Object No. 21 of 50 — Significant Objects, v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Marisa Silver, has ended. Original price: free. Final price: $41.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

I failed my learner’s permit test three times. The first time, my father was angry, because he had gotten out of bed at seven thirty on a Saturday morning so we could be first in line when the DMV opened at eight. Still, we had to wait three hours. “The world is not as simple as you make it out to be,” he said, shifting in the uncomfortable plastic bucket seat, his fingers itchy for a newspaper or a coffee. “It’s not just, ‘you make a choice and stick to it.’” His words ran through my head while I took the test, and when my time was up, there were some answers I wanted to go back and change, but I didn’t. When I failed, I knew he had been right.

The second time I failed the test, my mother said, “You think you can pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, but you can’t. I know what you are.” We were in the living room and my little brother, Neil, looked up from the floor where he was rolling his toy cars back and forth on the light green carpet, making ruts that my mother complained about. Sometimes, when my parents were fighting, Neil would make his car noises loudly so that they would start yelling at him. His face relaxed while they berated him, like he was relieved.

“Words have meaning,” my mother said, hotly, when I walked out of the test room the third time. I’d stopped trying to figure out what my parents were talking about most of the time, but something about what she said struck me as wrong because the more I studied, the less obvious the questions seemed to me. For instance: To avoid last minute moves, you should be looking down the road to where your vehicle will be in about a) 5 to 10 seconds; b) 10 to 15 seconds; c) 15 to 20 seconds. Suddenly it made no sense that distance could be measured in time, or that you could avoid a future that was going to happen to you in only 20 seconds. Even though I had studied that question and knew the answer, I could not mark the right box with my stubby golf pencil because I was sure that the answer the DMV wanted was wrong.

The fourth time I went to take the test, my brother gave me one of his toy cars for good luck. My dad had bought him the car, telling him it was the same model as the first car he’d ever owned. The car was pink and my brother had tried to paint it over, but he didn’t have the right kind of paint so the car ended up looking like a school bathroom. I put the car in my pocket, turned off my brain, and took the test. I passed. I made no mistakes at all. By this time my parents had split up and my aunt was waiting for me in the waiting area because my mother had started back at her old job selling perfume at the department store. I kept my brother’s car all these years, even though the wheels have broken off and gotten lost, and it is so derelict even my own kids won’t play with it. It reminds me that even if you look down the road to catch a glimpse of your future, there’s not much you can avoid.

No. 14 of 50 — Significant Objects, v3

[This is the third installment in a four-part story by the members of Kasper Hauser. The auction for this object, with story by Dan Klein, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $38.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

I commissioned this sculpture of Fries n’ a Shake in 1990, or thereabouts. He was a great horse. A zoo horse. The sculpture commemorates the moment Fries n’ a Shake realized that zoos are a godsend and that work sucks. This is him kicking down the doors to get back in. I saw this happen while I was hosing down some lizards, and it made a huge impression on me.

Two days later is the day that Joanie left me the origami note. She and Dad were gone. The oldest girlfriend I ever had. But at least I had a new mission in life: a zoo that wasn’t racist against livestock.

Tomorrow, The Conclusion: “Brass” Pitcher.

Object No. 6 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[ The auction for this object, with story by Benjamin Percy, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $63.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

I brought to school a rubber-band gun I bought at the mall. I bought it at that store with the tarot cards and the stink bombs and the beer T-shirts and the posters of women in thongs bending over on beaches with sand stuck to them in all the right places. So I brought to school the gun and showed it off to Stacey Swanson. I was a little in love with her. By that I mean I regularly jerked off into an athletic sock when thinking about her naked.

Normally she would not talk to me except to say, “Don’t even talk to me — you haven’t even gone through puberty yet.” But this time, when I held out the rubber-band gun, she said, “Let me see that.” She grabbed the gun and weighed it in her hand a moment before lifting her arm and staring down the line of it and shooting me directly in the eyeball.

The eyeball did not fare well. The rubber band hit the pupil directly, punctured it, buried itself like a worm. The doctor removed the eyeball and put it in a bottle of formaldehyde. I keep the bottle on my dresser. I can tell the temperature by the eyeball, its buoyancy. Whether it is up or down makes me throw on shorts or a sweatshirt. Sometimes the eyeball seems to stare at me. And sometimes, when the pressure drops and a thunderstorm rolls through, the eyeball spins in circles like some possessed weathervane.

