The Red And The Gold Poem by Denis Martindale

As I looked at the auction catalogue, I noticed one famous celebrity wanted to sell several antiques. Among these, I paid special attention to one item beyond its summary details. The item I wanted had a picture that was worth a thousand words and this auction article was given a full catalogue page instead of the usual half page. So I knew that it indicated that a much higher price was expected. My business partner had received the same catalogue and he liked the same item and we were willing to invest together to increase our chances.

The day arrived and we examined the antique desktop. It had exquisite gold leaf decoration and the drawers and the top opened smoothly. The tiny drawers were also professionally designed and it was also quite rare to have a spare set included in such an auction. Each tiny drawer was in a contrasting deep red and the wood was a hard wood to prolong its life as if meant to last for centuries.

As the back panel was examined, it was a pleasure to see that there wasn't a single scratch on it, as if this were a museum piece and had never actually been sold and moved from the celebrity's mansion until now. A truly unusual feature was that the auction included several close-up pictures of what the underside looked like and that confirmed the museum impression, too. The item was exquisite even if the maker's name remained unknown.

Our on-site auction analysis confirmed the asking price and a lot more. Thankfully, we won the auction because of the low attendance on the day. Our bids weren't deliberately fast to create any urgency at all. So we just upped the price every time by a hundred dollars at a time. Finally, we had beaten the others and still stayed within our budget.

Once delivered to our High Street store, the item was on show in the front window but only after we had discovered the secret that changed our good fortunes forever. A secret compartment revealed several highly collectable stamps which we sold off as soon as the valuations came through. Without my partner's help I would have missed out on a fortune!

Denis Martindale, for the 12th of March 2025.

This short story required a suitable image and I learned that some of the AI resources can use the poetry or text and create a text to image prompt. So that's how I got to use AI for a beautiful image to add to this story example.