Author’s Note: My apologies for being away the past few weeks. October has brought significant change. We moved to an apartment in the city, sold the house, and I changed jobs. And now I’m fighting a cold…
Anyway, here’s a brief bit of therapy.
*****
Crisp did not recognize the box. He was certainly not the owner. Its nakedness marked its difference. No labels, no neat writing. No warnings about fragility, or which end should go up. It wasn’t a liquor box, nor a box that once held reams of paper. The perfectly empty box sat empty in the middle of his guest bedroom floor.
He picked it up and carried it out.
When he returned, it was back.
He removed it again, folding it and placing it into a box containing other neatly disassembled and folded boxes. Then he carried on with his day.
That night, during his ritual room check, he discovered that the box had returned.
Muttering a string of curses, he removed it again, then, steadfastly refusing to check the room again, went to sleep, which is to say, fitfully tossed and turned and dreamed of endless cardboard boxes, stacked neatly up the side of a mountain.
“Move them,” a voice in the clouds commanded.
“To where?” he inquired, tapping his fingertips together.
Silence followed, and, like an ant or a bee, he began carrying the boxes up the mountain, certain of his task.
When he awoke, bleary-eyed and grumpy, he checked the guest room.
Across the street, Frieda Blake noticed the new neighbor jumping up and down and screaming, clad only in a pair of boxers. She put down the binoculars, swearing off them for all of ten minutes. When she checked again, he was gone.
What happened next is entirely speculation.
The neighbors say he was unstable, and torched the place for the insurance money. The experts disagreed, since the only thing that was burned, really, was an upstairs bedroom.
Two facts, however, are perfectly clear. First, Zachary Crisp was carted away in an ambulance, still wearing nothing but his underwear. Second, the firefighters swore they saw a perfectly good cardboard box untouched amid the charred remains of the bedroom.
Nicanor Abbott 