Every night I clean out the socket with a warm washcloth, a squirt of soap. There is a smell otherwise.

Used to be, people would make fun of me, a little rough in the hallways with their shoulders, a shove at the urinals. Now nobody touches me. They call me Cyclops and they beg me to lift my eyelid, show them the scooped-out socket. Sometimes I do.

I put things in the socket. A penny. A marble. A strawberry. You should have seen the look on Gabby’s face when I walked up to her desk and without a word dug into the socket and pulled out the mushed-up strawberry and popped it in my mouth to swallow.

Other things, too. Like a tongue. Stacey Swanson’s if you can believe it. Ever since she shot me in the eyeball she has been touching me on the shoulder, asking, “How are you today, Jimmy?” One time she asked if there was anything she could do for me. I said there was. She said, no, not that, that was terrible — that was the most disgusting she had ever heard. But I said please, it would mean a lot to me, and offered her the forty dollars I had swiped from my mother’s purse.

She wiped her mouth afterwards and demanded the money and ran from me crying and I stood there, behind the school dumpster, breathing heavily and shaking with an electric pleasure that I never would have experienced had it not been for the rubber-band gun.

Object No. 49 of 50 — Significant Objects v2. Note that UNY found two toy airplanes at Dead Horse Bay; the toy shown here isn't being auctioned off, but the one below is.

[The auction for this item, with story by Robert Lopez, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $19.50. 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.]

A man on a park bench then another man next to him.

The first man there for no good reason.

The other man the kind of man who sits next to strange men on park benches.

This other man has with him a toy airplane.

He holds the toy airplane in his right hand, which is battered, bloodied.

It looks as though the other man had been in a street-fight and was declared the winner. The toy airplane his trophy.

The other man holds the toy airplane like a trophy.

The day has in it the sky and sun.

There are clouds and women.

It is routine.

The first man looks at the other man. He looks at the toy airplane. He says nothing.

A week goes by. Then another.

Then the man holding the toy airplane speaks.

And of course to make a long story short, he says, anyone living in a pretty how townhouse can look beyond themselves into the kitchen breakfront and clearly see between two pieces of ordinary china that every second of every livelong day of an already long week in a rather long month can often lead to an even longer year and subsequently is almost always followed by a long decade which is only one tenth of a long century and compared to the long long millennium is practically insignificant on this or any other beautiful Sunday morning.

The first man says, I know what you mean, and leaves.

The other man remains on the bench holding the toy airplane for the rest of his natural born life, which concludes twelve years later on a Thursday evening, just before dusk.

The body goes undisturbed until the next day when a passerby alerts the authorities. Two hours later the body is removed and taken to the county medical examiner’s office.

There is no mention of the toy airplane in the medical examiner’s report, only a note concerning the right hand in which the subject held the toy airplane, which was strangely contorted and atrophied.

PHOTO: Nura Qureshi

]]> http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/11/toy-airplane/feed/ 0 http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/10/yellow-bear/ http://significantobjects.com/2010/02/10/yellow-bear/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:32:16 +0000 Kathryn Davis http://significantobjects.com/?p=3972 Continue reading →]]>

Object No. 48 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Kathryn Davis, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $51.00. 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.]

The sorcerer drove too fast. He always did but only because his mind was somewhere else, not because he was in love with speed. He was slow, really — sorcery is not a speedy business. What’re speedy are the events that make sorcery necessary. His mind was on his wife, Mary, who sat day after day at her sewing machine turning out small pink dresses, some trimmed in white eyelet, some in lace. Today he was more distracted than usual, this being the same block he’d been driving down the night he first saw her, a skinny girl wearing glasses, balanced on one leg like a stork. The sycamore trees were taller now, full of nests. A shadow leaped from between two parked cars. It was twilight and the papers on the back seat came flying in a white fan around him.

