Object No. 46 of 50 -- Significant Objects v2 (Photo by Adrian Kinloch)

[The auction for this item, with story by Chris Adrian, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $162.50. Part of a special collaboration with Underwater New York, this object's story shipped rolled into a vintage bottle found on the beach of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn. Proceeds from this auction go to 826 National.]

My brother and I could not agree on how to worship the mouse.  It was typical of us back then that we could agree that it should be worshipped—that was obvious from the day it arrived in the mail, a gift from our father, who had been in Vietnam for three years, which was one-third of George’s life and one-half of mine, on business more important than his wife and his sons. The last gift had been a green and yellow straw mat, and we agreed that it was, in fact, a prayer mat, the use of which only became clear with the advent of the mouse. The evening it arrived we knelt in our room in our pajamas in the dark. George had his flashlight out and he shined it on the mouse’s face.

“Great Faaa,” he said. “Mighty Faaa, hear our prayers.” He said the name in a singsong, high-pitched voice. We had just seen The Day of the Dolphin the week before. I put my hand on the flashlight and pushed it down, so the little monkey in the mouse’s heart was more plainly illuminated.

“Mr. Peepers,” I said. “Source of the All, forgive our sins! Don’t punish us!”

“What are you doing?” George asked, and our argument began.  We quarreled subtly, at first—we still shared the mouse, but prayed differently to it—and then more obviously, stealing Him back and forth, and performing secret worship in the closet or the basement or the pool shed.  The violence, when it came, attracted our mother’s attention. “If you can’t share that hideous piece of trash, I’m going to throw it away,” she said, and that night we prayed peacefully, imploring Faaa and Mr. Peepers not to hurt her, but by the morning we were fighting again. “Faaa!” George said to me, sitting on my chest and pummeling my head with the sides of his fists, and I could almost understand how his whole argument could be contained in just the name. I wanted to tell him that there was a monkey in my heart, and a monkey in his heart, and a monkey in everybody’s heart, and there was nothing worse in the world than an unappeased, unworshipped monkey who lived in you and was mad at you. But all I could say was, “Mr. Peepers!”

“Why can’t you two just be good?” our mother asked, and she took up Peepers-Faaa in her hand and threw Him against the wall, breaking off His ear. I cried, but George screamed at her, telling something horrible was going to happen to us because of what she had done, and horrible things did happen to us. She took up the body and flushed it down the toilet, and George said later that it was a miracle of Faaa that it flushed, but that it made sense that He would exercise His magic to get away from our mother, and from me.

I still have the ear.

Photo by Nura Qureshi

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/08/kangamouse/feed/ 9 http://significantobjects.com/2010/01/27/wooden-armadillo/ http://significantobjects.com/2010/01/27/wooden-armadillo/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:50:17 +0000 Randy Kennedy http://significantobjects.com/?p=4037 Continue reading →]]>

Object No. 38 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Randy Kennedy, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $16.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Later, in the glove box, the police found a letter. It said:

“Letter To The Police,

All the stuff in the trunk and underneath the sleeping bag on the back seat is stolen (which is embarrassing because it’s just old adding machines and rotary phones and things people don’t use anymore, things I wasn’t going to be able to sell.) But the armadillo on the dashboard is mine. And it would mean a lot to me if you didn’t send it to the evidence room, where things usually end up for good, at least in my experience.

I paid six dollars for it at a monastery gift shop outside of Los Alamos last December after I spent an hour and a half watching a Benedictine brother carve it from a knob of evergreen pine. I was going through a shaky time then and seeing something old-fashioned like that really calmed me down. It gave me the closest thing to a religious feeling I’d had in years.

I’m sure he thought I wanted it because the armadillo is a kind of universal symbol of the West now. But I wanted it because I remembered a strange thing about armadillos, the kind I grew up with, the little black-eyed desert rats. It wasn’t that they jump straight into the air when they’re scared or that they can catch leprosy like humans, but the real evolutionary head-scratcher: that the females gestate four embryos and give birth to quadruplets, always the same sex.

There were four of us boys growing up, not quadruplets but pretty damned close, mom didn’t waste time. We beat each other senseless until we went our separate ways. But I still figured it might mean something to her, now that Jim and Bobby are dead and Pete’s doing whatever he’s doing down in Chile, to have a thing like that from me for Christmas, a nice monk-carved armadillo, a thing I put some thought into.

