Object No. 64 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Margot Livesey, has ended. Original price: 10 cents. Final price: $33.77.]

Lydia felt the unfamiliar weight even as she stepped over the threshold of Stacy’s flat, and when, in the hall, she reached her hand into her pocket, the metal rectangle fitted snugly into her palm.  She continued down the stairs, across the park and towards home, the metal warming, pleasurably, to her touch.  Mine, she thought.  It felt like a compact, the kind her mother used to have, when she still had a mother.

In the gloom of Stacy’s hall she must have taken the wrong coat.  With half a dozen similar garments, the chances of seizing the right one were probably no more than thirty percent.  But she could not bear to return to the roomful of guests, braying over the goat cheese tartlets, nor to return the compact.  Her own coat, after all, was nearly a decade old, and threadbare, whereas this one, as she strode across the chilly grass, felt comfortingly warm.  When Lydia reached her flat, she did not stop to remove it before she examined what she held in her hand.

Not a compact but a cigarette case — a silver cigarette case. Even when she  smoked regularly, she had never owned such a thing.  Now, as she studied the graceful butterfly on the lid, the wings unspooling in sleek curves and arabesques, she felt a familiar craving.  Just one, she thought.

Inside, however, were no cigarettes.  Instead the clip held a piece of white paper.

I want to count your fillings and lick your vvertebrae.

E.M.

Lydia’s first thought was who spelled vertebrae with two “v”s?   Her second that she only had two fillings and a crown.  She shrugged off the coat, hoping for a clue, only to discover the familiar rip in the lining.  The warmer coat was her own.

Light spilled out of the open case.  One summer, her mother had explained the birthday problem: how, if only twenty-three people are in a room, the probability that two will have the same birthday is more than fifty percent.  Her mother had carefully drawn the graphs.  Four men at Stacy’s party had had the initials E.M.; two were brothers.  Lydia pictured the man she wished was the author, and the men she hoped weren’t.  If fifty-seven people are in a room, the probability of two coinciding passes ninety-nine percent. Probability worked in contrary ways that could be neatly plotted.

Lydia sat down, wrote her own note, tucked it into the case, and headed out to retrace her steps across the park.  For the probability to travel that last one percent – from ninety-nine to a hundred – three hundred and sixty-six people had to squeeze into the room.  But only one, thought Lydia, would own a silver cigarette case with four butterflies.

[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.