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. 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. 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. 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. 84 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Betsey Swardlick, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $26. This story is the third in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

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. 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 farmers’ 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. 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. 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.

Object No. 69 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stephanie Reents, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $33.00. ]

1.

The transparency of glass is cruel.

2.

When the beige palm of the sky descends, there is no warning, no chicken calling, “The sky is falling.  The sky is falling.”

3.

A sphere has no beginning or end, and thus my story does not start, “Once upon a time, long, long ago – ”  But rather, “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow,”  or “Today, tomorrow, and yesterday.”  I was and am and will be.

4.

Desire: I am always swimming towards her, and she is always swimming away.  I know we are soul mates because we always travel at exactly the same speed.

5.

Snow globe is a misnomer.  This is a glitter globe.  All that glitters is not gold.  All that swim are not fish.  All that smiles…

6.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow I call to her, and my own voice answers.  The water at the top of the sky kisses the glass, a maddening imitation of the real thing.

7.

“Wait for me, my love.”

“Wait for me, my love.”

“I am coming.”

“I am coming.”

“This is futile.

“This is futile.”

8.

I am sadder than a goldfish in a tank, a lion in a cement cell, a lightening bug in an old peanut butter jar.

9.

Then: the world around us changes.  The beige sky falls, and it begins to glitter, a flurry of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal light, and when the sky ascends and the glitter slows, I see we are a bubble on a broad, brown plain.  Something thicker than paper whirs and sings.  Light falls through other glass, warming my waters.  A little warmer, I think, and I will finally swim freely, finally meet my love.  A creature with two skies sits and tries to speak to us in staccato clicks and clacks, but soon grows frustrated and leaves.  “Don’t go,” I cry, “I have so many questions.”  I wait for an answer, even the echo of myself, even the stirring sound of kisses –

10.

[                                      ]

Object No. 63 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by J. Robert Lennon, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $21.50.]

The day after the day I turned seventeen, three weeks after the recital in which I received the award for distinguished effort in solo violin performance, five months after my older brother was arrested for dealing cocaine and thrown out of college and came home and ever since had been living in his old attic room which he had transformed into his personal domain during the last semester of high school when he had the argument with our father which our mother believed had contributed, however indirectly, to the stroke which killed him some weeks later, I stood on the stair landing gazing out through the tiny hexagonal window overlooking the back yard and saw my mother gardening there, and her bent form among the vegetables moved me, yes, but in an unexpected way — somehow the sight of her vertebrae humped underneath her purple blouse and the thick white bra strap visible through the fabric, even from here, filled me with anger, for the way she had pushed me, the way she had forced me to practice the same pieces over and over again those cold afternoons when I alone was sitting beside the radiator perspiring through my thick sweatshirt, and though my mother was frail already at forty-eight, worn down by the relentless belittlement of my father, I wanted to march down the stairs and tell her she had ruined me, that I hated her, to smash my violin against the cracked and disintegrating cement cherub that stood in the center of her flower garden, which my father had bought her in a happier time, or perhaps a time in which unhappiness was still latent, not yet fully expressed — but instead I reached out to the squat and ugly little end table that stood in the corner of the landing and took into my hand the nearest of her china figurines, all of them together a mystery, for they were cheap and tacky and beneath her deluded sense of herself as the wife of a man of wealth and power, which my father was not, rather he was a second-rate businessman in a third-rate city, and in any event dead now for three years; and when my brother came loping down the stairs from his room, reeking of weed and holding between his chin and extended left hand an imaginary violin, which he limp-wristedly sawed at with the imaginary bow in his right, while emitting a mocking squeak intended to represent my playing at its worst, I turned to him and punched him with all the strength I could muster, shattering both his nose and the choirboy figurine in my hand — and my brother fell back against the stairs gagging on blood, and I felt the shards of choirboy slice through my palm and the muscles of my fingers, which even at that moment I understood would take six months to heal if they ever healed at all, ending my nascent career as a classical performer, and I wish I could say that it was with satisfaction that I regarded my brother lying on the carpeted stairs with his hand over his other hand over his face, and that it was with relief that I regarded my ruined hand as the fingers jerked open, raining blood and choirboy pieces onto the oriental runner, but in fact I felt neither, I felt only the foolishness that accompanies any discharge of rage, and the very beginnings of shame as my mother, as though sensing this disturbance through the hexagonal glass and sixty feet of late spring air, turned her kerchiefed head to squint up at the house where everything she had hoped would make her happy was continuing to fall apart.