Hey, so much for good intentions, right? But maybe there’s somebody in the department who has a minute and could drop it into a padded envelope to her, C.O.D. – just Inez McF—-, Sligo, Texas, 79355, the post office knows her, they’ll get it to her. And a note, too, something like, “From Dan, your fat little baby.”

Thanks in advance for any consideration.

Yours truly,

[Redacted]”

Object No. 16 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sam Means, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $26.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

After the death of his older brother, Yuri III, in 1328, Ivan I of Moscow took up the throne of the Russian Empire, as well as residence in the royal palace. Yuri had been a well-known lover of aquatic life, and Ivan found that the private quarters of the palace were home to a staggering array of fish, some already suffering from obvious neglect in the absence of their exalted caretaker. Ivan lived up to his epithet, “the moneybag,” and had the private aquarium moved to sumptuous new quarters in the city center and provided for in perpetuity, thus establishing the first public Aquarium on the continent.

Yuri’s love of fish had also influenced his decorating scheme, most of which Ivan changed to suit his own taste, but the younger brother kept a single, fish-shaped topiary in the royal gardens as a tribute.  When Ivan’s son, Simeon (“the proud”) succeeded him, he was unaware of the familial provenance of the fish-tree, but fond memories of a childhood spent playing in its shade, and spinning fanciful tales about its mystical powers, led him to maintain it through his own sweeping redesign of the palace grounds.

When they married, Simeon’s first wife, Eupraxia of Smolensk, brought as a dowry The Fire of Minsk, at the time the most celebrated ruby in existence. He was so enamored of the gem that, even after rejecting Eupraxia for her frigidity in the marital chamber and remarrying, he refused to return The Fire. Paranoid about theft, or a chivalric attempt by Eupraxia’s family to retrieve her birthright, Simeon decided to hide it. He hired a craftsman, whom he had exiled afterward, to cast hundreds of tiny replicas of Yuri III’s beloved topiary, fitting all but one with ingenious paste reproductions of the ruby as the fish’s eye. (It should be noted that the original topiary itself had no eye to speak of.) The last, marked in a way that only Simeon himself knew, contained the Fire itself.

Before his death in 1353, Simeon took monastic vows, renouncing all wordly wealth, and spread his tiny topiaries to every corner of the Empire, never intimating to a soul which one held the real thing or how to tell. The ruby’s location is still unknown, but many of the fish still survive in private hands, and any one of them could contain The Royal Fire of Minsk in its unblinking eye.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sung J. Woo, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $52.]

Last summer, my wife and I held a barbeque in our back yard. After the event, I saw a little yellow bird with a black crown and wings on the knickknack shelf above the toilet in the bathroom. I’d never seen this figurine before. The bird, its head turned ninety degrees to the left of its body, gazed at me squarely with unblinking black eyes.

When I asked my wife about where she got the figurine, she had no idea what I was talking about. The figurine suddenly took on the cold heft of an object that existed only to tell us how much it didn’t belong here.

If neither of us had placed it on the shelf, that meant someone from the party had done it. Maybe it was a joke. Or was it a snide criticism of our decorating skills? I found myself getting angry, but then another thought occurred to me: perhaps it was a psychological issue that one of our friends was suffering from, a sort of a reverse-kleptomaniacal syndrome. In which case my anger was misplaced and insensitive. While I was mulling the possibilities, my wife was completing a more practical, forensic study of the bird. She pointed at the tiny lettering near the bottom, near its tail: MB.

In the kitchen, we went through the guest list and found two matches, a man and a woman who shared the same initials. I’d been friends with the female MB since college, and my wife had known the male MB since early childhood, but they’d never been introduced. Neither seemed to be the type to pull a stunt like this, but we emailed them each a photo of the figurine and asked if they knew anything about it.

Within a minute, we received replies. It was an American goldfinch, they agreed; and neither of them had placed it in our bathroom. The enthusiasm of this identification was evident in both emails; both were avid birders, it turned out. They announced their engagement soon after.

When the newly minted couple visited our house a month before the wedding, they stopped by the bathroom to admire the bird that had brought them together. I decided that the perfect way to celebrate their love was to give the bird to them. I found a fancy hexagonal wooden box in the closet and when the evening drew to a close, presented them with the gift.

