Object No. 76 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Terese Svoboda, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $15.50.]

You are fitting it in between the toilet paper and the shaver accessories, on top of the wart remover and the nose hair clippers. You say, tentacles for moon-people — this is where they store them.

Prehensile is prejudice, I say. But I’m not really agreeing.

Or a vehicle for invasion unwarned by Welles? you say. They’re everywhere and they’re transmitting.

Maybe, I say. Or maybe it’s for votives. The slimmer candles. Ancient Mesopotamian gods worshipped by Macy’s the II.

This is not a competition, you say. You kiss me.

Roaches crawl in and out and over an item like this, I say, unpacking it by nightfall with even less in the agreement department, more fatigue.

Roaches R us, you say, shaking the object so I can hear no little dry somethings. Whosoever finds parking for this baby will be blessed. All the bad is purged. Think of the ark-like covenant, the two-by-two or else, a pleasant symmetry where every inhabitant wears a stiff white beard.

I watch you stand it on the porcelain edge overlooking the Niagra-ed sink. No way breakage won’t happen. You darken your look as if that’s a dare. If the camel’s back stood ready, I’ve piled it on. Inspect that motif, I quicktalk, flowers in actual color, veritable domestic bliss.

If you say so, you say. All hygiene goes haywire. At least you aim to miss.

You are sweeping bits into a sweeper-upper-into, some of them floral. The Maltese Falcon, you say, somebody’s got to see inside it.

Noir toothbrush, I say.

Resuming normal speech but avoiding the bathroom — it had eyes, you cry — you find matching flora and defenestrate it all over our bed, making it, as it were, a bed of roses. That’s what I think life is, you say.

We take to it.

[NOTE: The object we are selling is NOT broken. — eds.]