Boxes

“She had in her seventh year, she recalled wistfully, dreamed of a wishing-box land above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee grinders; you picked a box, turned the handle around nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side, and the wish came true” – Sylvia Plath, “The Wishing Box” ^[1]Sylvia Plath, (2000), Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Harper Perennial, pp. 215-220..

The jar ^[2]She laughed out loud as she wrote and sometimes cried. She was obsessed with small cars and delighted in driving them fast around corners. She drew clever cartoons to satirise the mayhem of her life. … Continue reading

Pandora sat down and looked despairingly at the earthen object in front of her. Damn that misogynistic fool Hesiod! It was not a box, but a jar and it did not contain all the unknown evils of the world but rather a multitude of blessings, including hope. She remembered the joy she had felt when it was given to her as a young bride, the love she had felt when she was given as a bride to Epimetheus, and the optimism she had felt when she herself had been gifted to the world as the first woman. Pandora sighed; Hesiod had hated women from the start.^[3]Natalie Haynes, (2020), Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, Picador; Barbara Walker, (1983). The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets, Harper One. Destructive, mischievous and unmanageable gold-diggers and freeloaders he had called women in that nasty vile little text Theogony.^[4]Hesiod, and Barry Powell, (2017), The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, and the Shield
of Herakles, University of California Press. The only things they were good for, he had declared, was feeding, breeding and causing no end of problems for men. Perhaps if Hesiod had kept his horrid thoughts to himself, Pandora thought, women would not continue to be boxed. 

All the same

She softly sang to herself as she readied herself to leave the house. “Little boxes on the hillside”.^[5]Malvina Reynolds, (1962),  “Little Boxes”, released by Pete Seeger (1963). Reynolds later released her version on her 1967 Columbia Records album Malvina Reynolds … Continue reading She paid no mind to singing the words in the right order, they rolled freely down the mountain from her mouth into a semblance of the song. “Little boxes made out of ticky tacky”.  She had first heard this tune back in the late 1970s on a cassette tape called “Songs of the Protest Era” that belonged to her Mum and Dad and the simplicity of this song had stuck inside her head. “Little boxes, little boxes and they all look just the same”. 

Her shoes

Ignoring the brand-new pair sitting on the shelf unopened in their box, she bent down to lace up her pink, black and blue running shoes. Her pink, black and blue running shoes had carried her across 840km of pavement since the beginning of March. Since the beginning of March, they were not just the first pair of shoes she put on each day and the last to take off at night, her running shoes were her life. Her running shoes were her life and the answer she gave when people asked why she ran such long distances. She ran such long distances because the truth was, she was not running away from life, she was running to life. She was running to life because if she didn’t, she would never find the diamonds in the dust her trail left behind.

Plain things

It had been sitting at the bottom of her jewelry box gathering dust for some time now. The plain white gold band was slim and featured a four-millimeter round diamond in a basket setting. The white gold was not perfectly pure, and the gemstone was plainly less than 0.5 carats. It was bought and given for less than $750 dollars. She was plain and she liked plain things, the ring seemed perfect. The wedding band was also white gold but not quite so plain. It was custom made to perfectly match her engagement ring; the six small princess cut diamonds in alignment with the width of the basket setting. It too, seemed perfectly plain. 

She prefers not

The ragged vitality of teeth, the alignment of hers had always been in jeopardy and yet somehow, they remained rooted where they were. Encased in a small white plastic box by day, the splint she wore at night was but a salve for a 40-year-old habit which no manner of mouth guard had been able to remedy. Split and sacrificed under the weight of bruxism, it is only a matter of time before the layout of her teeth was sent into further disarray. Teeth do many things aside from assisting with the absorption of nutrients and the formation of words, one flash shares many things about who you are. Straight or crooked. Stainless steel or gold repairs. Squared or rectangular in shape. Stained or pearly white. Chipped or layered enamel. Remaining long after the rest of our bodies have turned to dust, teeth indeed hold many secrets. Isn’t it any wonder, she prefers not to smile?

Their managed hearts

No-one quite knew what happened that day in 2019, only that when asked to put on a friendly face at work, 25, 632 women at the university refused to smile. “A girl can only take so much after all” they said as they untied the string from around the boxes that contained their managed hearts and released them high into the air. The sky began to blush with pride as women stopped anticipating the needs of others, ceased to pay attention to the comfort levels of others, and put an end to doing tedious things for the sake of making people happy.  Before long, all the emotion women had kept locked inside the boxes crowded the sky and the atmosphere turned blood red. The world smelled of something beginning as 25, 632 boxes went up in flames. 

Tidying up

She pushed the 900mm x 550mm x 380mm khaki box into the corner of the storage cage. She wiped a trickle of sweat from her brow; she was not as strong as she used to be, and it was dark and clammy in the basement car park. She opened the latch to take one final look at the objects she had carefully buried inside. A tattered birth certificate which he might need one day when he gets out. Her eyes quickly skimmed over the mugshot on the outdated passport and expired driver’s license. Leather wallet, favourite books, a university tie, and his wedding ring fill up some of the space. A large yellow envelope holds the smile of a mother with her young son, a photo from the 1970s in Darwin full of hope. A handmade Father’s Day card from one of his own. She roughly shoved it to the bottom of the trunk, slammed the lid closed and dusted her hands.  Any kind of problem could be solved by putting it in a box and putting the box away.