There is an uncharacteristic chill in the air that hints at the coming of autumn, but for all intents and purposes, we are in the belly of summer, a vicious animal this year, plastering us with sweat and digesting us slowly, painfully slowly.
I’ve always hated summer.
It’s one of those facts you can never admit, like wanting to sleep in on Christmas or preferring vanilla over chocolate. There’s no reason these things should make you misanthropic, but our culture has written that vanilla, late holiday mornings and temperate weather are for the joyless. That’s fine, I suppose. “The more the merrier” never rang true for me anyway.
The chill air is an aperitif to the cigarette that dangles between my fingers. A long drag, a crackling exhale, a dry river cooling the back of my throat. I’m sitting on the back patio of my small apartment in Denver. The complex is a concrete block that looks out into an alley commonly frequented by stray cats and stray humans in need of a place to piss. Mercifully, the cold air mutes the smell, making this dirty corner seem almost livable.
I hear a thumping on my front door, steady strikes against the thin panel. I can hear the pounding shoot straight through my thin walls, back through the brick and onto the patio where I’m alone with my cigarette. Sound has always reverberated through my living space unobstructed, another price to pay for living anywhere affordable. I pinch the bridge of my nose and lift the cigarette to my chapped lips for a nip of nicotine. The steady thump subsides. Door-to-door Evangelist? Vacuum salesmen? Subpoena? I mull over the possibilities while studying the soft ember at the end of my cigarette, a small orange star shrouded in grey ash.
Another volley of knocks strikes my front door. I roll my eyes, kicking my feet forward and stand up.
“Alright, alright!” I holler, sliding open my screen door and padding back through my messy apartment. The rapping subsides before I make it to the front door. I pause, looking through the peephole, but no one is there. My heart suddenly goes lopsided, the beats uneven, hesitant. I don’t know why I’m nervous, I just am. I crack the door open cautiously. The same cold air brushes past me, but feels less welcome now, it’s morphed into the icy fingers of a fortune teller about to warn me of some tragedy in my stars. I swing the door fully open, the full view of the street spreading out ahead of me.
Nothing, no one. I poke my head out and look around, but there’s no trace of my visitor, no one ambling down the streets, not even a sleepwalking dog owner or drunkard searching for an 11 am dive cracking open its doors. As I lean forward, my foot hits it. I look down and I see the box.
The box is both fascinating and somehow non-descript; a smooth, shiny black cube roughly large enough to fit a basketball. There is an index card on top, the kind that college students use to cram for tests. In black ink, deeply carved into the paper with ballpoint pen, are the words, “Caution: He Bites...”
I crouch down beside the box and pick up the notecard, flipping it over in my hands. There’s nothing written on the other side. I take another drag of my cigarette. The box shudders and I stumble backward.
“Jesus fuck!” I yelp to no one. The box stills itself. I reach my hand out cautiously and touch the top of it. There are no latches, no seams, no apparent way for something to get in or out of the box. I wait for another shudder or movement, but the box remains unchanged in front of me.
“Hello?” a muffled voice finally calls from within the shiny black casing. “I’m stuck! Hello?”
“What the fuck…” I breathe to myself, staring at it incredulously. I put my ear against the top surface.
“Hello?? Hello? Is someone out there?”
“Yeah, I am,” I answer dumbly, and tap softly on the box before putting out my cigarette against the doorway, smearing a small trail of black down the frame before tossing the butt into a cement bowl that had once had aspirations to be a birdbath, but had sadly resigned itself to a pool of stagnant brown water and my occasional cigarette litter. I keep my ear against the box, trying to hear anything. There’s a vague shifting sound and a long pause.
“Well…can you let me out?” he asks weakly, hopelessly. The earnestness in his voice throws me. I look back at the word scrawled deeply into the notecard. Caution: He Bites.
“What are you?” I ask incredulously.
“What kind of question is that?” the voice in the box asks, the timbre in his voice hovering between amused and annoyed. “I’m a person.”
I stare at the box for a moment and smile. “No you’re not.”
“What do you mean, I’m not? What are you?”
“Well, I definitely am a person, and I promise you, you’re not big enough to be a person. Not unless you’ve been shrink-rayed or something.”
“If I’ve been what? Are you high?”
I pick up the box and shake it gently.
“Jesus Christ! What are you doing!? Stop that!”
“You’re in a box,” I inform the voice, then after a moment without response, I add, “It’s not a very big box.”
“I can’t see anything. Maybe I am in a box. Where are you?”
“Denver.” I reply. I look up, suddenly self-conscious about speaking to a strange, possibly very tiny man in a box on my front stoop. I glance around quickly. “Look I’m gonna bring you inside. Promise you won’t curse me or bite me or whatever?”
“Just be careful. Don’t shake me like that again.” The box replies. I pick it up gently, looking around before retreating into my apartment, wandering to my small kitchen table littered with unopened mail, half-finished crafts and an empty bottle of wine with a candle melted into it. I set the box gently on the table, sliding it to displace the mail.
“Okay, we’re inside,” I tell the box. “So who are you?”
“My name is Jason Mcentyre, I’m a data analyst at Brainify.”
“Brainify. Like the study app?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you get in the box?”
“Look, I didn’t even know I was in a box,” Jason replied, a tinge of panic in his voice. “I was just…I don’t remember. I was at a party, and when I woke up, I was just in the dark, and then you were shaking me.”
“
Huh.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing, I just thought your origin story was going to be a little more…magical or something. Like you were a wizard or a demon or something.”
“Can you just figure out how to get me out of here? I can pay you when I get home.”
“How can I trust you? The note says you bite.”
“The note?”
“Yeah, you came with a note. It says you bite.”
“You don’t think the type of person that would trap me in a box wouldn’t also be the type of person to write a shitty note about me?”
“That’s a good point.” I muse, tapping the box twice with two fingers. I slide the box slowly from side to side. “Listen, I don’t even know if I can get you out if I wanted to, is the thing. There’s no locks or anything. I’d have to break it and I might hurt you if I do that.”
Jason doesn’t answer as he seems to take in this information. Finally, painfully, I hear him mutter, “Oh my god. I’m gonna die in a box.”
I feel a slight, strange pang in my chest as part of me considers this possibility. Whoever Jason is, he's in my care now, but he's still invisible, disconnected. All of a sudden, the absurdity of the situation falls away and I'm left a single person, caring for another single person I've never met before, for whom I have no context. He's just some scared guy who was living his life, just like I was, but now he has to trust me implicitly. He has no choice.
“Well, you’re not dead yet, so there’s got to be some supernatural thing going on,” I offer finally, uncertain how to comfort him, or if I even should. Jason doesn't say anything.
"You okay in there?" I ask.
"Yeah. No, I don't know." He replies with a sigh. "Until I said it just now it didn't occur to me that I might die in here."
"I'll get you out, don't worry," I say finally when another icy thought trickles through my brain. Maybe he deserves to be in the box. What if he’d done something, something awful? Something so unforgivable the only solution was to lock him in a tiny box, banished? But then, why leave an awful man in a box on my front porch? So far as I was aware, I didn’t know him. Was I supposed to care for this stranger, or protect the world from his misdeeds? I take a deep breath. "Jason, let me ask you something. Do you think you're a good person?"
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If you enjoyed Part One of this short story, consider leaving me a tip! This short story was written as to share as part of my Writer's Room, which is a once a month event in Denver where we share poetry, short stories, screenplays, stand up, whatever our participants decide to bring. You can RSVP for the next one via my events section. |