The Curiosity Shop
- Oct 29, 2025
- 3 min read
by Connor Harding
Please understand — what we sell here is not our own.
What we sell here wears itself drop-waisted, accordion-pleated in rust, gradients of blacklisted thrift rubble. A world of grandma’s unwanteds, cannibalized at the edges by cricket teeth. What we are is little more than the four walls that form us, sets of uranium glass windows, the rolling tongue of I-80 West, small lots of gravel papillae. We got your great-uncle’s lever-action rifle on clearance. We have DVDs and Vinyl sleeves and diner receipts with autographs of dubious origin. We keep chicken’s feet, pickled to their talons, in a jar. You know that poem about the calf with two heads? It lives here now, on a taxidermy mount, counting Texaco signs in the rafters through two sets of formaldehyde pupils. We offer no goods in this place, only what is kept in stock. No services other than their exchange, a passage of goodwill and spare change — processes made small enough to fit in a palm. We are American at every moment. We believe there is nothing else worth being.
We collect merchandise from both front and back doors, watch faceless dolls and prayer beads tumble into the soot bed of our furnace box. We wave to the magpies on the roof — respect nature’s eye for larceny, the way things fall into your hands and stay there. We stuff rifle casings with confetti and display them in glass boxes to prove points nobody is making. Children we will never see again suck the lead out of old necklace charms and make grey-mouthed remarks about the way we smell the same as woodrot or stillwater, materials that stew in nothing but themselves. On days we arrive late, we do not open at all, and instead sit, palms in our laps, on those shoulders of highway people travel when there is no better place worth going. We stick our thumbs out to the sun and wait for something to pass until UV cooks our fingertips like spam.
We shelve magnets next to electronics, let mice hold court in our linens. We crack open soda cans from the previous century and find they taste only of water. We drink to remember what we otherwise wouldn’t — we get awfully thirsty at times. We sweep the floors of this house of odd ends and watch caulk grind like salt grain from its joints. We are very aware that few things can become greater than the shape of their containers. We understand the value of something that keeps. We imagine anything kept can keep us right back. Because being an American means knowing what a dollar costs and spending it anyway. Discarding all you own is to give the magpies their due. We find it important to make mistakes of every kind and to learn nothing from them — so long as there is space available somewhere close to the window, among knickknacks and animal bones.
Please understand. The last novelties we’ll ever sell are the ones that can be seen all the way from the road.
Connor Harding is a fiction writer and recent graduate of George Mason University’s MFA in Creative Writing. His works have been published in Black Warrior Review, HAD, Flash Frog, Crow & Cross Keys, Bullshit Lit, Barren Magazine, the Maine Review, and BOOTH. He is originally from Youngstown Ohio, and primarily writes stories set in the Midwest.
