SWORD FOR SALE—WARNING—MIGHT BE HAUNTED–$150
This sword is from the 1700s. I got it at an antique store in my memaw’s hometown back in 1984. The person who sold it to me told me to be careful because there is a 90+% chance that it is cursed. Since it’s been in my house my life has descended into pure chaos. My knitting group came over and they all said they could feel a strange energy in my sword room (I have a collection of over 100 swords. This is my only haunted sword). Since I got this sword, about 3 times a week a crucifix will fall off of my wall for no reason. I am 76 years old. I cannot have this cursed item in my house anymore. Please take it off my hands!!
This is my response:
I am very intrigued by your sword, but unfortunately the $150 asking price is far too much. Instead, I would like to offer a trade. I have two unique and haunted pieces that I think might exceed the value of your haunted sword, and which you might then trade or sell, thus allowing you to acquire more non-haunted swords for your knitting bunker.
The Haunted Painting
It is called The Green Man and is about 8 feet by 5 in size. It darkly looms. I had a heart attack in its presence, and then fell into a black and murderous depression as I sat beneath it working on my graphic novel about a green man who goes on a killing spree. If it wasn’t for Netflix, I’m not sure I would have pulled out of that spiral. The paintings bold use of colour and the ominous unsettling mystery that it projects, one that seems everywhere at once, but mostly, in a threatening way, above and behind you, ensures that the Green Man will always make for an amazing, if chilling conversation piece.
The Haunted Squirrel
The squirrel is called Mr. Peanut and he was found hanging from a hydro wire in front of our apartment. It was as if he had just committed suicide. I have no idea why, but I was compelled to bring his carcass down and stuff it. Since then, he has lived on our mantelpiece, but occasionally we find him in different parts of the apartment as if transported by mystical elements we do not understand. For instance, I once woke up from a nightmare yelling ‘SKY DEATH’ with Mr. Peanut on my throat. It’s truly unique piece.
I will trade you both the haunted painting and the haunted squirrel for the haunted sword. It is a good deal.
Let me know.
Michael Murray
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As Rachelle’s birthday is coming up, I thought I’d pick it up, refurbish it in my unique way (I like to paint primitive cowboys on things), and give it to her as a present.
At any rate, I figured the lamp would be safe until we were making our way back from the walk, but as we returned I noticed that some shady guy had picked it up and was looking at it.
Me: Hey, that’s my lamp!
Scavenger: I don’t think so.
Me: Heidi, attack! (Dog does nothing)
Scavenger: Your dog does not obey you.
Me: What exactly is it you’re trying to say by that?
Scavenger: Perhaps you are not the sort of man who commands respect?
Me: Perhaps I don’t want respect, okay?
Scavenger: Perhaps. Heidi, sit. (Dog sits) Good dog. (Now petting her on the head)
Me: Don’t touch my dog.
Scavenger: As you wish.
Me: I also wish for you to give me my lamp back.
Scavenger: It is not your lamp. It was left out with the garbage for anybody to take.
Me: Look, that lamp is a birthday gift for my wife. She’s going blind, you know, and this lamp, the symbolism of this lamp, is going to mean the world to her. It will keep her going.
Scavenger: It would be funny to play poker with you.
Me: Oh, why is that?
Scavenger: You are not a convincing liar. Your lip twitches when you are uncertain of yourself. I think that you dog sense’s that weakness, and that is why she doesn’t listen to you.
Me: I tell you, I do so much for her and she just doesn’t care. Drives me crazy.
Scavenger: Is it because you crave the love from her that you do not feel for yourself? First, you must love yourself before others can truly love you, and with animals, first you must respect yourself before they will respect you.
Me: You are an incredible buzz kill.
Scavenger: I am sorry, but it is God’s will that we are having this talk, and there is no lamp in this life that will ever be able to address your sadness.
He then put the lamp in his two-wheeled shopping cart, said something to the dog in a language I didn’t understand, and walked away.
Cuba, I guess, was a bitter pill. Our frail efforts at visiting the “Real Cuba” as opposed to the “Tourist Cuba” only served to prove that we don’t like the real Cuba, and neither, of course, do most Cubans. We stayed in three different cities, two of which (Havana and Varaderos) are tourist centres, so the crippled, interior poverty of the country was absent from our experience but only hinted at as we took a cab from city to city, passing by thatched roof homes with working donkeys living on the front porch. Our time there was one guided by hustlers, zombies and dead-eyed bureaucrats. Of course they would hate us, seeing in us only a mythic, superhuman capacity– one that was randomly dealt– to change their circumstances without damaging our own in the least. There’s an obscenity to wanting to have a fine lobster dinner in such a context, a very obvious one, and that tension was everywhere, invisible yet humming. We were billboards from the west– white, covered in corporate logos and sufficiently arrogant as to not know a word of Spanish. You know, I wanted to feel some sense of gratitude for my “charity” but what I felt was resentment and entitlement, which is probably the way that it should be. But in each small moment when we encountered what we hoped was the milk of human kindness or just a native curiosity about another human, it quickly revealed itself to be a prosaic, economic transaction.
The world is unfair in many, many ways.
Coffee pedants with laptops sit at the cramped tables and servers who pretend to be more interested in maintaining the integrity of their craft than in customer service, work the bar. As Rachelle and I passed through I noticed a table inhabited by a university-aged couple. Serious and hunched over in distant concentration, they both read thin and difficult paperback books in defiance of the populist culture they so clearly abhorred.
“Those things, those things you’re holding in your hands,” I said, as if astonished, “what are they?”
What I’d hoped might result in some whimsical banter instead produced a short, somewhat prickly conversation about the integrity of books, and as Rachelle and I left with our high-end coffees, I was happy to be heading to People’s, an old school diner that served slutty, speedy breakfasts to people with hangovers.
People’s, an iconic Toronto institution, has been around for 50 years and is run by a candid Greek family. They don’t look like the sorts who are transitioning through the service industry into something else. No, they come in all shapes, sizes and ages, and the women who work the floor are good at their jobs, have large arms that will never see a Spin class and seem generally concerned, even offended, if you don’t finish all your eggs. At each booth there’s a barely functioning little jukebox and a huge laminated menu with all the things you expect, in fact need, to find at a diner. It’s a gem, and Rachelle and I have been going there for as long as we’ve known one another.
Well, on Sunday we found out that it had closed.
And there you go.
The world just went and changed on us.
It’s a melancholy thing, this, and as we stood there in front of the place considering all the other inferior options around us, a small group of like-minded people were making the same discovery and going through the same process. One of these people was a solitary, elderly man with vivid bruises on his arms, an expensive watch and a food-catching mustache. He seemed a little bit lonely, even lost in the face of this news, and so we ended up going out for brunch with him at another local place.
He had a very gentle, slightly effeminate manner and he graciously answered all the questions that we asked, telling us that his journey started in Nebraska before winding it’s way over the course of 80+ years through Little Rock, Grand Rapids and Pittsburgh, amongst others, before finding himself in Toronto and sitting across from us on a Sunday afternoon. He told us that he’d found a kind of peace in Toronto, and as he said that there was some sadness in his eyes.
We all tried to order the same things that we would have had at People’s, but it just wasn’t the same, and as we shook hands and promised to see one another again after the meal, we knew that we wouldn’t, that our time, too, had passed.
