world in a box

I wrote this story as a model for my students. The assignment: write a creative, engaging story that begins and ends with these boring lines: “He/she/it was in the box” and “He/she/it was out of the box.”

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She was in the box.

The darkness had slammed around her so quickly, with such an unexpected jolt, that she’d been about to shriek out of alarm and fear, instinctively expecting her mother to come and make whatever had happened to her okay. But before she could cry out, an image flashed in her mind. A minute ago she’d been crawling across the carpet to reach the comfy brown chair, where the massive box had been resting, with its vast gaping hole facing her, and as she had reached to pull herself up to stand and investigate this looming box, she had bumped it with her hand, and that’s when the darkness had exploded forward to engulf her, making the room suddenly disappear. But the room was not gone – she was inside the box. It had fallen down when she had bumped it, and now she was on the inside.

This jolt of comprehension stunned her out of crying. The fact that she was not crying, here in this unknown stifling darkness, stunned her even more. She did not need to cry. She was not lost. The room was not gone. She was inside the box, and the box was inside the room. She knew exactly where she was.

Curiously she reached forward. Yes, there was the familiar flat grittiness of cardboard boxes beneath her fingertips, even though she could not see it. Her nails made a hollow scraping noise that sounded like the noise of other boxes, but was much louder here in the dark. She scraped at the cardboard several times for the sheer fun of it, the recognizable scratching sound that now filled her eardrums from all around her.

The darkness was warm in a still, heavy way, like blankets. When she stopped scratching at the side of the box she could hear her own breathing, small and regular. Other noises were gone – the ceiling fan, Kermit the Frog on TV, her older brothers playing guns outside, her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen – except that they weren’t completely gone. If she stayed very still, she found that she could still hear Kermit’s voice, tinny and distant, and beyond that, now a whisper, mother laughing in the kitchen. These noises sounded funny to her, as if she were large and they had shrunken to the size of ants.

She turned her head to see what Kermit was doing, but saw nothing there but darkness. That was right – she was in the box. She could hear Kermit, but not see him. As Kermit’s voice gabbled on, she imagined his face, his googly eyes, his skinny arms, and the way his mouth flapped open and shut. Here in the dark it was easy. It was like her own TV.

A soft click told her that her mother was finished talking on the phone. Seconds passed, and then her mother’s shrunken voice said, “Rachael?” But she was in the dark of the box, and her mother could not see her. She giggled. After awhile her mother’s whisper, now from a different direction, said again, “Rachael?” It was like peekaboo, except this time she was in this warm darkness, and she giggled again.

She turned her head in the direction she guessed her mother’s voice had last been and saw that the darkness there was a gentler gray. Above her head, a few miniscule threads of light were entering the box, coming from a point that looked like a star, or brighter – a pinhole sun. She reached up for it and found that she could barely, just barely, see her fingers and the top of her hand. They looked detached to her, just a hand hovering in the darkness, and she wiggled her fingers and rotated her wrist to see how the light played along her skin.

Her mother’s voice, still repeating her name, was taking on a higher pitch. She turned her head again in its direction when, without warning, the box shifted with a soft scrape, and a sudden panorama of light and color and sound and shapes jumped up on all sides around her like magic – familiar to her, yet new, vibrant, calling out for her curiosity and exploration.

Her mother, setting the box beside the comfy brown chair, said something warm to her, but she was looking at the box that had once seemed so massive and looming, and now looked like a regular large box. She knew what it contained – the darkness, the scraping fingernail noises, the hushed voices of Kermit and her mother, the pinhole sun – and she knew she could find them again, sometime. But not now, not immediately.

She was out of the box, and the world was beckoning.

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copyright © 2002, michael w. hobson