The Box

I should never have opened that damned box. All the signs were there to leave it alone, but curiosity killed the cat that was my blissfully ignorant life. Also, it literally killed my cat. But I’m getting ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning.

While we were clearing out my father’s things after he died, my wife found an old packing box in the basement. It was pushed in a corner, covered with an old canvas drop cloth, nearly camouflaged from existence.

“What is this?” She held it out for me to see.

It was about the size of a bankers box and labeled “Dad”, which seemed an odd way to label your own things. I could feel small items shifting around inside as I took it from her for closer inspection. The packaging tape used to seal it was dried out and lifting off the cardboard, completely ineffective. The thing practically opened itself during the handoff.

“Must have been his dad’s,” I told her. “My grandfather’s things.”

Throwing it away seemed like eliminating the last traces of my grandfather’s life and I wouldn’t want to disappear that way. I decided it was at least worth going through, so we loaded it into our car to dig through later.

That night when we got home, I brought the box in and as I walked through the living room, the bottom broke open and its contents were expelled with all the grace of an explosive shit. It all looked like junk. The only item that stood out was a shoe box, heavily wrapped in duct tape. Written in block letters on every side was, “DO NOT OPEN”. And what do you do when someone tells you not to open something? You fucking open it, that’s what.

I needed a box cutter to get through all the layers of tape, but when I finally got the shoe box open, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Inside was a wooden box, ornately engraved around the edges, like a jewelry box only it didn’t seem to have an opening. One side had a glass panel, like some sort of weird picture frame that had no apparent way to insert an actual picture. I turned it around in my hands looking for seams and pulled gently at the edges to see if I could find a way inside, but nothing worked. It appeared to be just a decorative box.

I eventually gave up trying to open it and set the thing down on the floor then went to find a new container for all the trinkets the decrepit packing box vomited all over my living room floor. When I came back, our orange tabby, Cheeto, was sniffing around the mystery box, his hackles raised. He batted at it with his right-front paw a few times without making contact. When he finally let his paw come to rest on top of the box, the glass panel sparked to life, like a mini-television screen.

The picture was in stunning high definition, which made no sense given the obvious age of the thing. The image was so realistic, it was more like looking through a window, than at a screen. What it showed was a racoon charging. The realism caught me so off guard, I stumbled backwards thinking the animal might actually leap out of the box. Surprisingly, Cheeto wasn’t spooked by this and remained transfixed with his paw on top of the box. The video kept playing over and over in a three second loop. After about 30 seconds, it stopped, the screen once again blank. Cheeto shook his head and hissed at the box as he backed away, then turned and ran out of the room. That was the last time I saw my cat.

I later tried to explain to my wife what had transpired with the mystery box, but she looked at me with one eyebrow arched, a pinched smile and a twinkle in her eye. It’s the same look I get when I am doing a less than stellar job of making excuses for not getting my shit done.

“You’re exhausted,” she said. “I think the emotions of your dad passing and dealing with his estate and all the pressure is making you, erm… imagine things?”

“It was real,” I insisted.

“I think you need to sleep. We can talk about the box more when you are rested.”

There was no point in arguing. I was beyond tired. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. I set the box on our hutch and there it sat, untouched, un-talked about for almost a year.

About nine months later, I came home from work to find my wife sitting on the couch, hunched forward, her forearms resting on her thighs and a tissue in her hands. She was staring at the floor, rocking ever so slightly.

“What happened?”

She didn’t respond at first, then she turned her head slowly and looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. But recognition quickly flooded her eyes and she said, “Nothing. Everything. The Box. It was so beautiful. And so frightening.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was dusting the hutch this morning and I picked up the box to move it.” She looked at me for a beat. “It did the thing.”

“The thing?”

“Yeah, the thing you told me about. When I touched the box, it came to life.”

“You saw the raccoon video?” Relief swept thorough me. I had not imagined it! That relief was short lived as she continued.

“Mine was different,” she said flatly.

“Okaaay. You’re making me a little nervous here.  What did you see?”

“I saw you. It was like I was seeing you from inside my car. You were looking at me from outside my window and telling me you loved me. There was so much love in your eyes and in the way you said it.” Then she started sobbing.

“I don’t understand. It sounds like a beautiful moment, why are you so upset?”

“I don’t know,” she managed between sniffles. “There was also a sadness in your face. Like you were never going to see me again and I don’t know why or what that means.”

