The Box

Walking to nowhere in particular was now apparently her favorite hobby. She would just walk for miles on end in these desolate streets, never reaching her destination. 

She left her house before the sun rose, at indecent hours in the morning, and she would just walk. Sometimes in a straight line, sometimes in circles. She did not mind the cold, or the fog that haunted our town, or sometimes even the rain which hammered the top of my house like a mischief of tap dancing rats. 

She would never talk to anyone, not to the old woman who would hobble toward her muttering ancient curses in latin, not to the masked man who sometimes crossed her path carrying a blade which, if she had been paying more attention, she would have noticed was dripping something morbidly red. I tried to talk to her more than once, but she would seldom give me more than a wistful stare. 

Maybe it was too dark to notice, but she never paid any mind to the vine-like creature that settled itself on the trees that adorned the sidewalk, strangling and sometimes reaching out to touch her, or the hands that would grab at her feet from beneath the bushes when she walked.

She never really minded the eerie noises that settled themselves in the night, the creaking of the old manor houses, and the wind that howled when it was trapped in between them.

She walked and walked, in between the trees in the forest and on the streets alike, as if following the moon. 

She was never afraid of the darkness, it did not feel cold to her, nor did it feel overpowering, it felt like an embrace, like an embrace that she had been looking for for a long time. 

The only times I ever saw her stop her ritualistic walk was to stop in front of a house, the largest manor on the street. It was quite old, made of painfully white brick and large windows with black wooden frames. It was at least three stories tall, and had a tall black, weather-beaten, wrought iron fence surrounding it. She would stand outside of the manor for hours at a time, but always leaving before sunrise. If you looked carefully, you would notice that she would always stare at the left-most window on the second story of the house. 

If you walked outside that house at about four in the morning you probably would have thought that she was a statue, made of porcelain, her skin glimmering in the moonlight, or the flickering streetlights; she would be so still that tiny spiders would crawl up her legs, up her chest, on her arms, in her ears and her nose. Sometimes, when she was about to leave, she had to first get rid of the spiderwebs that had become entangled in her head hair, her leg hair, and her arm hair. 

She would only cry when she had the cover of the rain, and she thought that no one was watching her, and yes, that included the pair of white and red eyes that would often watch her from the darkness, who after a few nights of the same routine, graced her with looking away while she let out her tears silently, letting only her face show her pain. 

She never had something like a flashlight, or a coat, or an umbrella; all things that I had attempted to hand her with little success 

The one thing I never saw her leave her house without, however, was a box. 

It was not always the same box, but she always had one. Sometimes it was a big wooden box, sometimes it was small, and plastic. Sometimes it fit in the palm of her hand, sometimes she had to strap it to her back because it was too big to carry.

What seemed to be a constant is that each time, the box seemed to weigh her down more and more, but she did not set it down for anything; not if the rabid dogs of the neighborhood chased her, not if the gnomes attempted to steal it, not if she tripped on the wild roots of the primordial trees moved in to trip her. She could have broken a bone, or bled out; she would not let that box go. 

It was an especially rainy and cold Thursday when I watched her leave her house and, for the first time, return without the box. 

The box was cardboard, and while she walked it got very soggy but she didn’t seem to mind this. 

She walked very slowly, taking each step with overbearing caution; she was walking on a tightrope twenty meters up in the air with no net to catch her fall, and it had nothing to do with the very cracked and old sidewalk that often made pedestrians lose their balance. 

She was slightly more short of breath with every step she took, and this time it did not have anything to do with the impish ghosts of the town attempting to possess her. 

It had all to do with the task she was about to complete. 

Her hands trembled, not because of the cold, but because the box in her hands was very heavy, heavier than it had ever been before. For the first time, she did not walk in circles, she did not walk into the forest, which already knew her name, and used it to call her away from the beaten path, to trick her and keep her forever. 

She walked directly to the old, colossal, white brick manor with the large windows with black wooden frames and the towering wrought iron fence— a feat which took her about a quarter less than an hour despite the distance between the manor and her house being less than two blocks. 

She walked ever so slowly, so slow that the things that haunt the night paid her little attention; they thought she was only moving due to the heavy wind and doubted she was alive. 

When she arrived at the front of the manor, her heart beat faster than it had ever before. It was the first sound I ever heard her make, it was so loud I feared it would burst out of her chest entirely. 

I later learned I had no reason to worry about that. 

She placed her box into a backpack, and began scaling the fence. She was not very agile, nor very strong. It was not pleasant to watch as she, multiple times, fell flat on her back, having lost her balance, or slipped because of the water that coated the iron fence due to the pouring rain. 

