I want to snicker at the word “honor,” but Evan is sleeping in the other room.
The tradition is that the eldest daughter or the wife of the family’s eldest son, in your case, guards this box with her life.
You may display it, touch it, or lock it in a closet. But under no condition are you to open the box, Patricia. It may try to agitate you when it perceives you as weak.
I can’t explain the how or why. If I could, I would. I can only ask you to obey this rule and trust me. Get a good pair of earplugs for sleeping. They’ll help.
I hope this answers your questions. Give a big kiss to my nephew. Is he still all skin and bones?
Xoxoxo
Auntie Iris
The box literally screams as I close my email. It sounds like a woman who sees a man approaching her in a dark alley with nowhere to run, or a teenager who’s just been grounded on the most important night of their life. A cry of fear and frustration. Then I hear human sobbing and my temperature skyrockets. It’s a low, coughing, hiccupping weep and there is only one person in the world who cries like that.
“Mom.” I am about to call her name more loudly when the door to the office swings open and Evan is standing there, rubbing his eyes.
“Honey what’s wrong? Can’t sleep?” he says.
I still hear the sobbing, but Evan is staring at me like the only thing that exists in the world is me and him and our queen bed. I follow him back and lay down. He asks if I had a nightmare and rubs my back, which always puts me in a good mood, but this time I’m frightened that he’ll feel the tight twitching muscles in my neck and shoulders, so I pull away.
“We can stop,” he says after several minutes of silence.
I jump because I’d thought he was asleep. I prop myself on my elbow. He’s wide awake and the light through the blinds makes his skin look thin.
“We can stop trying. I know we both want the baby, but if it’s too much right now, let’s just stop. It’s not worth you losing your sleep. I want you happy.”
I don’t tell him that the creepy box sounds, heightened by the clarity of the withdrawals, are the real things keeping me awake. I have this suspicion that if I can get all the meds out of my bloodstream, things will return to normal, but I can’t break the spell just by thinking about it. I have to do something. And the box. I can’t let it just keep shrieking at me all night, either.
Evan falls asleep again.
My mother’s voice still whimpers, but it’s fading, like she’s walking away down the hall, rejected and forlorn.
Mom’s dead. That isn’t her, I tell it.
The maracas under the bathtub strike up the band.
Nothing but a drain pipe.
The harmonica starts a slow croon.
I’ve checked the roof. Zilch.
I hear again the scuffling of the undead animal that refuses to curl up and die.
Nothing could actually live that long inside a box.
The piano is playing On My Own again and this one almost breaks me.
I blink away tears and mentally weave a sound-proof cocoon. I sleep for the first time in days. When I wake up, I feel like I’ve just run twenty miles.
Morning in a tropical rainforest: One moment it’s silent, and then the sun hits the canopy and the birds are squawking and the monkeys are shrieking and the frogs are croaking and I wake up to the box and the sounds are worse than ever and I am going absolutely out of my mind.
***
For the record, I’m not curious; I’m just totally selfish. I value my comfort and I justify this self-indulgent instinct by arguing that when I’m a happy woman, my husband is happy, my friends are happy, my family is happy, so I must actually be wise and mature when I prioritize care for myself.
After I read Aunt Iris’s email, I knew that it was more than just my happiness at stake. There is probably some awful plague inside that box, or maybe a tornado or some Curse of the Pharaoh from Black Lagoon, but if that was the case, they shouldn’t have given the care and keeping of it to a depressed insomniac, even if the original diagnosis for depression was mostly ridiculous.
It’s only my third day of not taking the pills, and already everything glistens brighter, sharper, more painful, and more exciting. My brain keeps zapping all these different directions, and twice I get so dizzy I almost hit the floor, but I’m saved by a nearby wall.
As soon as Evan leaves, I take the box off its altar and address it. “What do you want?” As I set it on the floor, the maracas, harmonica, piano, children, and my mother crescendo in a dissonant burst. When I jiggle the lock, everything goes quiet. A sigh gushes from my throat, but a second later I’m annoyed. “So now when I want to talk, you ignore me?”
I think of the axe that Evan keeps in the shed. I wonder if the force inside the box would respond to threats. I’m not afraid to make them. As I stand, the voice of the children under the floorboards shouts, “Don’t go!” and then hisses with mocking laughter as I sit back down. I cross my legs and stare at it. I can hear only the children, but soon they fade and I’m left with the harmonica on the roof playing Desperado by the Eagles. I put my head in my hands and mumble, “Why don’t you come to your senses?” along with the music.
The box speaks in my mother’s voice. “You have to do this for me.”
My palms are pins and needles. “Mom?”
“Your mother is gone. This is a voice from your memory.”
I swallow. “What do you want?”
“Free us.”
“Open the box?”
A thousand voices drown out my mother’s in a chorus of, “Yes!”
I back away, my temples slick with sweat. “Why?”
“Free us!” the thousand voices yowl in unison. It’s freaking me out.
“Repetition doesn’t work on me,” I stutter.
“Free us. Free us. Free us. Free us…” it chants. The walls of the living room throb. I kick the box and it crashes into the glass panels in front of the fireplace. My mother’s voice yelps in pain.