Mary wanted a child more than anything and he’d conjured one up, only to run it over — that was his first thought. Then he saw that what he’d hit was no human child but a yellow bear. It had leaped out though — he was sure of that. The car had inflicted no damage the sorcerer could see. When he picked the yellow bear up it was smiling at him, its little mouth slightly open and eager, revealing the tip of the tongue but no teeth. It held its forepaws against its chest in a posture the sorcerer knew signified submission. Mary wanted a girl and the yellow bear seemed more like a boy, but then again it didn’t have genitals. The sorcerer wiped it clean and took it home with him; every now and then he could hear a jingling sound come from it like it was a hard rubber cat toy with a bell inside. But the bear wasn’t made of hard rubber; it was made of something soft and warm more like skin.

Mary loved the Yellow Bear the minute she laid eyes on it; she held it to her cheek and smiled. “The baby’s tired. She wants to go to sleep now,” Mary told the sorcerer. She put it in one of the pink dresses and carried it upstairs with her, then she got into bed with it and turned off the light.

In the morning when the sorcerer brought Mary her breakfast tray of tea and toast he found her propped on her pillows, the bear at her breast. Mary was no longer smiling but had tears running down her cheeks. “I don’t know if I can do it,” Mary told him. The jingling sound was very loud now, ear-splitting. “She won’t stop,” Mary said. “She needs something from you, too. That’s how babies get made, in case you forgot.”

“She’s no baby, she’s a toy,” the sorcerer said, but when he went to show Mary the rubber seam running across the top of the bear’s head, the baby sank its teeth into his thumb clear to the bone.

Later, when Mary had cried herself to sleep, the sorcerer snuck the bear from her breast and filled it with something secret. “Pablum,” he told Mary when she asked, because now there could be no question, the child was alive and thriving and cute as a button. Buttercup, the sorcerer called her. But Mary knew better and treasured these mysteries deep in her heart.

PHOTO: Nura Qureshi

Object No. 23 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Rachel Axler, has ended. Original price: $1.49. Final price: $56.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

10/12/91

Q: Does John like me? A: TRY AGAIN

Q: Does John like me? A: TRY AGAIN

Q: …Does Alex like me? A: YES

11/27/91

Q: So I asked John out, and he said okay after only a little thinking, and we went to the movies and it was great! Actually, it wasn’t great, but we definitely went to the movies. Three times! I paid for his tickets, and he brought a friend along and paid for her tickets. Sometimes he and his friend would kiss a little. Is John my boyfriend? A: ASK A FRIEND

Q: I asked Ashley because I figured she’d know, since she’s been coming to the movies with us so much. She said no. Is that because Ashley’s jealous? A: TRY AGAIN

Q: …Does Alex still like me? A: YES

12/07/91

Q: What should I wear on Saturday when I see Hook with John and Ashley? A: TRY AGAIN

Q: Sorry — I forgot I have to phrase these questions in a certain way. Um… should I wear a dress? A: NO WAY

Q: Jeans, then. But a cute sweater? A: TRY AGAIN

Q: …You want me to wear scrubs again. A: YES

Q: Really? Again? A:  YES

Q: But they look so bad on me. A: YES

12/24/91

Q: Merry Christmas tomorrow!! I’m thinking of getting John a present, since he’s my boyfriend. A:  NO WAY

Q: I know, right? It’s a big step. But that wasn’t the question. My question is — how about, like, a CD? You think he’d like that?  A: MAYBE

Q: I wonder what his favorite band is. A: YES

Q: Really? That’s weird. I thought maybe he might like that new band, Nirvana. But you think I should get him 20-year-old British prog rock? A: DEFINITELY

1/6/92

Q: John showed everyone at school the weird CD I got him and everyone at school laughed at me. Except Alex, who looked kind of hurt or angry or something. That was a jerky suggestion, fortuneteller… Why are you shaking? You’re shaking a little. Are you laughing? Are you actually laughing?! A:  MAYBE

Q: I can’t believe this! You’re totally evil! Are you purposely giving me terrible answers? A: NO WAY

Q: You just don’t want to admit how in love with me John is! You’re trying to break us up! A: MAYBE

Q: That’s it — I’m never consulting you again. I hate you. You suck. [FORTUNETELLER PLACED IN BACK OF CLOSET; ANSWER UNCONFIRMED]

6/1/92

Q: Hi. It’s me again. Um, John and Ashley are going to prom together. And I wasn’t invited along, so I guess they’re a couple now. A: NO WAY

