Object No. 99 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Edward Champion, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $56.]

The resilient ruffians ran away with the geisha’s canes just after she refused to perform a classless act. While it was true that the geisha dramatized the occasional lowbrow feat, befitting an object of her status, even she had her standards. She’d wobble her elliptical hips within a studded hula hoop forged from painful tungsten alloy. She’d gorge on great sticks of fire while her blind part-time assistant hurled jeweled daggers round her anatomical outline. And if wanton clients had serious dinero — particularly that shiny new oval currency with the Prince Albert piercing — she’d even flash a bit of flesh, relishing her total control over the crowd. The bobbled harpies working the onyx alleys could hike up their skirts for a sou, but she knew every sector on her body was insurable and she remained committed to securing the compensation befitting her curvy carapace. It hadn’t been easy to work her way up from the snowbound steppes without a rep, but she stage-managed her prestige through her divine Venetian valet de chambre.

However, she needed her two canes to get around.

Now wobbling atop a safe surface, the geisha ruminated upon the false proposition with unintended consequences. The three men had imparted intent to pay serious cash, approaching her with necktie paradoxes she decided to disregard. The geisha asked what they would like, shifting her harsh all-business larynx into a soothing dulcet tone. One claimed that his nether enormity was so round and imposing that it confounded the sensors scanning allplace from space.

“Don’t speak like that to a lady!” snapped the trio’s ringleader, who slapped the boor with a mesh metal glove and jabbed him in the anatomical vicinity of recent boasts.

“You’ve bifurcated my loins!” cried this sausage-laden braggart.

“That’s overstating things,” said the ringleader. “It is exquisitely rude to speak of your insufficient indignities before one of the finest entertainers that this village has to offer. There are subtler ways to elicit a response.”

The ringleader then whispered his lewd request into the geisha’s ear.

“I will not!” shrieked the geisha.

Talks were aborted, but there was a struggle. The self-proclaimed longjohn purloined his trophy.

The final indignity came with the ringleader’s second sordid offer that involved swapping one art for another. But was it so venal? Which line was straighter? The geisha had initially squawked in commerce-laden consonants. Instead of shedding seven veils, she could pilfer from faux furriers and highwaymen expanding their chicanery to a global stage. She reminded herself that she wasn’t getting any younger and that vocations were adaptable. And the new art presented an atonal atonement, an opportunity to correct the scales. Who needed seven notes when there was a human register?

The ruffians returned for their answer. She assented, and the trio gained a fourth member. The run would last longer than any half-baked phantom of the opulent. The new vocation defied objectification and required no crutch.

Object No. 98 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stacey Levine, has ended. Original price: $4. Final price: $10.50.]

I’m not a collector, but really a purloiner, and there’s only a brief backstory to these novelties.

When my second wife died, I sought companionship. So I installed a soda machine in my bedroom — it would be a conversation piece and might make me more attractive to the ladies. I disabled the cash acceptor. I started going for walks to the little square in downtown Orange, and I thought: Why is no one talking to me? Yet soon I was helping a lady cross the street with her grocery bags. She was en route to a cousin’s wedding, she said, and I could come along with her. The grocery bags were full of almonds and snacks sweeter than that.

She was a Somali Jew. Her cousin came from a family of plumbers, and the relatives were working that day at the community center where the wedding was held. The kitchen sink had flooded the main hall. All kinds of guests streamed in, African and white. Grandmothers with shoeboxes of homemade cookies. Middle-aged men in sports shirts and a singer whose entourage of laughing musicians trailed behind her.

The woman who had invited me scarcely glanced at me, though for a few minutes in the press of the crowd, she held my hand. That action made my own hand feel dry. I was about to tell her so, but she ran off with her sisters or other women.

I assisted the three plumbers and another workman as they installed a sump pump in the floor near a storage room door. I thought they should put the sump pump inside the storage room — but no, that idea made them upset. Nearby, a crew of hippie-caterers in sandals began setting up a drinks table. We got the sump pump installed and were testing the alarm when the bride, groom, and minister walked onto the sump pump cover — they liked validating the workers’ labor in this way. We all stood back to see if the pump could handle the weight of three people.

It could. The ceremony began on the sump pump and I slagged to the back of the room. I paced. I had a great pain to mitigate. I saw the bookends in an unwrapped box on the counter and thought, “What a stupid gift to bring to a wedding. Who would do that?” Then I stole the bookends. What a coward I am.

Later I considered the bookends might have been a present destined for another event, and that someone merely set them on the counter temporarily.

