A story with no flotation device
I’m in a box. It’s a black box and I’m in it. It’s a square black box, and a noisy one at that. I know it’s a square box because all the edges measure the same. I know it’s black because everywhere I look I see black. The noise is a different story — not a mystery or horror or anything like that, just different. Enough to start over.
I’m in a box. It’s a box and I’m in it. It’s a box so it’s got edges and corners. It’s got edges and corners because it’s a box. It’s got six identical panels. Always the same black panels. The noise is a different story, but also the same. It’s crying the same, hollering the same, emitting static and garbled broadcasts the same, calling for an ambulance the same. Whether it’s a faint echo flitting across the devastation or a booming reverb in outer space, it’s always the same.
I’m in a box. It’s a black box made of six square panels. If you cut up the top panel on the diagonal and raise the pieces to make a roof, the box won’t be square anymore. If the new top were to burst open and release the pressure, a whole lot of hot air would blow law and order and similar bullshit to atomic smithereens. There won’t be a box anymore and I won’t be anymore and the footnote about collateral damage won’t matter anymore if it ever did. Or I could forego the roof over my head and start the fucking story already.
It’s just a box I’m in, a box that looks the same everywhere I look. The noise is a different story. And gravity, too. Gravity dictates whether I look up or down or around. All directions belong to gravity, even in a box made of six panels. The seventh panel, like the day of rest, got discarded, amputated, tossed aside. No rest for the weary, though there’s always death to cut you loose.
Owing to gravity I get to call the overhead panel ceiling, the panel I stand on floor, and the panels closing in on me walls. I can’t call the overhead panel sky if it never gathers clouds, never rains and sobs, never howls in despair over the wrecked terrain beneath the wall-to-wall carpet bombing.
It doesn’t matter if the panel underfoot is carpet or tiles or floorboards mourned by the surviving trees. You wouldn’t call it ground if nothing ever grows in it. Whatever it was before it turned to rubble, it couldn’t have been earth or mud or magnetic fields. The only thing the floor and the debris have in common is gravity, and maybe not for long.
The vertical panels are kept upright against gravity but they can’t be trees, not whilst they’re square and smooth and clearcut with no disobedient roots meandering underground and no crooked defiant branches grabbing at the raging storm. It’s a square black box made of nothing, a deep space kinda nothing with nary a whiff of wind. The box contains nothing but me. But nothing will become everything the moment I self-destruct, which I promise to do.
It’s always a box and I’m always in it. It’s a black box because its panels are black, and all of them are square which makes it a square black box. The noise is a different story, but also the same. Droning the same like the Enola Gay before it drops its load on Hiroshima, screaming the same like the fighter jets passing overhead so low they clip the treetops behind your house. Ask yourself if the silence you enjoy following that fleeting air show is linked to your busted eardrums and the reason why you won’t ever touch the noise again.
You won’t touch the box either. You can’t paint it white or wave it in surrender, you can’t equip it with a flotation device, and you can’t poke holes in it, or maybe you can. I never tried. I never touched the panels, I always knew they were out of reach, like my feeble attempts at sending out signs of life. I’m still waiting for gravity to do its thing, to sink the box into the deep and take with it our overlords and fake heroes who ravaged the earth.
I’ve never been to the bottom of the ocean, but there’s always a first time. The ocean may well be the atmosphere surrounding the black box, and if I stepped outside, it would lap at my shredded feet and wash the blood away along with the rest of me. There’s no way to find out. I got no tools, and I can’t carve windows into the square panels with my chewed up fingernails. I got nothing, which is the essence of everything, nothing but the box and me.
The box could be in pain if it’s not pain itself. It could be put together using an odd collection of disoriented words jiggling inside my head. A few hundreds of them is all I need to describe the black box and throw in some storybook ideas about ephemeral things like oceans and deep space and whales and seabirds and hardwood forests with dense understory over a thick blanket of leaf litter and rocks and deserts and sea turtles and spiders and chameleons and gray wolves.
I like the wolves
I love the silence of the desert (the noise is a different story)
I can’t figure out the whereabouts of anything
