more than anything at the time.

Deep down in the bottom of the rock bin, wedged in the corner of the wood drawer, was a tiny seahorse, petrified, looking almost like it was made of iron. As small and precise as a necklace charm. Once picked up, it rested directly in the center of my palm.

There was a curious feeling then, in me, in the store, in my palm, about what this was doing in some rocks at all, and I took it right to the counter and it was a dollar fifty, and with the remaining fifty cents I gave the store owner a tip in his tip jar because I had a feeling he was underselling. I held it in my hand the whole train ride home, and kept it close in a pocket or a bag for the whole next year during which my life changed four distinct times.

Close to three million years ago, near the lower Pliocene, in what is now Italy, this seahorse swam, washed up on rocks, died, became hard as iron, merged with silt, settled with stones, rested, traveled through pockets and bags, through history as we know it, making a landing in this polished rock bin in Pacific Beach.

When I was old enough to do such a thing, I had the seahorse embedded in plastic, to keep it safe. Then I had the plastic converted into the base of a lighter that I used to smoke cigarettes throughout my adolescence. I kept the lighter in my purse long after I’d quit, just carrying around that oldness, as old as the light from some stars that we see. I go look at those stars sometimes, on the beach, in the nighttime, with the edgings of surf lace and all those shells scattered on the sand, uncollected.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sari Wilson, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $31.]

It’s incongruous. The buttery finish, the fluted spout, the air hole in the back of its head offering a peek into its ceramic innards, a glimpse of the thick cream that no one is supposed to have anymore. The torso pitched forward, the nubs of wings lifting, ready to employ itself in the service of our morning coffee. Except that neither of us drank coffee. No matter. We kept that creamer on our table for years. When we did start drinking coffee, we bought it at Starbucks in tall cups and we didn’t even take milk in it.

Where did the creamer come from? Neither of us could remember. Maybe one of those estate sales we sometimes drove out to on Saturdays? For whatever reason, we adopted it. A Balinese sarong covered our rickety table. Then a Crate and Barrel linen cloth. Then we bought a new fancy table—an eight-seater, tavern-style.

Through all those years—our ambitious, job-hopping 20s—the creamer was like a mascot. When we were both promoted to v.p, we bought it a general’s cap. We put sake in it. We treated it with the scornful irony we began to feel for each other. The creamer sat there,  this patient, eyeless homunculus, watching us as we began to argue about stupid things like who would take out the garbage, how much to tip the delivery man, then louder and more forcefully, about real-like stuff. What we wanted. The future. It turned out that I was a Republican and wanted a bunch of kids. He was a Democrat and didn’t want any. One night he grabbed the penguin creamer off the table and said, “What the hell is this?” As if he’d never seen it before. I almost said, “It’s our baby.”

When I moved out I took that orphaned creamer but left everything else. It sits on the red-checked oilcloth covering my bistro table. My new boyfriend pours cream from its spout and says, “Cute little guy.”

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Todd Levin, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $50.]

Have you ever hated someone solely for her dumb benevolence? For bland and witless good cheer? It’s the lowest of unfair acts, I know, but as soon as a smile crosses Mary Eileen’s lips, my jaw tightens and my hands instinctively ball into fists.

I honestly have no idea what Mary Eileen does for this company. Benefits manager or creative resources or consumer metrics or birthday announcement committee co-chair or some other marginal department for which no award shows exist. A career path that dead-ends inside a grim cubicle squatting in the middle of a complicated floor plan. That is Mary Eileen’s daily existence, not that it bothers her any.

I always guessed she was a Christian nutjob, with no real evidence to support that theory. Maybe I just assume anyone who likes Cats: The Musical enough to have a varsity jacket from the Broadway production draped over desk chair like some kind of trophy for outstanding achievement in the field of mediocrity must be right with Jesus. So yeah, I associate Cats fandom with chubby born-agains, and I associate Phantom with closeted gays; sue me.

On her desk Mary Eileen kept a clear glass bowl filled with M&Ms. The bowl had a lid, held in place with a heart-shaped Ziggy paperweight. It was an elaborate contraption — really, more of a trap.  The time required to get at that candy — removing and replacing both the paperweight and lid — guaranteed you would be held captive for at least a fleeting social interaction.

Mary Eileen’s supply of M&Ms was seemingly bottomless. She even found M&Ms in special colors around the holidays — an act in which I’m sure she took some kind of near-erotic pleasure. And whenever — seriously, whenever — you’d swing by and grab a few pieces of candy on the sly, Mary Eileen would unfailingly say, “Treat yourself!” That word — “treat” — from her lips was like an iron file dragging against the edge of my front teeth. The works, from Ziggy vaguely threatening me to “have a lovely day!” to the pink and red M&Ms on Valentine’s Day, to Mary Eileen’s matronly invocation, all seemed calculatedly designed to make me feel infantile.

And I guess that’s why I stole that Ziggy paperweight. I emptied the bowl of M&Ms into my backpack, too. An appropriately infantile act I suppose. But why should she have that power over me? And why can’t Mary Eileen find a means of happiness that’s, I don’ t know, grown-up? She never once complained — not formally, anyway — and it’s been stashed in my desk, M&Ms and all, for I don’t know how long.