I asked the lady to visit me the next day. So I hid the bookends under my couch. She stood on my doorstep. I told her right away: “I am strong as an ox.” She said: “Fine — I like people from foreign lands, because they are less polite and I seek umbrage in that.” I asked her what she was talking about, but the conversation moved to other things.

Object No. 97 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by (Six-Word Story Contest winner) Rob Agredo, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $27.]

“You lose,” she puffed.

True.

Again.

Object No. 96 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Bruce Holland Rogers, has ended. Original price: 29 cents. Final price: $21.50.]

By my third visit to Dr. Peragua, I had decided on what I was going to steal. There were lots of candidates. His office is full of keepsakes from his travels to meet shamans, whom he says are his professional colleagues. There are a lot of objects small enough to slip into my pocket, but I decided on the dish for paper clips that sits on Peragua’s desk. It was in the shape of an open, upturned umbrella.

By the fifth visit, I had a plan. Dr. Peragua knows that I steal things. He even knows the kinds of things that I steal: small objects of no great material worth. I’m here to talk to him about my stealing. I’m here to get my father off my back.

On week six, I arrived chewing a big wad of gum. Before we started to talk, I stood up and tossed the gum at the wastepaper basket behind Dr. Peragua’s chair, and missed. The gum stuck to the wall above the basket. “Oops,” I said, and Dr. Peragua took a tissue from the table between his chair and mine. He pulled the gum from the wall and dropped it in the basket. Perfect. Each week since, I have come in chewing gum. I spit the gum into a tissue and throw it into the basket.

Before we start today, I take out the gum and toss it, unwrapped. “Oops,” I say. Dr. Peragua frowns, reaches for a tissue, and turns. In three heartbeats, I have crossed to his desk, pocketed the little umbrella , and returned to my chair before Dr. Peragua has finished cleaning the wall. “Sorry,” I say.

“Hm,” says the doctor. He looks around the room as if doing inventory. “You don’t really want to get better, do you?”

He knows that I’m here only because my father said that if I’d see a therapist for ten weeks, at my father’s expense, my father would stop mentioning my habit.

“Taking things makes me feel good,” I say. “And it’s not as if I’m taking things worth a lot of money. Where’s the harm?”

“You harm your relationships. Whether your victims know what you’ve done or not, you know that they can’t trust you. That limits your opportunities for intimacy.”

“I have friends.”

“Well,” he says, “let’s talk about those friendships. You know, everything, even what you see as a one-sided transaction, is a kind of exchange. So let’s talk about what you give and what you get in your friendships.” That’s the start of our session. He asks questions, I answer. At the end of the hour, he glances at his watch and says, “That’s about all we have time for today.” He asks about a further appointment. But today I have fulfilled my half of the bargain with my father.

“Goodbye, Dr. Peragua.”

“Goodbye, then,” he says.

I leave the umbrella and paper clips in my pocket. The walls of my living room are lined with shelves. When my father visits, he always asks me how much of what is on those shelves is really mine.

All of it. And now he can’t ask any longer.

I reach into my pocket. Something jabs my fingertip. A burr. My pocket is full of sharp little burrs. Where are the paper clips? Where is the umbrella? But then I find that the umbrella is there, a little metal figurine with no moving parts. Only now, it is closed.

Object No. 95 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Lauren Mechling, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $30.]

It was during Charlotte Sanger and Georgia Howard’s punk period — which actually had nothing to do with music and everything to do with mustard nailpolish and slinking away from Pine Ridge High School ’s mandatory double-period orchestra — that Charlotte spotted her mother in the front of the Pine View movie theater, waiting for the lights to dim and the 11:50 a.m. screening of Wayne’s World to begin. She was feeding herself popcorn, her right arm windshield wipering in unthinkingly perfect time.

“Crap.” Charlotte instinctively pulled her REM sweatshirt hood over her head. The last thing she needed was a run-in with her mother, who’d just last week moved up her curfew in response to her B minus in English.

Georgia, who’d pulled a zine out of her backpack, had no idea what was going on. And, come to think of it, neither did Charlotte. What on earth was her mother doing at a Wayne’s World screening when she had a deadline she’s been bitching about all week? Was she having an affair? Dread pooled in Charlotte’s stomach, but when she leaned a few inches further up and got a better picture of her mother, she wished the answer had been so tacky and simple.  She was eating the popcorn out of the blue family vase, the same clumpy one that was on permanent display on the living room mantel, next to the photograph of Charlotte and her brother, Dec. The popcorn carton was nowhere in sight — it must have been on the seat next to her, or the floor. Christ.

