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. 74 of 100

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

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

Object No. 72 of 100

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

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

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

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

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

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

Object No. 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 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.