Q: I know. They’re big jerks. Oh, but Alex got me a birthday present. Off the Deep End, by Weird Al. It’s pretty dorky. But funny. A: YES

Q: So, what do I do about prom? I can’t show up alone. I’ll be mortified. A: ASK A FRIEND

Q: …You want me to ask Alex, don’t you? A: DEFINITELY

6/24/92

Q: So, we didn’t just go to prom together. We also went to the movies. Alone! I mean, with each other, but nobody else. Except the other people in the theater. Oh, who, by the way, included John and Ashley… and Laurel. John sat between them, and in the middle of the movie, Ashley got up, and she was crying, and she dumped popcorn all over John. It was better than the movie. A: NO WAY

Q: Seriously. But anyway, I guess I didn’t have a question for you. A: —–

Q: I just wanted to say… we had a good time. A: —–

Q: You were right. A: I KNOW.

Object No. 93 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Kate Bernheimer, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $104.50.]

A long time ago, I was very poor and often traded my body for cigarettes, Chelada, or food (in order of preference). I had two children — both daughters — and together we lived in a motel on the coast. It was a knotty-pine kitchenette cabin, and came furnished with a teapot, a few chipped flowered plates, some utensils, and bedding. The cabin overlooked a paved parking lot and beyond it, the beach. If a man came to visit, I sent my youngest girl out to find driftwood and starfish and shells. (Her sister was in kindergarten, so always gone in the morning.) There was no market for these trinkets among tourists; but they were precious to my little girls, truly their only possessions. We washed them and kept them along the edge of the porch rail and inside, on the white windowsills, which otherwise were very empty, apart from a pink horse my youngest had found in the woods. That pink horse! How she loved it. Once when she had gone a very long way to gather her treasures — all the way under a natural tunnel inside the cliffs, which led to a narrow beach that would trap you and kill you if you were stuck there during high tide — an old woman with pink hair approached her and sang her a song. My daughter told me about this old woman, but I didn’t believe her. Later that week, my girl brought home a sea urchin, closed. She said that when the sea urchin opened, the old woman would return and that she had promised then to bring us good luck. I got an empty jar from the cupboard — it had once been full of beach plum jelly but had been long gathering dust. We walked down to the edge of the ocean and filled it with water. Back in the cabin, we placed the closed sea urchin carefully into the water, where it sank and stayed closed. The next morning my littlest girl didn’t wake up and the sea urchin had bloomed. It was on her grave that my other daughter placed the pink horse. Then she too was taken — by the high tide — the very same week. She’d gone into the magic tunnel. Now I do nothing but drink Chelada all day, haunted by pink. Pink urchins, pink cigarettes. Pink horse, pink horse, pink horse on the grave — if ever the pink horse flies into the sky, your daughters will come back to life. The pink-haired old woman sang that to me once when I passed out in the sand. For now, there you stand in the dark of the wood — beautiful, all-powerful, and silent. Pink horse, you are everything, and everything is everlasting in you.

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. 90 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Ehrenreich, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $50.]

I pull a marble from your skull each time we kiss. “Give it back,” you say, each time.

“Darling,” I say. “Baby,” I say. “No.”

I put the marble in my pocket. Later, I will hide it with the others. But not now, because now you’re watching. Now you’re getting mad. I knew you would, and now you’re doing it. You cross your arms. Your features droop. Not just your lips but your eyelids and ears and the cleft ball of your chin. All of it droops. I laugh at you. “Come here, Droopy,” I say, and I try to kiss you, but you pull away.

“Give it back,” you say.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

“Give it back,” you say, again.

“Each marble is a moon,” I say, “but the moon is not a marble. Did you know that?”

“Give it back.”

“I just read an interesting article about a hunchback,” I say. “They put him on display in a museum until he withered and when they did an autopsy they found that his hump was filled with marbles. And they marveled at the marbles. Don’t you think that’s unfair?”

“Give it back,” you say.

“Give it back give it back give it back. Come up with something better. Think a bit. Ask yourself: how would Professor Noam Chomsky respond in a situation like this? Or Beyoncé. What would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad do?”

“Give it back.”