Object No. 59 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jen Collins, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $20.50.]

For my 9th birthday, I begged my mother to take me to the iron-on decal store at the Meadow Glen Mall. I had seen some older boy wearing a sweatshirt with a glittery rip-off of the Superman “S” shield saying SUPERBRAT, and I had to have one. By the time I convinced my mother, they had run out of the decal. So I settled for a glitter Garfield on a royal blue pullover hoodie. I was crazy about Garfield — he loved lasagna and hated Mondays, just like me. I had all his books and my friends would come over and read them. This was awesome to a 9-year-old in 1983. I wore the pullover to the arcade, to sleepovers, and to my first track meet.

I wasn’t a Superbrat anyway. I did have a whoopee cushion, though, and a ketchup squirt bottle with a long string in it — both gifts from my father, a wiseass. Naturally, I always picked the 7Up Uncola glass from the kitchen shelf, except for when he picked it first. A few times, when we were watching TV, he stole it from me when I wasn’t looking.

For my 13th birthday — a few days before it — my father left us. A Monday morning. He was packing his briefcase for work while Ma was packing our lunches for school. He came into the TV room, kissed my little sister on the forehead and told her, “Do good today, OK? ABCs?” Then he side-hugged me and said, “See ya latah, Ambah.”

When I got home after track practice that night, my mother told me my father wasn’t coming back. “He left you a present,” she said.

“An abandonment present? Is that customary? No thanks.”

“What can I tell you? He’s an asshole, he’s always been an asshole. At least he remembered this year.” She put a package on the kitchen table, wrapped in newspaper.

It was shaped like an Uncola glass.

[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 Thomas McNeely, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.]

As a mug, it was useless: pot-bellied, so whatever we drank, herbal tea, cheap whiskey, cheap red wine, dribbled down our chins, as if we were children; the pouch behind the cat’s head, a promise of tidy convenience, worse than useless, good only for planting cigarettes like flags after we’d given up on it as a mug.  Its only redeeming aesthetic feature, the patina of mold we were never able to wash from the right side of its nose, at least offset its louche, ridiculous, wall-eyed gaze.

We found it on the back porch, a screened-in box tacked to our apartment atop a treacherous flight of stairs. Down the street, at one end, the last bus stop to the university between two liquor stores, at the other end, a park that looked dark even at midday, always deserted. We took boxes of junk by bus from our dorm, the tail end of our freshman year in college, both of us barely nineteen years old.

The day we found it: Late afternoon, early evening, scraps of cloud like red satin blankets, surcease of summer heat. We lugged plastic milk crates from the bus stop up the vacant street, past the liquor stores, trying not to talk about what your mother had said, that you were on your own.

As I put the key in the lock, my hand shook, thinking how flimsy it was, how easily it could be broken. It was our first time there without the landlord, a tidy, soft-spoken man whose sex life we speculated upon; everyone was a character to us, then.  I thought I should carry you across the threshold; maybe we did this, ironically; maybe I’m only imagining it.

I remember how our footsteps echoed, how doors creaked across bare wooden floors.  We roamed the house tentatively, as if it wasn’t really ours.  In the kitchen, you jimmied open the back door, which I’d forgotten, a surprise, a secret passage.

Outside, the wall of maples above the creek you had yet to discover had already darkened to shadows.  I started to speak, to warn you not to step through the hole in the porch; but you’d already turned, holding the cat mug like a prize, plucked from a cobwebbed corner, straddling the gap in the floor.

“It’s hideous,” I said.

“It’s wonderful,” you said.

“It’s wonderfully hideous.”