Had the vase been vaguely attractive, that might have explained it — her mother was a fan of “dressing to impress” and storing Nilla wafers in a crystal cookie jar. But that wasn’t it. Transferring popcorn to a weird case was just about the least impressive thing a suburban mother could do. Christ, Charlotte thought again. Her mother was going insane.

Charlotte and Georgia left before the movie was over — orchestra was one thing, but they couldn’t afford to miss 7th period. The rest of the day, Charlotte felt a shade of blue that was new to her. There were no hues of anger or hysteria or self-congratulation. Just blue.

When she came home that afternoon, she was expecting to find some sort of catastrophe. But Dec was watching “Family Ties” and her mother was upstairs, working on a drawing, per usual. The vase was in its rightful place, in all its lumpen glory.

It’s remained there to this day. Her mother has continued to function— there have been no signs of lunacy. And every winter, when Charlotte returns home, she waits until she’s alone in the living room to share a meaningful moment with the vase. Your mother is going to unravel, it tells her. All it will take is the tug of one thread.

Object No. 92 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Sarvas, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $41.]

When I was seventeen, I was expelled from high school. My father, reasonably enough, gave me a choice: Get a job or get out. The only job for a 30-mile radius was the night shift behind the counter at an Amoco station on a deserted back road off the interstate. Scott, the owner, told me I probably wouldn’t see a customer most nights. He was chubby, hairy and, at 26, overly proud of himself for owning a gas station.

Back then, gas stations had no mini marts, no hot dogs, not even Gatorade. It was mostly candy bars and smokes, if you weren’t picky about your brand. Gas fumes mingled with the scent of cleaning fluid used to wipe down tools. I had an AM radio with lousy reception and, on his way out the door, Scott tossed me an Amoco yo-yo for entertainment.  Ahead of his time, he was branching out into branded swag.

Four nights into the job, Scott’s prediction had held up. I was fiddling with the yo-yo, which had become an obsession. There was something soothing about the bouncing repetition, and it helped pass the time. I was watching it travel up and down the string when I heard a girl’s voice.

“Walk the dog?”

A customer.  My age, perhaps a bit older. Her skin was red and flaky, her teeth gappy and her clothes sized for someone fifteen pounds lighter. But I was 17 and she was a female who talked to me and that was that. I looked up blankly. She indicated the yo-yo.

“Can you walk the dog?”

I shook my head and her disappointment was palpable. She bought some Bubble Yum and a pack of Parliaments and was gone.

I spent the entire summer practicing walking the dog. I wrote away to the Duncan Yo-Yo company and they sent me the instructions. Hour upon hour, not just at the gas station but at home, in the street, everywhere, I walked the dog. I knew she would come back.  I was right. When she returned to the station, I was ready. She nodded at me when she walked in, with the easy familiarity of old friends.

“Hey,” I said. “Watch this.”

I flicked my wrist and sent the yo-yo hurtling down the string, which chose that moment to come undone. I watched in horror as the hunk of black plastic rolled away and disappeared under a rack of motor oil, leaving a limp string dangling on my middle finger. I couldn’t bear the pity in her eyes so I busied myself with fishing it out, and it was only after I heard her leave that I emerged with it, dust-covered,  in my hand.

The next day, I learned that Scott, my fat, hairy boss, had slept with her. A week later, I left for New York City, mended yo-yo in my coat pocket.

Object No. 91 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Meghan O'Rourke, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $62. ]

After my mother died, a stranger emailed me. He told me that my mother had been the most important person in his life. They went to Catholic school together. He was unpopular, she was popular; he was a bad student, she was a good student; he was a football player; she was a cheerleader. Though he wasn’t in her clique, one night at a dance, she came up to him while “Hey Jude” was playing and asked him to dance. Something clicked.

They told each other everything, walking home from school carrying books, talking on the phone for hours at night, to the annoyance of siblings and parents. (This was before call waiting.) One day after school they went to the beach club and swam in the ocean for hours, talking, sitting on the rope buoys. Her lips got blue. He told her they should go in, but sitting on the furthest buoy, she said, let’s just stay out here a while longer. The two of them sat together under the big sky, listening to the cries of the birds, as if they were made for water.

The other boys in her clique got annoyed that my mother was spending so much time with this guy. One of them tackled him hard during football practice and broke his wrist. So this guy decided, with regret, it was time for him to leave my mother alone. First, though, he made her Mario, the baker mouse. It took him three days of work after school. Mario is made of soft felt, string, and paper. If his feet are not really there, that is because this young man was not much of an artist.