I leap up, shaking. I remember the lighter fluid and matches under the kitchen sink. “If you’re not going to play fair—” I begin.
The piano bursts into the introduction for On My Own and the sweet sad tones are beating my ears with manipulative punishment.
I snatch the keys to the garden shed and return with Evan’s firewood axe.
The children under the floorboards and the harmonica are humming a song together. It’s On My Own, in accompaniment with the piano. Now I’m all alone again nowhere to go no one to turn to…
I heft the axe onto my shoulder and a spell of dizziness hits me. I narrowly miss the granite topped coffee table as I keel over. My elbows feel pulverized and my teeth are ringing in my head. The maracas underneath the bathtub applaud my fall.
I rub my elbows and growl. “You get to choose. I’m going to chop you up or I’m going to burn you.”
My mother’s voice chides, “Neither. No force of man can destroy our shell. You must open the lock of your own will.”
“I don’t have a key.”
“What a shame.”
I think it must feel exactly like this if you’re an axe murderer. The axe is flying through the air and connecting with the beautifully carved top of the box before I feel myself swinging it. The blade bounces like a rubber ball. I hear the children laughing under the floor again, the harmonica is playing a see-saw pattern like a croaking donkey, and then my mother says, “I expected more from you, Patricia.”
The house falls into a deathly silence and I stare at the axe and the unscathed box between my splayed legs.
***
That evening I go to bed early and Evan comes into the room shaking a paper gift bag in front of my face. Something clunks in the bottom of it. The bag is white with silver ribbon handles. He says, “I found this when I was looking through gift bags for Jeff’s birthday present.” He tips the
bag onto my lap. “This was probably left over from our wedding.”
I see a polished brass key, the perfect size and color to match the box’s lock.
“Oh, God. No,” I say before I can stop myself.
“Have you found a treasure chest under the house?” His lips twist in a playful tease. He doesn’t know what this is.
“Not exactly.” I roll away.
His breath is on my neck. He says, “I saw Austin and Chrissy today on the bus.”
“How are they?” I’m grateful he’s changing the subject.
“They’re expecting their third. Isn’t that crazy? I still remember them hooking up at that Halloween party and now they’re talking about kindergarten and—”
I’m crying. Evan strokes my hair and he’s making that sound in his throat which means he wants to say something. I know he didn’t mean it. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. Evan says, “Have you had your reduced dose today?”
I snarl and almost bare my teeth at him. “Is that what I’ve been reduced to? An organism that just needs maintenance?”
Evan turns totally white. I never yell at him. I can’t remember feeling this angry. I’m alive and powerful, but I’m also frightened, because I don’t like Evan staring like he doesn’t recognize me.
He looks at my bedside table. The pills aren’t there. He army-crawls to my side of the bed, opens the drawer, prods at my blank journal, gel pens, and a few condoms that we haven’t used for months. He looks at me. “Where are they?”
I can’t lie. I’m feeling invincible. “I flushed them.”
Evan covers his face. “Honey, you’re setting yourself back. If you wanted to get off of them, we could have worked on this. Did you lie when you said you decreased your dose?”
“Not exactly. I just eliminated the dose altogether.”
“Okay.” Evan’s voice is fainter than a whisper. “Let’s go to sleep. We’ll call Dr. Thatcher in the morning.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“And I don’t want to see you like this.”
“I’ll get better. I promise.”
“Sweetheart, it’s not about you trying. This is a condition. You can’t do anything about—”
The harmonica and the piano and the voices are chorusing again, peaking with my emotional waves.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I scream.
Evan plummets into a grieved silence. He grabs his cell phone and I know he’s calling the 24-hour night nurse in Thatcher’s office.
I want to die.
I lie down and stay perfectly still until he’s finished the phone call. My skin feels sticky and itches so much I want to claw it off. I imagine that I’m the Lady of Shalott and I am drifting down the river on my flowered bier. Evan has fallen asleep with his hand on his phone.
My sweet silent husband. He works too hard all day to lie awake worrying at night. He lives in the normal world where night is a welcome rest, where food tastes real and lazy weekends without schedules dangle like tempting carrots.
This is my last chance. When Evan says we’re going to the doctor, I can’t refuse. Everything is related. I’m sure of it now.
Tonight it ends: the sounds, the box, and my mental hell.
***
On a theatrical whim, I retrieve the oblong container with my wedding dress from the upper shelf of our office closet and slip it on. It has a few creases along the bodice, but it gives me the courage I need.
I press the key so hard between my fingers, I bruise my thumb. The box on the mantle is either being courteous or just trying to play its best cards because the only sound tonight is my mother’s voice coaxing me with suppressed anticipation across the floor, around the living room furniture, to the brink of the mantle, and then finally into the keyhole. I jam the key in the slot like a toddler learning hand-eye coordination.
I am about to turn it when I remember that there really might be something dangerous inside this thing, so I write Evan a message that I hope looks nothing like a suicide note.
You won’t understand this, sweetheart, but I’m just opening our wedding present. Believe me, I’m doing this for both of us. I love you.