I dropped down next to her on the couch and put my arm around her. “It’s going to be ok. I’m not going anywhere.” She laid her head on my shoulder, and we sat there in silence. After a few minutes she suddenly perked up.

“You know what I need? I need a wine night with the girls.” And with that she was up, gave me a peck on the cheek and headed to the bedroom, a group text already putting plans in motion. One hour later she was dressed and ready for an evening with her friends.

She drove off and I had just sat down with the latest Chuck Wendig novel, when I heard the sickening sound of crunching metal. I could feel in my core something bad just happened. I ran out the front door in my stocking feet and saw my wife’s car in the intersection a block away, t-boned by an SUV. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I ran toward her car as I called 911.

When I got to her, the glass on the driver’s side window had completely shattered, giving me a full view of the interior. Things did not look good. It appeared her airbag didn’t go off and the steering wheel looked like it was embedded in her chest. She was lucid though.

“Hi honey,” she said. “You can’t come with me, this is a girls-only night.”

She was in shock. “You’ve been in an accident,” I explained. “I’ve called 911 and they are on their way. Just hang in there.” I struggled to keep my composure. “Are you in any pain?”

“No, actually. I…”

Then something changed in her face. A recognition of something.

“What is it,” I asked. But she started to gloss over. She probably had massive internal bleeding and I could tell I was losing her. Where the hell was the ambulance? I was so damn scared. I wanted to ask what happened, but I knew I needed to be in the moment with her. “I love you. I love you so much,” was all I dared say.

She smiled weakly at me then went still. I heard sirens in the background as I watched the life drain from my wife’s face. Then it hit me like the Suburban that hit my wife. My bowels liquified as I realized what her moment of recognition was. What just transpired was the vision she saw in the box.

It all became frighteningly clear what that thing does. My wife seeing me tell her I love her from outside her car window. My cat seeing a racoon attack. We never knew what happened to Cheeto and always assumed some wild animal got him, but I never put together the racoon vision. That box, that damn fucking box, it shows the last thing you see before you die.

The next night, a bottle of whiskey in hand, I built a big fire in the backyard pit and threw that box in then watched the flames engulf it with satisfaction. Nobody needs to know how or when they die. It just becomes an obsession that stops you from living your life. But my satisfaction turned to uneasiness the next morning as I picked through the ashes and found the box completely intact. And not just intact, it looked almost polished as if the thing was washed by the flames rather than burned by them. I think it just might be a toy belonging to the devil himself.

I spent the next couple months trying to destroy the thing, but nothing could touch it. So I turned to research, trying to figure out what this box was or where it came from. I reached out to biblical scholars, demonology experts, alien technology theorists, anyone I could think of who might have some answers, but that got me nowhere.

Then I had a daunting thought. Did the box reveal your vision to you if you touched it within a certain time period of your fated death? Or did touching it cause your death to be manifested? It seemed awfully coincidental that both my cat and wife experienced random deaths after touching the box. Then again, my wife handled it many times before it gave her a vision. Nonetheless, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk to keep coming into contact with it, so I wrapped and boxed it up much like how I originally found it and put it in a dark corner of my garage. That was a decade ago.

Today, completely out of the blue, I received an email from some archaeologist claiming he might know what the box was, but wanted a picture of it to confirm before discussing further. Finally, someone taking me seriously. Of course, I never had the foresight to take a picture of it, so I had to retrieve the box from the garage and unwrap it again.

Alarmingly, as soon as I pulled it from its packaging, the screen came to life and I could feel an energy running through my body. It wasn’t painful, but the current did seem to paralyze me, forcing me to look into the box and see the horrors it wanted to present me.

What I saw was the world on fire. The sky was filled with smoke that glowed red, trees were nothing but charcoaled skeletons, and the ground burned like lava. Fireballs rained down, igniting the scorched earth until the screen was filled with a blazing inferno. Then it repeated itself for what felt like an eternity but was probably less than a minute.

I don’t know how much time I have. My wife died the same night she saw the image, but she hadn’t touched that box for probably months. How do I know she wouldn’t have been given her vision months before her death had she touched the box earlier?

They say knowledge is power, but I feel so powerless with this information. I don’t want to know this. I don’t know if I’m hoping it will all end tonight or if I want to have months to live, fearing each day might be my last.

What if the vision doesn’t always come true? This one seemed excessively apocalyptic, but then again there’s been a lot of talk lately about solar flares and our damaged ozone layer. I don’t know if that’s real. I don’t know a lot of things right now, but I do know one thing.

I should never have opened that damned box.

Writing Prompt