Do you still go to garage sales? I love garage sales. I've always walked around my neighborhood looking for garage sales - ever since I was young. I used to hold my Mema's hand, and she'd let me look at everything; look don't touch.

Most garage sales sell the same things, odd decorations, baby clothes, board games with missing pieces and VCR tapes are so common I don't even see that stuff. Assorted collections of knickknacks, tchotchkes, frou-frous, bottles and boomers don't catch my eye, perfectly arranged and dusted every time, shimmering in the cool weather chosen for the yard display.

I see the tangled mess of electronics and my eyes scan them for useful scrap. I look at the broken Radio Shack devices and old-school RC. I buy walkie-talkies that have no partner. I count out my change for pairs of leaky rechargeable batteries. I walk away with well-used kits for learning how to wire lights. A Night Bright with a few panels missing is my treasure.

When it's Saturday and the sun is shining I hop on my scooter and put on my cracked shades and my fingerless gloves and play Macklemore's Thrift Shop as I roll through the good neighborhood and the bad ones too. I stop at every lemonade stand, that's how I stay hydrated. I stop at every yard sale, every sidewalk sale and every block party I can find. I find things lost to time.

Then came the holy grail, or so I thought. I just stared at the 3D printer with its cracked glass siding and angled gantry. Rolls of filament hung from it like King Tutankhamun's wrappings. Half of a shipwreck lay melted on its bed and the extruder was pointing at it in a timeless pose saying:

"Look what I made, bruh! Gonna buy me? I'm only eighty dollars."

I nodded and spoke to it out loud, "I'm going to buy you, but I've only got Jackson, gotta go to the ATM."

The wiry old gnome who was selling it stared rheumily at me as I walked with a slight skip toward him and his little metal change box. I held out the twenty and pointed at the 3D printer.

"Will you hold that for me, if I give you twenty now?"

He nodded and took my money and slipped it into a slot on his metal box, freeing one hand from how he was holding it clutched in his lap defensively. "I close up at three. But I'll leave it out fer ya. Just put the money into my mail slot."

"Sure thing." I agreed. I offered him my hand so we could shake on it and he smiled toothlessly and we had ourselves a bargain.

"Just one thing, though, the slicers don't work with this. Gotta use the helmet. And one more thing, never give it a bad dream, could be disastrous. You don't have bad dreams, do you?"

"Uh, no." I felt weird but I told him it was safe with me - no bad dreams.

I took my scooter to the ATM and got out some cash and went back. By the time I had got there it was a quarter past three already and sure enough he had closed up shop for the day. Everything was gone except my 3D printer sitting next to an oil stain on the weedy driveway. I walked past it to the front door of his hovel and pushed the money through the mail slot as agreed.

Then I went to claim my prize, loading it into the basket of my scooter and rolling away with a crazy grin on my face. I thought I had the biggest score of my life, I thought it was charmed. I was so sure that from now on, life was going to be perfect.

I had looked at it already for a brand name or a serial number and found only some odd runic symbols. I'd thought it was some kind of foreign manufacture. When I got home I went on YouTube on my phone and watched all the unboxing videos for 3D printers, trying to figure out which one I had. After a while I gave up on trying to guess and started fixing it up to use it.

I had a pretty good idea how to get it started, using the dial to turn it on, and when I did it just sat there humming idly, making a kind of jagged purring noise. There was no USB slot, no disk, no input screen - nothing. The only input seemed to be an odd-looking hat with lots of wires wrapped together and plugged into the input for the gantry and extruder.

Slowly, with a weird feeling, I put the control helmet on. I stared at the half-melted shipwreck. It was supposed-to-be that default tugboat toy that every printer knows how to make. It looked tired and ruined and somehow perilous. I imagined what it was supposed to look like and as I watched, concentrating, the bed started swinging, the gantry adjusted itself and the extruder went to work, unspooling the blue filament to make repairs.

It hovered in place, moving where I wanted it to go, needing no support structure or coordinate lists. Instead, it just worked with the model already on the bed, caressing it and squirting all over it until it started to look, well, fixed. Somehow it had not only fixed the toy, but it had done so just by my thoughts alone. I was stunned.

I took off the apparatus and started pacing, completely bewildered. This was no ordinary 3D printer, I realized. It was something entirely different. I ate some ramen and went to bed, dreaming of all the things I could dream up and make. I was going to need more filament - a lot more.

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I went to the library on Monday and got online so that I could try and find out more about it. The sea of all of humankind's knowledge didn't have a single mention of such a device anywhere I could find. Exhausted, I went home and sat and stared at it.

The filament I had ordered arrived and I went and added it to the roll-o-dex of empty spools, noticing it could take thirteen of them at a time. I wondered if that could be a way to figure out what I had, but no longer really cared. I just wanted to play with it.

The first thing I did was complete my Warhammer 30K collection, just by reading a Workshop catalog and imagining each figure I wanted. I was laughing by the end of it. Board games with missing pieces were already beneath my level. I wanted more.