When I was a child, my mother used to keep Mario on a shelf near the oven. Sometimes I would play with him. She told me that Mario was magic; in the night, he made muffins light as manna and delicate as silver. If you happened to sleepwalk into the kitchen, you could eat the muffins, but they disappeared by morning. I always hoped I might sleepwalk, because the muffins, my mother said, cast a spell on you. If you ate one, your dreams would be vivid. You would feel light and airy when you wake, not tired. You would finally remember that feeling which always seemed like a secret you couldn’t name, and carry it around with you.

Soon after the man gave Mario to my mother, she met my father.  She married my father a year later, when she was 17. There was nothing more between my mother and this man. Then one day last year, he Googled my mother. He saw her death notice. And he contacted me to tell me about Mario.

For these reasons, I believe Mario is good luck. He is made out of feelings as much as he is made of felt. And his favorite thing to bake is red velvet cupcakes.

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 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. 88 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Kathryn Borel Jr., has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $16.]

Marc’s room smelled like half-open tins of chewing tobacco. He liked Skoal butternut, and I loved it too. Not to chew — I was only seven — but I loved the way its manky smell would tussle and fuse with all his other teen things: his gym bag with its tube socks and olive work shirt, the after-effects of a spritz from his Polo cologne. I’d sneak in there before he got home from Ramapo High, before he’d lay out all his textbooks with concepts inside that were so out of reach to my little mind they thrilled me to the point of terror. Everything about him was intoxicating — his creepy Grateful Dead posters of skeletons with roses for eyes, his silver record player with a thin film of dust between the buttons, the black woolen winter hat decorated with all the lapel pins he’d been collecting since he was younger than me.

One night I’d dared open his door, knowing full well that he was in there. My mother had warned me to leave him alone — Lovey was over. Lovey was his girlfriend, I think. It confused me, because my parents called us all “lovey.” So I turned that knob and let the door fade off to the left. There they were, Marc and Lovey, rolling back and forth on his single bed, their shirts hiked up to their necks. I stood there staring, distracted by the pin hat. It sat upright, stuffed with balled-up newspapers, on a stack of his Ramapo yearbooks. In the middle of the hat was a thin rectangular pin with a ribbon and medal hanging off it, all gorgeous and cyan and silver. My father had given it to Marc after very long business trip to Europe. I’d received nothing but a crummy pile of rocks he’d pick-axed off the Berlin Wall. Eventually, Marc noticed me in the doorway, leaped off the bed, punched me hard on my shoulder and slammed the door.

Marc got the medal because he was the oldest and my father loved him best. When I asked him if we could trade, he said, “Shut up, twerp.” Then he knocked me down and dragged me across the living room carpet for 10 solid minutes until my back was sore and red. I’d laughed all the while, trying to act tough. But late that night, my mother had to soak a bunch of rags in cold water and lay them on the raw spots to take away the pain.

When he left for college, I stole the medal from the pin hat. It was lying right on top of one of the moving boxes. I’d never touched it before, and it was far heavier than I thought it would be. I hid it inside the cavity of my sock puppet, Gaston.

During frosh week initiation, my parents received a call. Marc had been running barefoot through the quad and had stepped on a rusty nail. He had tetanus. For six weeks, he lay in the hospital. We packed into the car to go visit him. Before leaving the house, I looked hard at Gaston, who was sitting in his place in the middle of my bookshelf. For a flash of a moment, I considered giving back the medal.

Object No. 86 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by (Slate contest winner) Matthew J. Wells, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $54.]

Booth 106 was the regular table of Evelyn Nesbit — it’s where she was introduced to Charles Dana Gibson, who used her as the model for his famous Gibson Girl drawings; it’s where she met the young John Barrymore, who became her lover and got her pregnant twice (once in the booth itself and once in his apartment); it’s where she was introduced to architect Stanford White by fellow Floradora Girl Edna Goodrich; and it’s where she met her future husband Harry Thaw, who murdered White at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.

Originally surrounded by red velvet drapes, the booth is now open and unlit. On the wall is a photo of Nesbit from her Gibson Girl days and beneath it, on a small shelf, is a little jar labeled “BAR-B-Q Sauce.” The jar was originally purchased by Nesbit as a gift for White — whenever White would meet her for dinner, he would order ribs, and she paid the waiters to always keep the small jar full of sauce at the table for White’s special use. Very special, according to suppressed trial testimony after his murder — allegedly, the ribs weren’t the only things White covered in barbecue sauce behind those drapes.