“It’s hideously wonderful,” you said.  “I like it.”

We washed it as best we could in the coughing sink. Tiny spiders erupted, scattered ahead of the rushing water.  We put it on a windowsill, saying we would clean it later, when we had soap.

On a curio shelf, we found a roach the landlord had left, and smoked it, and made love quickly, clumsily, on a sleeping bag on the bare wooden floor.  Sometime that night, I woke to the platting of distant gunshots outside.  I lay on the narrow strip of fabric, holding you, imagining our empty apartment, the cat on its windowsill watching us, the vast, encompassing night sky above.

May, 1987, Austin, Texas, two bedrooms, half a house, $225 a month; signs and wonders were everywhere, then: runes, tarot cards, the harmonic convergence, though we didn’t believe in any of that.

I wanted to call you, to tell you I’d found the cat, unpacking boxes in another house.  But it was late, and I didn’t know if you would answer.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Dean Haspiel, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.75.]

Kentucky reminds me of my first and, probably, only encounter with a friend whom aliens had, supposedly, abducted. In the late 1980s, I co-created and drew a comic book mini-series with a writer who lived in Kentucky. I wanted to draw a sequel and I decided it would be best to knock brainpans face-to-face. So, I saved up some monies and booked a weekend flight to Louisville, where the writer lived at the time with his wife.

He was late in picking me up and, out of boredom, I circled the paltry airport gift shops and was blindsided by the golden light and piercing black eyes from what looked like a stained glass horse trapped inside a porcelain dish. Emblazoned in classy golden letters was the word, “Kentucky.” I had to buy it. However, I couldn’t own it. Not in my house. So, it would become an impromptu house gift.

That first evening, the wife pulled me into the kitchen, and alerted me that aliens had regularly abducted her poor husband. With tears in her eyes and a tremble in her voice she told me that he would go missing for a night, sometimes days, and would come back home deranged and depressed, his mind fried, his body despondent. They weren’t having sex any more and she was worried he would be abducted forever.

What had I walked into? The writer’s depression was soon confirmed when, that night, I discovered him sitting in a chair, alone in another room, facing the wall in the dark. I asked him if he was okay and he told me that his head hurt.

The next day he seemed to be feeling better but said he couldn’t work just yet. So, he took me for a long drive around his stomping grounds and introduced me to a very sexy young woman with dark hair. I don’t remember her name, but let’s call her Janice. Suddenly, my pal was radiating sunrays. He seemed smitten with Janice, but cautious. She was a Philly, a true Kentucky dish. So, I could empathize with the extra skip in his step. But the second Janice was gone, he fell back into a morbid slumber. I was starting to get pissed off, especially since he wasn’t telling me about his cosmic anal probes and instead was moping about like a 12-year old.

He suggested we drive home and try to write. After an hour or so, he looked at me with swollen eyes and told me his head hurt. He walked into his bedroom and shut the door. Like a looming specter, his wife floated over from the kitchen and, after a very long pause, suggested we call Janice over for dinner. She had heard of Janice but never met her and thought a single guy like me might like her. “Sure, why not?” I sighed.

My writer pal appeared at the dinner table, but was incredibly uncomfortable. His wife mollycoddled him while Janice launched a campaign of woo towards me that was so paramount it was a parody. They turned in early — but Janice decided to hang out with me. Talking turned into touching and the natural evolution of two naked people doing what they’re known to do. We rolled around and smashed into something so hard it cracked. It was the Kentucky dish, and it was in pieces.

Janice split early the next morning and my pal stumbled out of his bedroom door in a near coma. His eyelid batted a catatonic wink to acknowledge me as he shuffled into the bathroom. His frightened wife snuck out of their bedroom towards me and whispered that she thought he had been abducted by aliens last night but found him in their closet, standing and staring at wire hangers.

Back home in NYC, I wrote our proposed sequel myself. I never drew it but it broke my cherry to write and draw my own comix. My Kentucky pal would later divorce his wife and write other, great stories that won awards. It was years before it occurred to me that he hadn’t been abducted by aliens at all.

[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.”