A small tale for our times, being my entry for the "Love the Ones..." story event.
May we all find our own lamp.
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Duster in hand, Tammy looked around the shuttered shop. Its owner, her uncle, was down with the virus, leaving her in charge of Azdem's Antiques.
Conveniently, the job came with a small furnished apartment above the store. Actually, given that the university had with almost no warning padlocked classrooms, labs, libraries - and residences - for the duration, it was more than just convenient. The offer from her uncle couldn't have come at a better time.
It was a good deal for him, too, she knew, more than just an act of charity for his late sister's spawn. She'd worked here last summer and knew her way around the store. Moreover, while one of the unacknowledged effects of locking down the city had been a sharp drop in residential break-ins, there'd been a commensurate rise in commercial burglaries. With the shop closed until 'whenever', having somebody in the building all the time just made sense.
Then one morning he'd phoned in with a sore throat. And the Test -- the one with a capital T, the only one which mattered these days -- had in due course come back positive and Rick had moved himself into quarantine.
She'd been terrified at first, even though they'd not spent much time in close proximity. The terror had slowly faded to mere anxiety as the days went by, something she could push down under her radar for most of the day.
Nights, of course, were something else.
"I'm sorry, but you're on your own, kid" he'd said to her over the phone. "If you run out of things to do, you can always start sorting out those three triwalls of stuff in the loading bay. They got dropped off just before all this exploded and I didn't have time to do more than sign the receipt before we were ordered to close the doors to customers."
"What's in them?" she asked, curious. This could either be total scutwork or it could be a lot of fun.
"Estate sale," the older man replied. "An old lady's heirs wanting to empty her house to get it on the market. The pictures I saw, well, call it a mix of antiques and junque." The 'que' was an old inside joke. "You tell me - you're the archeologist, right?"
He'd bent forward and began coughing before looking up, his eyes red. "I gotta go, Tammy. The doc says I'll be fine eventually -- probably - but I'm not going anywhere for awhile. Look after the place, OK?"
"Will do, Uncle Rick. You get better, OK?"
His face on her telephone nodded, began coughing again. His hand came up in a slight wave before the screen went blank.
She'd remained healthy, thank God, her unease at having been in close quarters with him subsiding with each healthy day.
Still, while relieved to have dodged that bullet, Tammy was going certifiably crazy with loneliness and boredom.
You and about six billion others around the lanet,
she grunted to herself.
Tammy was a social animal. She was essentially alone for the first time in her life and was not enjoying it at all. Rick was her only relative and was too still ill to talk. She'd broken up with her boyfriend at Christmas -- no loss, truth be told, but it left a big gap. And yes, she had friends she could chat with, but it wasn't the same.
I need a hug,
she told herself as she started to dust the shelves in the cluttered store.
No -- more than just one. I need a
lot
of hugs.
The only people she'd seen since getting here were the nervous masked grocery store clerks behind their plastic screens when she shopped for herself and Rick. Every few days, she'd leave a box of food on his front porch, ring the doorbell and step away to wait for him to shuffle to the door. The sound of his coughing always got to the door at least 30 seconds before he did.
He was still on his feet and always waved in thanks when he took the food in, but Tammy was worried for him. He looked terrible, frankly. What would she do one day if he didn't come to the door? That was another thing to fret over.
She caught sight of herself in an old freestanding mirror. She ran the duster over its face, then paused and turned back and forth to examine herself.
She had a fairly cute face, but nothing all that inspiring. Her bright china-blue eyes were her best feature, but the list began there and ended there. Her figure could most kindly be called 'slender'. An A-cup bra was generous for her - when she could be bothered to wear one - and her lack of hips had been her despair since grade-school adolescence. Meh - it was like she'd been on vacation or something when they handed out proper womanly figures.
Not that it matters
, she thought to herself, gloomily.
It's not like I'm going to meet anybody here in Lockdown Central.
Finishing today's dusting, she went in search of the triwalls -- heavy, thick-walled cardboard boxes, each the size of a small desk. She'd been putting it off, but today was the day.
The boxes, each on its own wooden pallet, filled most of the delivery bay. Tammy picked up the bill of lading and flopped down into an old sofa her uncle kept there for just such moments. After a few moments of flipping through the pages, she tossed it aside as utterly uninformative. She pushed her hair back off her face, rose, found a boxcutter and opened the first box, full to the top with paper-wrapped items.