Life goes on here, pretty much unchanged, except for a few details most people around the office probably wouldn’t even notice. Mary Eileen has stopped putting out M&Ms, and I’ve been walking in wide, inconvenient arcs to avoid passing her desk. I even switched my printer from 3-DEATHSTAR to 3-DAGOBAH just to avoid her. And this Ziggy paperweight? I just can’t keep it anymore. Maybe you can. I can’t even remember the last time I had a lovely day.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Colson Whitehead, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $71.]

On September 16th, 2031 at 2:35 am, a temporal rift – a “tear” in very fabric of time and space – will appear 16.5 meters above the area currently occupied by Jeffrey’s Bistro, 123 E Ivinson Ave, Laramie, WY. Only the person wielding this mallet will be able to enter the rift unscathed. If this person then completes the 8 Labors of Worthiness, he or she will be become the supreme ruler of the universe.

[* --> Information regarding the 8 Labors of Worthiness is being made available by the author, in occasional Tweets, here: @colsonwhitehead.]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Toni Schlesinger, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $88.]

“I have something for you,” she says.
“For me?” he asks.
“For you!” she says. “Wait, waiter, I’ll have a pale gold drink.”
“For you?” asked the waiter.
“I’ll have one that’s blue.” He coughs. “I’m so excited.”
“Here it is.” She places the 4-tile on the table.
“Oh,” he cries. “But it’s not Valentine’s Day.”
“Why does that matter?”
“You know, the candy heart that reads 4 U but without the U. What is it?”
“You remember…”
“Of course! You had it made to remind me of the four times I strayed.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, you would!”
The waiter returns. “Here are your drinks, for heaven’s sake.”
“I know, that time we discussed having a foursome!”
“We never did. That sort of thing is so out of fashion.”
“God. It’s from Vegas. Some indicator of money lost or gained.”
“No, you’re being too formal in your thinking.”
“It’s the 4 from the height chart in the lineup of suspects where you had to stand when you were arrested for murdering that man in Tennessee?”
“You’re getting close. Don’t look so forlorn.”
“I’m foraging. Perhaps the waiter knows.”
The waiter looked at the ceiling. “It’s not for me to say.”
“I’ll give you a hint. A summer day, all the world was as blue as your drink. You flew through the air…”
“…and I dove into the cool water of the swimming pool and I thought of marimbas and orchids and forsythia and when I came up…”
“You said, ‘Be mine forever.’”
“No, I said, ‘Be mine — for now.’”

[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 Tom Vanderbilt, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $37. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

If he had a personal philosophy, and if such things needed to be articulated, it might be called: the aerodynamics of everyday life. He wanted his surfaces clean, his leading edges freed from drag, he brooked no laggards in his drift. This served him well in his avocation, which, as systems operation manager for a large industrial concern (Imprinteon, a custom-printing operation), involved ensuring that inputs became outputs, with maximum efficiency and at minimum cost. But one would not go awry in ascribing his philosophy to his life outside work, which too bore the requirements of flight: streamlined, rigid, and with no ground attachments.

On this morning, however, headwind. First had come the ink debacle on line 37, as the Pantone 4604, “billowing sail,” rendered so truly on screen, seemed wan in substrate form — more “rippling sheet.” 10,000 college yearbooks were to be pulped. Then were the material flow issues in sector 4, some sort of line imbalance. His throughput was out of sync, and there was no parallel flow, no buffer. The first-pass yields were collapsing. He glared at the faded white sign on the wall: MTBF. Mean time between failures. Its scuffed adjustable wheels were calibrated to read “43.” They would have go to back to 1, tomorrow.

And then the mug. It was placed in front of him, on his padded desk calendar, eclipsing March 3rd. It was a simple thing, really, the sort they ran millions of in a year, being the DOD’s favored insignia contractor. Fortuna Favet Fortibus, it read, Fortune Favors the Strong. The error was so basic, so obvious, that he wondered if there weren’t some hidden layer of complexity at work here. Privately, he allowed that one might read the mug’s form factor in two ways: The wider, curved flare made most sense as the vessel’s egress point, so the lips could comfortably adhere to the contours. And yet in some kind of drink-ware equivalent of a Necker Cube, the brain might willfully invert the mug, so that the wider end could logically seem the stable base, as with the cooling towers of Three Mile Island.

But the lapse he could not comprehend was the handle orientation. For the logo to make sense in this latter configuration, this would have had to have been a right-handed mug; normally, this would make sense, but the 3rd Marine 8th battalion had a long-standing, obscure joke, which some colonel must have dreamt up years ago when this long-standing order was first requisitioned, that the 8th battalion liked to “drink with their left, and shoot with their right.”