After White’s death, Booth 106 was roped off as a sign of mourning, a RESERVED sign was placed on the table, and per Evelyn Nesbit’s wishes, once a week the bartender would refill the BAR-B-Q jar, as if in preparation for White’s eventual return. The table went empty for almost two years (not even Nesbit sat at it), until the afternoon of January 5, 1908, when Harry Thaw sailed into the Naughty Pine, plunked himself down at Booth 106, ripped up the RESERVED sign, tore down the red velvet curtains, draped them around his body like a winding sheet, and demanded a shave. When told that he was in a bar and not a barber shop, Thaw cried, “Then I’ll do it myself,” whereupon he pulled out a straight razor, stropped it on his leather belt, and taking the BAR-B-Q jar, proceeded to slop sauce all over his face as if it were shaving cream. Then, pretending to stare into a mirror, he gave himself a blood-soaked shave while humming “I Could Love A Million Girls,” the song that had been playing when he shot White in the face.

“You must be a lunatic,” said one of the waiters. Thaw just smiled at him. His first trial for the murder of Stanford White had ended in a deadlocked jury; but the next day, when his second trial began, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

***

NOTE: This story was also published at Slate.com. Read more about this winning entry, and the runners-up, here.

Object No. 85 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Meg Cabot, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $108.50.]

So Brandon was going to Cabo for spring break and I saved up all my tip money for a year to chip in for the rental car to go with him.

But then at my last cleaning Dr. Jones said if I didn’t get my wisdom teeth pulled out right away my incisors were going to overlap, and I might never get my dream job as a television news journalist like Katie Couric.

“When was the last time you ate?” Dr. Jones wanted to know.

And I was all, “At my shift just now at Señora Mexicana.”

“That’s okay!” he yelled.  “We can use a local!”

I tried to say no but Mom was all, “It’s much better this way, sweetie,” because I could recover during the break and not miss any classes.  “Besides, Novocain is cheaper than anesthesia!”

Plus, I don’t think she’s ever liked Brandon.

I couldn’t even reach him in time to tell him what was going on. I could only reach my best friend Kara, who was still at her shift at Señora Mexicana.

Kara was like, “Oh, don’t worry, hon, I’ll find Brandon and take care of everything.” Which made me feel a little better.

And then the next thing I knew this nurse was jabbing needles into my gums and I heard this crunching sound and even though Dr. Jones said it wouldn’t hurt, it hurt a lot!

And then Mom was going, “Don’t worry, sweetie, you can do Cabo next year” as she helped me out to the minivan.

But the whole time I was lying on the couch in front of the TV, trying not to get dry sockets, Brandon never called.  He never once called, or even texted.

The funny thing was, neither did Kara.

And then when he finally did show up, he was all, “I thought of you every minute, babe!”

And then he gave me this authentic wooden cow, or snake, or whatever it is.  Real Mexican villagers carved it, he said.

But if so they must know Kara, because it looks exactly like her.

Especially the empty space where its heart should be.

Because it turns out Brandon found someone to take my place in the rental car.

Not to mention in his bed at the hotel room.

But I had a lot of time to think about it while I was waiting for the swelling to go down, and I decided it’s okay. I’m going to go back to school, and back to Señora Mexicana. I’m going to save up all my tip money.

Only not to go to Cabo. To go to New York City. To get an internship with Katie Couric, or some other empowering woman who knows the pain of betrayal and getting all your wisdom teeth pulled out with just Novocain.

And someday when I am anchoring my own half hour national news show, Brandon and Kara will turn on their TV and see me and go:

“Wow.  I used to know that girl.”

Object No. 83 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Nomi Kane, here. Original price: 49 cents. Final price: $37. This story is the second in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

Object No. 82 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Josh Kramer, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $76. This story is the first in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

Object No. 81 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Bruno Maddox, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $19.50.]

Did she love me? Nah. Did I love her? Yeah. So I got her this wooden map of Thailand with four hooks sticking out. Figured she could use it to hang items on — you know, in her future life. Whether or not she chose to let me be a part of that.

I wrapped it up best I could. Frank’s cologne came in some green tissue paper which I tried using first, but the hooks and the peninsula kept poking through, or seeming like they were about to, so I went back to the shop and bought a little girl’s raincoat with a white fur hood. Back in the room I stood on the coat and tore the hood off to make a pouch for the map. It looked good, and I felt a tingle of hope and fear. Because my love was real.

Our flight was at seven, checkout was noon. Frank and Headcase were having pints at the roulette table in the lobby and I said I was going quickly say goodbye to Sick Mick at the hospital. “Tell him he’s a woman,” Headcase told me, looking at the wheel and fingering his chips. “Since when is alcohol a poison?”

Her mum let me in and shooed me to the back. The door was open and she was on the bed reading a magazine very intently.

“I love you,” I said, when we were sitting on the bed together.