They looked at the box with absolute shock. In tears, they chided me for taking the bird out of its natural habitat and for putting it in a container that resembled a coffin. Before I had a chance to apologize, they stormed off, and as my wife and I stared at the bird in the box, I had to admit, it did look sort of dead.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Nathaniel Rich, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $57.]

Do you ever struggle to remember insignificant facts? Facts so small and irrelevant to the natural course of your life that you wonder how you ever learned them in the first place? And yet your inability to recall them infuriates you. Who was the actor in that Greek film, you know the one with Melina Mercouri, from the sixties? What do you call the stick that leprechauns carry? What’s your cousin’s girlfriend’s name? Is it “Man on the Run,” or “Band on the Run”? Who is that famous autistic lady who writes about what it’s like to be an animal?

The answers to all of these questions and more will be answered when you come into proud possession of the Rhinoceros Knows. Whenever you feel stumped, simply rub its nose (also known as its “horn”). You will feel a jolt of energy in your neurons, your synapses will grow extra sticky, and your frontal lobe will throb pleasantly. Also, the rhinoceros’s eye will, ever so subtly, twinkle.

And then, in no more than five minutes, the answers will come: Phaedra is not a Greek film, but an American film set in Greece; the actor is Tony Perkins. Shillelagh. Candace. “Band on the Run.” Temple Grandin.

One warning: the Rhinoceros Knows must not be misused. Should you try to retrieve a more significant memory (“When did I first tell him that I loved him?”), the Rhinoceros Knows will shut down. From its eye will descend, ever so subtly, a tear. It will know no more.

Study the image of this talisman. You will see that the body is heavily crosshatched, as an elderly palm or a balled-up sheet of aluminum foil that has been carefully unfurled and pressed into its original form. These creases are important, for there is exactly one for every question you are permitted to ask. Do not go over your limit. The total number of creases is unknown, and impossible to count, but woe to the person who asks one too many questions. On that occasion, as soon as you rub the rhinoceros’s nose, you will feel a rather violent knock behind your forehead and your short-term memory will vanish altogether. You will be left only with the answers the rhinoceros has already given you, and your brain will cycle through them, nonsensically, for the rest of your life.

You must pass the Rhinoceros Knows on to another person before you reach that point. Trust me. It is a waking hell.

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lydia Millet, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $22.72.]

I went with my friend G to her great aunt’s house a few weeks after the aunt passed away. G had been called in by the family to pick out one or two keepsakes. Because she lived in a cramped studio in Hell’s Kitchen she didn’t want anything, a, and b, according to G’s mother every item of value had been carted away five minutes after the old lady died, by a daughter-in-law no one liked. By the time G was called in to make a selection they’d already held the estate sale, so all that was left were the sale rejects. “Harsh,” said G, but she decided to go anyway because it was June and New York City was hot and humid and stank. The aunt had lived in one of those nice little towns on the Hudson, green with a pleasant breeze, and the train would let us out about three blocks from her house. Also there was a good diner in the town that G, who was a part-time food critic with a specialty in burgers, wanted to try.

So we got in the train one Saturday afternoon and we went to the house. It was a modest fake Tudor place, pretty much empty now except for a few dusty boxes of trinkets. G’s second cousin R was there, who she hadn’t seen since they were fourteen, went to summer camp together, and ended up making out. (She told me that later.) Now he lived in Jersey and had a lot of tattoos. They sat on the stoop smoking and talking while I rummaged around in the boxes, just for something to do. They were mostly ceramics of chickens, cows, and other livestock, the kind of cheerfully painted ones some ladies like to keep in their kitchens. Beats me why they do that. Maybe they want to feel their kitchens are farmhouses. Anyway, no one wanted these things. Some had been thrown into the boxes carelessly and were already chipped.

I’d never met the great aunt but as the sun sank low outside, G and R’s laughter floated in to me, and shadows crept over the bare living room floor, I started to feel bad for all those abandoned barnyard animals. I picked through the pigs and roosters with a kind of sadness until finally I found Chili Cat. Ugly as sin, there was no getting around that. No reason at all for the cat to be festooned with red chilis. There was a Mexican motif, I guessed. Maybe Tex-Mex. Chili Cat was supposed to be festive.

G never picked out anything, herself. We went with R to the diner and afterward we sat drinking and looking out at the river. Because she was homely, and all those boxes were full of the homeless, I took Chili Cat home.