I fold the note and leave it under his water glass on the kitchen window sill. I breathe deeply and twist the key. The lock resists, then pops, and the lid flies open.
I’m knocked backward, still holding it, while a hot rushing wind pours over me. I see flaming skyscrapers, clashing swords, oozing sores, wild snarling teeth, and then I hear a deep roaring. It’s like a level five hurricane is being born in my hands. The windows of the living room shatter and our picture frames crash to the ground. I hear Evan shouting from the bedroom and I try to close the box, but I can’t.
It’s wrenched out of my hands, and I’m falling into it.
***
When I wake up, I’m stretched out on our couch, covered with a quilt that I recognize from childhood picnics. I look up into Daddy’s face. He and Evan stand over me, speaking in whispers. The shattered windows have been re-glassed. The voices are gone. The house creaks like a normal house. The sounds aren’t coming back. I feel the certainty of this in my marrow and I almost cry with happiness.
Evan stands near me and I grab his hand. He squeezes back, hard, and brings his ear to my mouth. “I’m not touching another pill,” I say. “I don’t care what anyone says, especially Daddy.”
Evan stares at me, and I feel him really seeing me and my heart for the first time in months, knowing what I need and loving me beyond the bounds of medical science. He nods.
Daddy begins, as if on cue. “We’ll get a prescription to help you stabilize.”
Evan puts a hand on Daddy’s arm and leads him away.
A woman’s voice trembles somewhere behind me. I recognize her from a picture on our fridge: Aunt Iris.
I have been unconscious long enough for someone to fly over from Italy.
“Pah-triss-ee-ah,” she coos, trilling the r dramatically. She appraises me and seems pleased.
I say, “I couldn’t help it. I opened it.” I cough and that’s when I notice the pain low in my gut. “What did I do?”
Iris shakes her head. At first I think she’s dismayed, but her voice sounds more resigned than anything. “You’ve unleashed a curse on the world. More death, more disease.” She smiles bitterly. “More of the same.”
And then I see it. As black horror for my actions presses into me, I see a small flash of my future and something hot prickles deep in my abdomen and then I know for sure, just like I know the sounds are gone for good, no baby will ever survive my womb.
My throat tightens in a violent sob. The box has made sure I’m cursed, along with everyone else.
Evan returns and I grab his hand and crush it again. I must be hurting him, but he doesn’t complain. Then I’m crying and they’re all staring at me and even in the tsunami of my grief I think, I’d do it all again. For me. For Evan.
Evan says, “I told your dad that you need a rest from medications.”
Daddy slouches onto the couch by my feet. He puts a hand on my knee and says, “There was a windstorm, but no one was hurt. Do you remember anything?”
He’s going with the rational approach.
I wipe my eyes and look at Iris. We know what really happened. Everyone else will think my behavior was just withdrawal symptoms, that the curse was some natural disaster.
I answer without thinking. “I remember a harmonica, Mom crying, kids talking under the floor,” I stop when I realize what I’m saying. Aunt Iris’s eyes flicker with understanding. She’s heard these things, too.
Evan kisses my forehead. I grab him and kiss him back. He jumps a little, surprised by my strength. As I fall back into the pillows, I feel finally ready to sleep through the night again.
Evan and Dad talk while Iris whispers to me. For all they know, she’s telling me I’ve imagined everything,
but she says, “I heard them, too. You’re very brave. I almost opened it so many times.”
I feel, in an off-kilter sort of way, that she’s proud of me.
Iris says, “Do you want to see what was left?”
She sets the box in my lap. Paint curls off in strips and one of the hinges hangs twisted and broken. Long claw marks rake the inside. It smells of smoke and violence. It isn’t heavy anymore.
“Look inside,” Iris says. “It’s empty. Well, almost.”
I carefully raise the lid and I’m staring at the wooden floor of the box. Etched in burning letters, in my own handwriting, is a single word: Hope
Elise’s latest novel is: “Moonlight and Oranges”
Find more information about Elise at: https://www.EliseStephens.com
Christopher Turkel
I began to write after my father gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis' A Horse And His Boy at age thirteen. My first attempt at writing a story was a six page single spaced rip off of Narnia called Darnia. I was on my way. Writing is my only hobby and something I am either doing or thinking about doing. Interestingly enough the capital of that long lost nation of Darnia was called Xuelition and I used it as the capital of my nation, the Prakani Empire, in my novel Ouroboros.
This story began an an exercise for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, an annual event every April 27th where authors post free short stories in their websites and since I don't write short stories very often I took it a challenge to write one and thus “The Return of the King” was born.
The Return Of the King
by Christopher Turkel
The summer the Catchotochk returned was also the summer Sener came. The Catchotochk had been gone for a couple of years and I had hoped, along with the rest of village, that it was finally gone for good. But one early summer evening, as I lay awake, looking at the moon as it hung above the pines out behind my father 's workshed, I heard it's distinctive call, a high pitched call like that of a rooster but much louder. It seemed to echo through the mountains. As a child, I had been scared of the strange beast but it never came into town. It just seemed to lurk in the forest for months, scaring off the mink and the foxes my father trapped and making the trip to the iron mines more dangerous. Then as suddenly as it came, it would leave.