“Yes,” she said. “I love you.”

I shook my head. “No,” I explained. “Love…” I pointed to my chest and mimed lines going from my heart to her face. “I love you.”

She watched closely. Her long hair brushed her crossed legs as she nodded. “I love you.”

Down the corridor, a door slammed. I told her I’d got her something.

The lads still give me guff about it. “I know what you’re thinking,” Sick Mick’ll say if I daydream in the cafeteria, and that’ll set the others off, which I like because it makes me remember her.

But it’s not what they think. You see, she didn’t know what it was. I had to explain that this was her country, and that there were others, and about the world, and I left her there staring at it. And while I do often think of her, when I wake up, or coming back hammered after being out with the lads, it’s not sexual in nature. Well, it feels sexual, but what I see is her at a podium, dressed like Margaret Thatcher, addressing the International Union of Nations or something, jabbing the wooden map I gave her at all the sheikhs and toffs and monocled kings, shouting the words to the sad, sad song she sang that first night in the bar at karaoke. She sang it in Thai, that night, but the English words were behind her on a screen:

Leaves are falling on my heart.
Why did you set fire to our love?

Object No. 80 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Doty, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $76.]

As a young man I read a poem I’ve never run across again since. I found it in the school library. If you already knew what you wanted in this haphazard collection, you were sunk, but if you spent time pulling things off the high, not-much-visited steps, you could get lucky.

The poem was Anglo-Saxon, a riddle, and it had to do with cold armor that never clanked, with chain mail that moved with a strange fluidity, as if it were made of mercury – though I’m sure I’ve added that detail, in memory. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t have mercury, did they? Or maybe they did.

I think what I liked best about the poem was the feeling of things moving in darkness, beneath the surface, not at all troubled about being in the dark.  That and something about the allure of ancient silver, that there were mines, somewhere in the far mountains, and people had learnt the methods of refining the hidden ore and bringing the malleable shining stuff into the light.

Which does not exactly explain why I stole the spoons. It was an outdoor fair, at the end of September, in a field that belonged to the Kiwanis, rented out on weekends for carnivals or farmer’s markets or, this day, the big rows of tables on which the collectors had arrayed their stuff. It seems obvious now, but it had never occurred to me that practically everything here had belonged to someone, perhaps several people, and that most of those people were dead. It was all here to be redistributed to some new place, for a while.

I was fifteen, I didn’t have any money, but it would be false to say that’s why I took them. I never looked at the price tag. I acted on impulse; I saw them, from a few feet away, and felt as if I was suddenly a little off balance. I moved toward them directly, peripherally aware that the woman who minded the goods was turned in another direction, to help a customer who was considering the purchase of pottery jug. I put my hand over the cluster of spoons – they were nestled one into another, like silver fish who each had swallowed a smaller member of their tribe – and slipped them into my jacket pocket.

And then what? I couldn’t show them to anyone. I was a little ashamed of stealing them, but that feeling was not as strong as my pleasure, when I could lift them from the back of my sock drawer, and peel back the tissue paper I’d wrapped them in, and study this private token I’d come to possess.

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2009/10/15/fish-spoons/feed/ 1 http://significantobjects.com/2009/10/13/indian-maiden/ http://significantobjects.com/2009/10/13/indian-maiden/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:56:32 +0000 R.K. Scher http://significantobjects.com/?p=1781 Continue reading →]]>

Object No. 78 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by R.K. Scher, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $157.50.]

Visitors never fail to ask about my squaw. It’s what I like to call her, although one of those visitors, an earnest young art critic, did try to impress upon me the incorrectness of the term. Small as she is in stature, the squaw demands attention. Hers are the only colors in my entire studio. I’m a Minimalist, after all… or as my art dealer has it, a Neo-Minimalist.

I used to enjoy telling the story of how I came by the squaw but one too many art collectors demanded her price. The story that doesn’t get told any more goes like this.

Not long after I didn’t graduate from high school, a crumbling cluster of old houses adjoining our property was slated for demolition. Exactly eleven acres of old-growth trees, two Spanish-style houses and three cottages would be razed to make way for a new suburban development. It would take all summer long and it was all I thought about.

My ideas evolved over time and became less ambitious when my parents forced me to get a job. That was when I abandoned plans to booby-trap the houses and create a homemade minefield.

Instead, every evening I took pictures of what was still there after a day of destruction and the space of what wasn’t. I made a detailed map of the whole property in pencil and erased each day what got knocked down and carted away. I spent a lot of time sitting on cut logs, stroking my old dog and taking in what happened when ancient root systems were hauled out of the ground.