She paused after an hour. There was no air-conditioning in the loading bays and, early as it was, the day was becoming hot. Sun was pouring through the dusty windows on the rollup door and Tammy was already perspiring.
Well, there was nobody around to laugh or be shocked, was there?
She wiggled out of her jeans, leaving her dressed in a long t-shirt, panties and sandals.
Better.
By the end of the third hour, with unwrapped bits and pieces stacked and scattered around the loading dock, it was pretty clear to her that most of the stuff was indeed 'junque' -- mainly household effects of no particular value or interest. Much, she thought, would wind up donated to the Sally Ann when Rick returned.
But not all.
There were several pages of hand-written scribblings she thought would interest her uncle -- initial research notes for President U.S. Grant's history of the Civil War, if the note on the wrapping was to be believed. That was impressive enough, but what boosted it to the top of her list was a scrawled note on the first page addressed to 'Sam C'. It was a matter of history that Sam Clemens -- better known as Mark Twain - had helped the dying Grant finish his memoirs.
Two-for-one!
she thought to herself with no little excitement. This business was like that -- a lot of trash with the odd gem, just enough to keep it interesting.
She re-wrapped the old papers very carefully and sealed the manuscript in a box for her uncle's eventual inspection.
The rest of it was however pretty much a waste of time -- kitschy statuettes, faded prints, old romance novels, a couple of stone ashtrays, elderly lampshades. The old woman apparently had had a thing for owls, for there were 17 of them -- statues, framed photos, even a stuffed owl on a stand. And oil lamps -- dozens of those. There were kerosene lamps of assorted sizes and designs, locomotive lamps and one she suspected had been designed for whale-oil. A couple of old clocks -- not old enough to be valuable, but not new enough to run. Collector plates. Dozens of souvenir teaspoons, complete with racks.
Junque.
No doubt Uncle Rick could find a market for some of it and maybe those research notes would allow him to break even, but it was still one heck of a way for an almost-MA in Archeology to be spending her time. Still, she made notes, diligently assembling a list for her uncle's return. It wasn't, after all, like she had anything else to do.
Tammy leaned back, twisted herself from side to side to relieve the stress in her back. She grimaced at a dull 'click', but smiled at the relief it gave her.
Bending over the waist-high edge of the mostly-empty last box, she ran her fingers through a layer of crumpled packing paper on the bottom. Nothing. She shoveled the paper around, much of it spilling out onto the floor where it would eventually be loaded into the bin outside the loading door. She was about to give up when her fingertips brushed against something solid. She fumbled through the mess, found it again.
Her hand emerged into the light and the girl gasped at what she held.
This
was
worth her attention.
If it was real.
Roman-era volute-style oil lamps were common enough, she knew. There'd been actual factories back then churning them out, by the thousands and tens of thousands. Enough had survived that you could even buy them on eBay now for a surprisingly modest price. But most - almost all -- had been made of tera cotta or pottery.
This
one had a solid weight to it and the patina of old age on its bronze surface.
The size of a medium grapefruit squashed flat, it was only a couple of fingerbreadths high. There was a small rounded handle on one side and a short beak or nozzle on the other, with shallow fluting around the edge for decoration. The centre of the body was pushed in to form a hollow, with a small hole to allow the lamp to be refilled with olive oil. A second hole in the nozzle allowed a linen wick to be inserted.
All but the cheapest of such lamps, she knew, had been decorated with some form of image on the centre hollow -- typically gods, goddesses, warriors, animals, fruit or flowers. Most such decorations were, given the nature of the materials, fairly crude. Tammy turned this one against the light to see what it was.
And almost dropped it.
Tammy was no blushing virgin. She liked boys, liked sex (OK,
had
liked sex, twice) and watched her share of 'erotica' at tequila-fuelled parties and during sleepless, lonely nights. It had its place and she accepted that.
But finding it on a 2,000-year-old artifact was unexpected.
Yet such things had certainly been mentioned in her texts. The Romans had after all been more relaxed in their attitudes towards sex; indeed, explicit sexual imagery permeated the entire culture.
Even the most respectable homes, for instance, had a brazenly phallic column or Herma proudly displayed outside their front door. Brothels painted prices and specialties over their entrances on public streets. Married couples often had erotic images painted on bedroom walls in hopes of improving fertility and many artifacts from Pompeii had been locked away for centuries by scandalized modern authorities.
Could this be one such?
she wondered.
The image was amazing in its realism; the depiction of the act was extraordinarily precise, superbly lifelike in its craftsmanship.