As it was, it could have been worse. The flaw was found in an acceptance sample (it was a retrograde technique, but he was working on a refinement that he would debut at next year’s Logistics World) run about two hours, or 3000 mugs, into the lot. And here was one of those moments where he felt the keen sense of being at the center of things, of life in its great rushing cavalcade of risk and reward. Was the sample he had pulled a statistical aberration — one upturned mug among tens of thousands of mugs of proper disposition — or was it endemic of a system failure, a thorough corruption? Was he about to pull the plug on an otherwise stable process?

His assistant called out, the inspector was here. He put the mug in a file drawer to his left, and would later move it to a cabinet that he considered his own museum of error. “Have a seat,” he said, closing the drawer.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sarah Rainone, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $41.]

As my husband and I were driving back to New York after my mother’s funeral, I spotted a general store on the Rhode Island-Connecticut border, the kind that exist solely for those who forgot to bring something back from Newport or Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard or wherever. Judging from the weathered sign and the rusting trinkets out front, it seemed decades old, and yet I swear I had never seen it in all my travels along this stretch of I-95. Strange.

My husband looked puzzled as I pulled into the gravel driveway. “I have to go in.” He started to open his door but I stopped him. “And I have to go alone.” I was not in the store two minutes when I saw the plate. Let me explain.

After my mother became ill, I traveled to India in search of the secrets of eternal life. While my studies proved inadequate to save her, I learned a bit about yogic chanting, namely that the sweetest chants are the ones sung to Krishna — the mischievous youth who liked butter, enjoyed hanging out with female cowherds, and who just happened to be the human incarnation of the great god Vishnu, tasked with no less a chore than the preservation of the entire universe.

When I returned to the States with my newfound knowledge, my mother said she appreciated it, but I think she was humoring me. She was Irish Catholic and didn’t see the sense in taking off to India when the Holy Spirit was everywhere.

When I saw this plate, I knew there was something about it that was both Indian and Irish, something that transcended the religions that divide nations and men. I bought it immediately and would later discover that much like St. Patrick who had driven the snakes from Ireland, Krishna had tamed the serpent Kaliya who had previously been poisoning the waters of the Yamuna river, killing the cowherds on its banks. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

This plate is about cowherds, about shamrocks, about Ireland, yes, but it is also about liberation, about preservation, about eternal life. And if you purchase it, my only wish is that you do not eat corned beef from it, without first thinking of Krishna.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Glen David Gold, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $56.50.]

Hell, of course, has a hierarchy; it is by definition all hierarchy. As James Blish noted, any act of magic requires harnessing the work of one demon at a time. Those who answer the call are subalterns, grumbling Malebranches whose job otherwise is to stir the pitch into which politicians are tossed. Think of them as the enlisted men.

The officers — the ones who disdain pacts with sorcerers — are demons with actual names. Above them — the majors and colonels — are the 400 primal sinners envisioned by Albertus Magnus in Ein Katalog der Kritiker die Ihren Eigenen Berichten Glauben. Higher still are the 13 evil forms identified by Eliphas Lévi before his mysterious fall from the window of l’abbaye du psellus. Unspeakably powerful, the generals above them are Belial, Othiel, and Qemetial, of whom Aleister Crowley wrote “Let no man see these dark shapes before the final dawn approaches.”

And ruling them all, Lucifuge Rofocale, tyrant of hell. At his fingertips are the powers of the 15,485,863 (a deconsecrated prime number) demons below him. Controlling him? Unlikely.

However…

The possibility of summoning this ur-demon has frightened the most rational of scholars. In the age of the Enlightenment, Athanasius Kircher is said to have torn crucial pages from the Voynich manuscript’s cryptic sections on herbs and astronomy to prevent exactly this evocation. Nonetheless in the course of several generations, the mysterious Eruditi di Nerezza managed to file away the procedures required. When the Collegio Ghislieri located the single necessary talisman, their sanctuary — stone towers and all — burned to the ground with no survivors.

And yet tales of the talisman remained.

Etchings in The Grand Grimoire, assembled in 1522 by Alibek the Egyptian, indicate it would depict one of the pseudo-Solomons, a bald-headed figure, bearded, in supplication. He would show wear on his knees (from prayer) and his bib (from feasting on mysterious flesh). He would hold a hammered copper tray of offerings (four serpent eggs dyed in rosewater) in his left hand. His right would be extended in the anatomically-difficult position of first and last finger splayed, center fingers adjoined, making in other words the sign of the sage bound to Baphomet.

The base would be verdant green, textured grass, representing nature trampled by the self-determination of man (and by extension, of demon). The figure would appear to wear the skin of a golden bear he had slain himself, surmounted with a red silk cloth representing sacrifice, and leather shoes made from the skins of his enemies. His trousers would be blue, and have no significance.

Descriptions at this point traditionally conclude with a warning/exegesis on the nature of desire. An object is only an object unless invested with manna, animal spirit. In short, all authorities from the Deum te Inharmonium onward have noted power does not tend to give itself up. Thus the talisman’s guardian must desire power with a single-minded lust, slaking off any vestige of humanity like a snake shedding its scurf.

In order to use a demon, you must believe in a demon. Which carries its own price. The pact will get you all that you want, but, as it will be provided by demons, nothing that you keep.