One day I realized that I had to decide what to do about things that appeared instead of disappeared. The plan for the map was to end up with a blank page. I hadn’t figured on the things that get shaken out of an empty house when it’s destroyed: the objects fallen through floorboards or just left behind. There were some broken dishes, some sodden books, a bicycle wheel, a Frisbee, an empty coin purse… and the squaw.

The thing about the squaw was that she changed places. The first time I saw, and photographed, her, she was half driven into the dirt. The next photo shows her lying on some dead leaves. Then she disappeared for three days. The fourth day found her fifty yards away. This time, I plotted the location on my map, in ballpoint pen. It went on like this for weeks, an old souvenir hopscotching across a blanker and blanker landscape, followed by my ballpoint pen.

At this point in the story I usually got asked, Who was it? Did you ever find out who – or what – was moving the thing around? The answer is, No, I never tried. The day the pattern of her movements closed in on a perfect repetition is the day I picked her up and brought her home.

This is the pattern I have been drawing ever since.

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. 73 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Christopher Sorrentino, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $38.]

My parka (Coat, Cold Weather, Men’s, Field, OG-107) hangs from a hook whose shape is in the likeness of Pickwick, of Dickens’ classic and eponymous book. The hook is mounted on the back of my door. Above the olive-drab parka, I can see Pickwick gesturing expansively. This is kind of a funny coincidence because just earlier today I was standing outside the home of Stanfield Mooney, in my accustomed spot, hoping to get a chance to talk to him about my ideas and see if he might be able to put me in touch with his agent, a simple but apparently impossible request, when I noticed that a box of books had been placed on the sidewalk just before the wrought-iron fence there. In the box was a copy of The Pickwick Papers. Yehudi, I said to myself, now there is a sign if you’ve ever received a sign. I opened the book. Sure enough: Ex Libris Stanfield Mooney. No interlinear comments or significant underlining, though.

I took Stanfield Mooney’s personal reading copy of this timeless classic back to my room and made a Survivor Sandwich. This is slices of apple between which you put cheese, or meat, or what have you. It provides stamina, fiber, and internal purity. While eating I gazed at the photos of Stanfield Mooney that I’d pinned to the cracked plaster of the walls enclosing my small and shabby one-room crash. Mooney with Mailer. Mooney with Vonnegut. Mooney accepting the National Book Award. Mooney disappearing into a limousine during his intense but brief affair with the beautiful Lauren Holly (what role did he play in bringing about the end of her bright career?). A somewhat Pickwickian figure himself, come to think of it. It’s very interesting that Mooney is here, there, and everywhere but never seems to have a moment to talk to me about The Underwater Mosaic, a novel idea which I’ve been told by Bernard Gerthner himself, the Bernard Gerthner, would probably make a very appealing motion picture idea. It’s all about ideas, and I have them. I am simply without the necessary connections to say, Let’s make this happen!

When I finished my sandwich, after the prescribed two Nutter Butters, I searched in Stanfield Mooney’s personal reading copy for clues. I don’t like to read much, so I didn’t find anything. Gun magazines, sure. Magazines with full-color photos of women blowing up balloons in their underwear, definitely. Books, though, are a problem, especially since the Bernard Gerthner himself assured me that it was all about ideas, which I have galore of. Then I stared at the brass effigy of Pickwick, leering and gesturing above the slump of my empty parka, bringing myself into a mild trance state. Do you like paperback word-search puzzle books? Playing 33 rpm records at 45 rpm? Me too. Messages abound. “Kill.” “Lock and load.” “Let’s do lunch.” “Does not meet our needs at the present time.”

I like to think that one day someone will be waiting, rain or shine, outside my own stately home, where among the elegant furnishings and appurtenances I will have scattered some of the “lesser things” from my “salad days,” such as the Mr. Pickwick coat hook. That?, I’ll chuckle. Oh, there’s a real story behind it. Then I’ll smile and gently shake my snifter. Perhaps there’ll be a Mrs. Pickwick hook for Lauren, when she starts answering my letters already. They’ll find a box of books and thrill to see Ex Libris Yehudi Mirandez when they check out the endpapers. I’ll slap my name right over Mooney’s.

Object No. 71 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Shelley Jackson, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $30.99.]