“You are a funny bird,” I say. “But I’m bored of this. I’m going for a walk.” I put my shoes and my jacket on and I go outside, but I don’t really go for a walk. I just stand beside the door and count to 35,000. Then I go back inside. You’re tidying up. I can tell that you’re still angry because you’re tidying up and because your nose is drooping as you do it. “Are you hungry?” I say, but you don’t answer. “Is there still chicken in the fridge?” I say, but you say nothing, so I open the fridge to look. The chicken is gone. How could you eat all that chicken? Did you give it away?

From the other room, you speak. “How was your walk?” you say, placing the remote control beside the other remote controls, arranging them attractively.

“It was lovely,” I say. “I ran into Vladimir Putin in the form of a crow. We’re Facebook friends. He sang the most beautiful song. It was called, ‘Give it back.’” I sing it for you, swinging my hips like a metronome gone mad. “Give it back, give it back, give it back now. Give it back, give it back, give it back now.” And I take your hand and pull you to me because I want to be close to you and I want you to dance with me and to love me as much as I love everything in this world. But your hand is balled tight and your body is stiff and you’re not drooping at all anymore. Instead you’re crying. You’re covering your face. “Oh baby,” I say, “Don’t be sad.” And I unball your hand and squeeze your fingers and run the fingers of my other hand across your cold and teary face. “There’s nothing,” I say, “but nothing, to be sad for.” And I kiss your fingers and your dry lips and with my free hand I reach up and I stroke your hair and I poke about until I feel the bulge and then I dig in with my nails and pull another marble from your skull.

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. 61 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Myla Goldberg, has closed. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $36. ]

This is not a toy. Only the young or the hopelessly commonsensical dip it into liquid soap, content with bubbles. Curl your fingers around the handle, lift it to your mouth, and flick the switch. Say what you long to say. The fan is small, but its aim is true. You will be heard.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jonathan Goldstein, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.25.]

Twenty years after the man’s death, I still can’t rightly say whether my uncle Dwayne was a benevolent old-timey Grandpa Walton type or a secret sadistic performance artist. By the time I met him, Dwayne was a retired concierge with shaky hands. He claimed it was because of the heavy vibrating machines he employed to polish banisters. When he affectionately placed his large hand on your shoulder, it felt like a gentle shower massage. Another thing I still remember about Dwayne was that he always had for us a pocket full of tiny unwrapped butterscotch candies that all stuck together, we suspected, because he’d begun to suck on them and had stopped half way through.

Every year, for each of our birthdays, Dwayne presented us with a toy made to mimic some common household appliance. On the occasion of my cousin Bernice’s birthday, he presented her with a toy hot plate that pretty much looked like a regular hot plate to the last detail— except for the fact it didn’t work.
“Why not just give a real one,” asked Bernice. “It’d be fun to bring it to school and make pancakes for lunch.”

“Real hot plates aren’t for children,” he’d say. “Besides, toy ones are more fun.”

She conceded the point, but really, there was very little that was toy-like about his gifts. One year he gave my brother Charlie a “toy” vacuum cleaner. It was exactly like a real one, weighing about forty pounds. Thing was, it didn’t work. To make it more child-friendly, Dwayne had drawn tremulous polka-dots all over it with his palsied hand. Charlie loved it. Over the years, Dwayne presented us with, among other things, a toy coffee maker (the pot filled with all white gumballs), a toy toilet plunger (wrapped in colourful tinsel), a toy mop (that smelled of real sewage), a toy caulking gun (in a little toy holster he’d made out of red electrical tape), and a toy steak knife set that we used to eat make-believe cutlets.

The toaster, pictured, was given to me for my seventh birthday and it was always one of my favourites. On the day he gave it to me he asked several questions:

“How do you spell ‘roast’?”

“R-o-a-s-t,” I said, proud of what a good speller I was.

“How do you spell ‘coast’?”

“C-o-a-s-t.”

“And how do you spell what you put in a toaster?”

“T-o-a-s-t.”

“Wrong!” he said, the word sounding like an electrical buzzer going off. “B-r-e-a-d. Bread goes into a toaster. Toast comes out.”

But the thing with a toy toaster is that bread goes in and bread comes out. There’s something refreshing and unexpected about that. I remember many afternoons spent gazing into the slot and really hoping that I might see the inside slowly growing orange with heat. So think of this as a kind of exercise machine — not for the tightening of your buttocks or the growth of your biceps — but for the strengthening of a more childlike muscle: your capacity for hope.

