Lutheran Mutual - The auctioned herloom.

Sarah couldn't believe it had come to this. Borbert's pelvis had been shattered in a freak gardening mishap, and without his income from his job at the inflatable furniture factory, their future looked uncertain. They had come to face the cruel truth… that they would have to sell off some of their heirlooms, like the football shaped phone, or that book of carpet samples they had found together on that donkey trip through the Ozarks. But the sacrifice that stung the most – that threatened to bring her to tears – was the sale of their flanged globe.

She remembered the day that she and Borbert had bought the flanged globe. They had gone on a second honeymoon to Brown County, and stayed at a little bed and breakfast run by that adorable old woman with the dueling scar and the club foot. It had been autumn, and the leaves were just beginning their seasonal chlorophylophiboc transformation. They found the little globe shop inbetween the sexual marionette shop and a store where a grizzled farmer made broken apple crates.

Sarah and Brobert had decided they should buy some kind of globe to remember their trip, and the globe man had shown them many varieties. There were ridged globes and isoplanar globes, and they had settled on a glorious knobbed fur globe, but then they saw the one they had to have. The flanged globe. Brobert loved flanges, and Sarah simply adored oblate spheroids like the one at the end of the flange. Oblate but not quite ovoid. It was like the little globeman had made this one especially for them Sarah couldn’t help but feel that it was meant to be.

The flanged globe had been with them for years. It had held the ashes of their former pangolin, Abbey, until they read that pangolin ashes made an especially good fertilizer, so into the garden Abbey went.

The flanged globe had held Brobert’s umbrella when they lived in Seattle for that long summer, trying to get the rights to make a sequel to Wargames. But Ally Sheedy had bowed out at the last minute, owing to her growing relationship with Johnny 5, so Seattle had been a bust.

The flanged globe had been there after their house had burned down. Somehow it had escaped the flames, probably because of the flange. Such an efficient heat dissipator.

Brobert and Sarah had turned down so many offers to buy their flanged globe, but it held too many memories. They wouldn’t sell out. Now, with Brobert in the hospital’s Baffling Injury ward and their nest egg of nuisance lawsuit money drying up, the flanged globe was just another item in a dusty cardboard box at the emergency pelvis auction. She was wistfully running a finger down the graceful lines of the flange one last time when a voice behind her gasped “Is that a flanged globe? I’ve been looking for one like that for months!” She had a hand like Saruman and seemed to really love the flanged globe. Sarah had a feeling the claw woman would give it a good home. First thing in the morning, Sarah would make a call to Lutheran Mutual to begin making a sound financial plan to assure they’d never have to sell the next flanged globe they bought.

However, there was a store down town selling bulbed toruses that were simply dear. Maybe it was time to begin rebuilding her dreams.