I made Mandalorian armor, Halo helmets and telescoping lightsabers. I crafted My Little Pony models with rainbow manes and tails that looked like fiber. I picked it up and found it indistinguishable from something bought in a toy store. Amazed I wondered what else it could make.

All night I was sitting there making things with moving parts, after realizing my 3D printer had no conceivable limitations. It worked at lightning speed, making things that I knew should take hours or days in just seconds or minutes. It skipped steps, needing no structure, intuitively working with my mind to make anything I wanted.

As I sat there, the filament I'd ordered running low, I began to nod off. I'd sat there for nearly eighteen hours making a pile of things. My mind and body were tired, and I should have turned it off and gotten some rest.

I don't normally remember my dreams.

When I woke up, something was wrong. I was lying on the floor and there was smoke and sparks coming out of my 3D printer. I got the spray can of fire away from my kitchen and emptied it. Then I stared at what it had made.

At first, I felt only a vague chill, my flesh creeping into goosebumps. I just looked at the awfulness knowing it somehow, from some deep part of my mind. It was the idol of some ancestral echo, something in all of us, some kind of hideous thing from before we existed, something at the root of all that is wrong and vile.

I felt sick, as I stared at it. I would describe the nightmare on the bed, but it was like a brown stain, a nasty little leftover of pure evil. It was made with a blend of all the colorful filament, braided and melted and oozing together into a purplish--beige color, a kind of slimy brown, but not a good kind. No, this was unlike any color I'd every seen. It was wrong, unnatural and drove a spike of icy fear into my heart, just from looking at it.

The toilet hugged me and took my sickness like a kindness. I flushed it, noticing how it was a cleaner and healthier shade that the color of the awful thing that should not be. It occurred to me I should flush the idol, but I worried it wouldn't fit. Instead, I made a fire in a coffee tin and went to go drop it in, hoping to burn it. As I approached the 3D printer I felt a new terror.

Whatever it was it had grown, somehow, and changed shape, as though it were alive in some way. I didn't want to touch it so I took up a knife from the kitchen and used it to pry it from the bed, popping it off onto the floor. There it rolled or wiggled or whatever it was doing, but all the way into the dark corner behind my old couch.

I nervously walked towards it, knife raised defensively, sweat on my brow. Had it actually moved? I was already wondering if it had. I pulled the couch away and didn't see it. I leaned down, slowly, and looked.

"There you are." I said and tried to fish it out from where it was caught under the couch, using the blade of the knife. My efforts only pushed it further back. I felt really weird, and scared, as though it was trying to stay in the darkness.

I lifted the couch and moved it off of it, and then it started to roll back into its black sanctuary. "Oh Hell no!" I shouted and took the knife and stabbed at it, chipping the hardwood floor and then sticking it, the blade getting the tip bent on the supposedly soft filament. It emitted a kind of chittering scowling noise and escaped the blade's bite to retreat quickly back under my couch.

I had jumped up, dropping the knife, breathing hard and eyes wide, staring where it had gone. I was so scared I just stood there for a few minutes. I looked to the open door where my tin can fire was burning low. Then I looked back at the 3D printer.

If it could make such a monstrous creature, perhaps it could make something to protect me. I went to it and put on the helmet one last time. I imagined its counterpart, a warrior of the same size, strong enough to use the kitchen knife and take that thing to the flames. I concentrated, using the link between me and the machine to create the enemy of my enemy.

When the model was born it saluted me. I blinked in surprise as it leaped to the floor and ran for the blade, just as I had intended. With trepidation, I watched, as it brandished the knife and went under the couch, into the darkness.

With horror I listened as they shrieked and danced in the darkness under there. Then, wounded and victorious, the slayer dragged the awful squirming thing from where it had tried to hide, and into the light of day. They crossed the floor to the flames, as my heart beat so fast I thought I could die of fright.

My defender lifted its opponent overhead and then jumped together with it into the flames, which rose around them as they melted, shrieking horribly. When it was over I looked at the 3D printer where it smoldered and smoked, the gantry falling off of it to the floor and the filaments wildly unspooling. The bed cracked and fell into two pieces and the whole thing was just a fried mess of tangled wires. Even the helmet, which I had thankfully removed, was sizzling and ruined.

I sat down on my couch where it remained at an odd angle in the middle of my studio. I started to cry in relief and from the acrid smoke. When I felt it was truly over I lay down and rested.

When Saturday came around, I took that weekend off. It took me some time to get over what had happened, and to live with the ordeal I had experienced. I'd had a 3D printer, one with unique properties, and I'll never know where it came from. I wasn't going to go back and ask about it. He'd warned me not to give it a bad dream. I sighed, as I realized the only way to fully recover was to get back to what I love doing.

Mema would be proud of me, the way I got back into the garage sale game after such a fright.

It wasn't until the end of the month, though, that I finally got back on my scooter. I had a couple Hamiltons and a Lincoln. I put on my headphones and started up Thrift Store.

I rode out of my neighborhood, looking for the next sweet bargain.