Maybe Uncle Dwayne was trying to teach us that things have a value that transcend what they’re actually able to accomplish. But more likely than not, he was unloading junk he no longer needed.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jenny Davidson, has ended. Original price: 12 cents. Final price: $3.58.]

I blame it on the book: a pocket-sized lined notebook with a black matte cover, bound at the left-hand margin and with a band to hold it shut. I used to tuck a pen inside, a pen whose nib was narrow enough to inscribe my tiny Brontë-like lists of calories consumed and exercise taken. It came to be the case that I could no longer eat unless I had documented it beforehand — I remember the first day I noticed that physical reluctance in my esophagus, that hand-dependent hypergraphic inability to eat without having written.

As a child, I loved Beatrix Potter’s story of the two bad mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, who broke into the doll’s house where “the dinner had been bought ready-made, in a box full of shavings. There were two red lobsters, and a ham, a fish, a pudding, and some pears and oranges. They would not come off the plates, but they were extremely beautiful.” Tom and Hunca Munca smashed dinner when they found it could not be eaten; I keep the hot dog to remind myself that food does not have to be beautiful.

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Matthew Battles, has ended. Original price: 29 cents. Final price: $11.50.]

You had passed him at the entrance to the subway station countless times before, not so much sitting as thrown into the corner, his plump bulk indistinct beneath the rags he wore. What was different about this day? What changed conditions made you take notice of him? Was it some look in his eye, a trick of the light? But no, you’ve learned that there was nothing random about such days, when the cards flip and the world changes color. Or everything is random, but the deck was shuffled long ago — the moves determined, the game already played.

You caught a glimpse of his eye; his smile bubbled forth from the foul hood. The sounds of the street receded. “Pick a color,” he said with a strangely rich voice, a voice less like the barker than the circus itself. “Any color!”

“What?” you asked.

“Choose your color!” he replied. “Doesn’t matter which. Your favorite color. Whatever color catches your… your fancy! It will be the right one, I’m sure.”

You shuddered — and then simply, with a shrug, you said, “red.” The man drew from his pockets the small plastic box, the prism mapped with colored blocks and candycanes. He shook it slowly in the plane of the earth’s surface. As if sifting for some artifact. A smile hung in the depths of his hood, and the smile grew. Tiny figures darted up and down the rainbow trail, until the hand — dry, you noted, but somehow shockingly soft — the hand froze when the red man came to rest at the end of the trail. And with a seeming gust of wind (though nothing rustled, nothing shifted), the world went red (though nothing changed).

And now the little box was in your hands; the plump and shapeless man was gone. How had he so quickly transferred it to you? How did he make his vast bulk so thoroughly disappear? Questions that disappeared in a purple mist that faded to red, leaving you with the little rattle-box labyrinth and a growing deadness that flowed down your limbs and into your heart.

The world of acts and things became a rosy shadow. People swept along the sidewalk borne by what currents you knew not; they flowed right through you. Trucks trundled by without a rumble; music rang out soundlessly; the chess players in the courtyard were reduced to calculating clouds. What was vivid and solid, what was real, was invisible to them: candycane fences, molasses swamps, plumdrop trees that sprang up wherever you went. They alone had the power to dazzle — yet they lacked any sweetness; they did not nourish you in your entranced despondency. And so the years streamed on from red to green to yellow to blue. The bright limits of the old life — goals, friends, loved ones — were crowded out by colors that had been present from the dawn of things, determined by a turning of cards that was simple in its unwavering instantiation. For you it was only the turning of the years; the sweets without succor; the endless hopeless shaking of the box.

Until your recent deliverance! That revelation of holy oblivion, it occurred not long ago: there you sat by the turnstiles shaking the little maze-box when reason flooded your mind. The figures — are trapped inside — and yet their movements are — random! Undetermined by past events, with no bearing on the future! And with a clap the colors merged again, great annuary blocks of diffraction colliding and conceding one to another. The misty figures of passers-by resolved, and the flood of consequence rolled like unredeemed refreshment. And the strange talisman, the map of your unbecoming, became all it had ever been: a silly plaything, a game for unconsidered moments, freedom in the swerve. And so, do pass it on; its curse is broken.