Auction Tag by Travis Park

The estate auction lasted all morning. Most people came for the tools. The tables in the machine shed filled quickly with extension cords, socket sets, coffee cans of bolts, and all the other things a lifetime gathers without meaning to.

Near the end, the auctioneer held up a taped cardboard box.

“Five dollars. Who’ll start me at five?”

Nobody bid.

He shrugged, cut the tape with a pocketknife, and tipped the contents onto a folding table. Hundreds of paper tags spilled across the surface. The kind tied to items before an auction. Each carried a number written in black marker.

People wandered over to kill time before the final lots. A woman picked one up and laughed.

“This one has my name on it.”

A few others checked.

Then someone else found theirs.

Then another.

Teachers. Farmers. The pharmacist. The mail carrier. Every tag bore the name of someone from town.

The auctioneer reached down and selected one at random. His expression changed.

It was his name.

Silence spread through the shed.

Someone noticed the dates.

Written beneath each name was a single date.

Most were years away. Some were decades away.

One man stood frozen, staring at his tag. The date on it was tomorrow.

The auction ended early.

No one bought the box.

By evening, photographs of the tags were circulating all over town. People compared names and dates. Some treated it like a joke. Others refused to discuss it at all.

The next afternoon, the man whose tag listed tomorrow’s date failed to arrive at work. Three days later, search crews found his pickup in a flooded creek.

After that, the photographs disappeared. The box disappeared too. People stopped mentioning the auction except in lowered voices.

Years passed.

When my mother died, I spent a weekend cleaning out her house. On the top shelf of a hall closet sat a stack of old cookbooks she hadn’t opened in years.

As I flipped through one, a paper tag slid onto the floor. The handwriting was instantly familiar.

My name.

A date.

Next Tuesday.

For a long time I stared at it, trying to convince myself it was a coincidence.

Then I turned it over.

On the back, in smaller letters than I first noticed, were four words:

Lot closes at noon.

Travis Park is a writer and artist from Noblesville, Indiana. His poetry has received awards from the Indiana Poetry Society and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and his work has been published in literary journals and anthologies. This is his first fiction submission to Free Flash Fiction.

Photo by Eva Bronzini at Pexels

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