When I first met him, the moon — a chip of bone in the pale blue of morning — was just past full. I can be sure of that, though it was only later that the phases of the moon became as familiar to me as the seasons or as my breath coming and going. He was crouching against a tree in Prospect Park, nearly naked despite the autumn chill, the pale skin stretched over his shuddering ribs disfigured with a rash. He was swiping at his red, swollen, and tearing eyes with one paw, while the other, with a very practiced motion, was employing what looked at first glance like a bar of soap, to harry clouds of short, coarse, whisky-colored hairs from a pair of loose drawstring pants and a tunic draped over his lap. I did not think anything of the fact that both items appeared to be inside out. I did not pay any special attention to the fellow at all, who seemed to me an everyday sort of eccentric, only (for I have an eye for curiosities, particularly those ingenious contraptions rendered pathetically de trop by advancing technology — clockwork computers, water clocks and the like) to the object he was holding, which I now saw to be a rounded bar of ivory (or an imitation) in which a cylindrical brush had been ingeniously set so that it might skim a smooth surface and rid it of debris — the tool of a butler or maître d’, I thought, for clearing crumbs from a place-setting.

I stopped to comment on it, reaching out a casual hand. He snarled at me, and I took my hand back, the small hairs standing up on my neck.

I hardly think I felt an attraction then, despite his undress; he was not a prepossessing sight, with his wet red eyes and nose, and his rash. So how can I explain, except by some atavism buried deep in the genes, that I did not excuse myself and continue on my way, but cringed down before him on the grass with a truckling grin?

Events followed, many good, some very bad. He left me this object and my life, which was good of him.

He was exceptionally fastidious, for a werewolf. Indeed, his whole family, or, I should say, his pack, was so. They left no bone unburied, and curried the furniture daily to rid it of hair. To do so was their pride, as an ancient, aristocratic family, but it was also necessity, since every member of that bloodline was congenitally allergic to dust, to dander and, such is the cruel levity of fate, to dogs — and a wolf is but a purer, more essential dog.

He is not the only person I have loved whose constitution was at war with his calling, but he handled it rather better than some.

Object No. 70 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Charles Ardai, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $20.50. ]

The telegram arrived too late. The morning mail had brought the box, wrapped in a double thickness of brown paper and covered with fibrous packing tape I’d had to dig out the heavy Wüsthof cook’s knife to slice through. Inside, upon a bed of cotton batting, lay a ceramic ball painted with images of flowers in a wicker basket and tiny, gold-bellied birds. There was a plastic stopper in the base, a loop of ribbon at the top, and a diamond pattern of pinholes on either side. I looked at the return address on the torn and crumpled wrapping: Gabriel Hunt, Trebišov District, Košice, Slovakia.

The illustrious Mr. Hunt, a centimillionaire and renowned world traveler…why, I wondered, would he send me this oddity? I had recently completed co-authoring a book with the man (by which I mean that I wrote all the words the book contained, save three: ‘by,’ ‘Gabriel,’ and ‘Hunt’), but that hardly explained the appearance in my mailbox of this rara avis.

The explanation arrived an hour later, in the form of a half-size sheet of paper bearing the logo of Western Union. “Charles,” the message read, “you will receive a package from me shortly; do not, repeat do not, open the object you find inside. I send it to you for safekeeping, so I beg you, keep it safe. Hang it, please, in a cool, dry place, away from noise and direct sunlight. Do not listen to it. Do not attempt to peer inside.

“You will be curious as to what the piece contains. I will tell you, so that you might avoid accidentally doing irreparable harm. This innocent-seeming container is the handiwork, Charles, of the renowned Slovak metaphysician and sculptress Mária Gruska. She fashioned it with clay from the basin of the Tisza River, the burial site of the great Hun chieftain, Attila. Some incantations followed – I don’t know the details, Charles, and since Gruska has recently passed on (rather violently, I’m afraid) I doubt we ever will. But incantations there were, and a pentacle inscribed on the ground, and certain other bits of ritual that resulted in the ancient chieftain’s soul being drawn back from whatever midnight realm it had so long inhabited and stoppered up in this spherical chamber.  The art on the outer surface is functional: as anathema to the inhabitant as holy water to a vampire, it keeps him penned inside.  The holes permit communication, but not escape.

“Gruska had it hanging, Charles, from a cast-iron hook in her cellar.  Her mansion was aflame when I found and rescued it, escaping mere instants before the building collapsed into a heap of rubble.

“Now it’s in your hands. I realize you may not believe that Attila is in there.  Humor me at least. I will take it off your hands when I return.”

I would have done as Hunt requested – very gladly. But by the time I read this I had already slipped a thumbnail beneath the stopper’s edge and, with a tug, removed it. It had come free with an audible pop and I’d felt a strange breeze, as though there’d been a window open nearby. There was a scent in the air as well, like roasting meat or burning wood. But it passed, and I’d thought nothing of it – until the telegram.

On his return, Hunt was inconsolable.

I have used the container ever since to hold salt.