She had to be particularly careful, at the very top, which was full of sharp spikes, which seemed to slowly grow towards her. 

At last, wet and cold, she got to the other side of the fence, at which point she was faced with the next challenge, which was getting inside of the house. 

First she thought to scale the house, and climb in through the left-most window on the second story. However, after she grasped the vines that curled up the house and used them to climb up for a few minutes, she found that each step she climbed, the vines moved downwards, never letting her up more than a half a meter off the ground. 

Discarding the first method, she thought to open the front door, but as she approached it, she saw that down the door were seven locks of varying widths. She tried picking the first one, but as soon as she placed her hand on the lock, it bared its teeth, then opened its mouth and bit down on her hand.

Finally, she thought to try and see if any of the windows in the lowest level would budge, and as her luck was, the last one she tried, all the way at the back of the house did. 

She climbed in, one foot in front of the other, her heart in her throat— figuratively speaking of course. She did feel a knot in her stomach, which was quite real: her intestines had crawled up and tangled up with the rest of her organs, pressing in with unabashed force. 

She found herself in a decadent and unfamiliar dining hall. She did not know the way around the house, not as well as you might have thought. 

She stepped quietly, measuring every step. The air in the house was moist and heavy, it made it difficult for her to breathe. Feeling the weight of the box drag her down even more with each passing second was enough to carry her forward. 

After minutes— which felt like hours— of walking endlessly around the manor, being careful not to knock over any of the porcelain vases or marble statues that were littered around, she found a curved and old oak staircase heading upwards. She was very conscious of every step she took; careful not to make much noise, as she did not want to wake the people in the house. 

She reached the top of the staircase and the weight on her back was killing her— literally speaking. It was crushing her bones, which were splintering and digging into her muscles. It was making her vertebrae collapse into one another and crack. It was making her ribs stick out in odd places. 

Every step was excruciating for her. 

In the second story of the house there were four rooms, all adjacent to one another. If she, by mistake, entered the wrong room, she would risk waking up the wrong person and not being able to complete her task. 

However, she found it was easy for her to know which one she had to go into; she recognized the beating of her own heart. 

She carefully opened the second door to the left. The knob burned her hand when she touched it, and she, once more, had to show herself stoic and silent. 

The beating of her heart grew louder when she entered the room. In fact, there were two hearts, beating not in unison, but in disharmony. She closed the door, wary to not touch the scorching doorknob. 

That was when she saw him. 

Him, sleeping peacefully, with his angel face and angel eyes. 

Seeing him was like a blade to the heart. 

Missing him came in waves, waves of remembering how life used to be and waves of remembering what he did. 

It was enough to kill her. 

She set down her backpack and pulled out the soggy cardboard box. 

She grabbed the box and set it down next to the sleeping man, took off the lid to reveal: 

It was empty. 

And, at this part, even the eyes in the darkness turned away. 

She unbuttoned his shirt carefully, but she knew he would not rouse. 

Out of her pocket, she pulled out a knife. It was a small knife, but it would do the job.  She was scared: I could tell. Her hands were wet, and it was not because of the rain outside.

She plunged the knife deep into his chest, drawing a line right in the middle. Blood spewed out, but she was not intimidated by such a sight. 

Breathing deeply, she set the knife down and with trembling hands, opened his chest, revealing his overflowing insides. 

Her beating heart was now deafening, it made her cry, and so some of her tears fell into his open wound. 

He did not rouse, he had no reason to: she would not hurt him. 

It was dark, and it was hard to see, and the rain crashed into the side of the house with such force that she feared that the glass would shatter, but the sound of her heart guided her. 

With trembling hands, she plunged into his chest cavity, and it did not take much groping around to find what she was looking for; there they were beating in grandiose disharmony, his heart, and next to it, her heart. 

They had fused together, because there was not much room in his skinny frame, so she took her knife and started to cut. Once they were appropriately separated, she plunged both her hands and pulled out her contrite, but still beating heart. 

It was red, and it was bloody and it was inflamed and it was sore but most of all, it was hers, and that was all that mattered. 

She placed the bloody heart inside of the cardboard box, and closed it with hands that were steadier than ever; as soon as it touched the bottom of that box, a wave of relief passed through her unlike anything she had felt in a very long time. 

She put the box in her backpack, which felt infinitely lighter. 

She walked out the front door without much trouble. 

The fence seemed smaller now, only about knee high, and she was able to jump over it with ease.

The sun was rising. 

The walk home felt not like a burden, but for once, it felt like a breath of fresh air. 

I watched her as she walked into her house and, it might’ve been a trick of the light, but I think that I saw her smile.