Understories by Tim Horvath

Author:Tim Horvath
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781934137499
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

A Box of One’s Own

Aguy started carrying a box around the neighborhood one day. Not a small box, the type swaddled in clear tape and addressed with scented marker; no, this was a great strapping thing, cardboard limbs flailing akimbo from a cardboard torso, defying its carrier to heft it without tripping or colliding with a wall. It was like the guy was about to give birth, unable to see his own feet, while also blindfolded. I’d seen the pregnant prancing in maternity blindfolds before, and it made me nervous, it made me cringe, I tell you.

After seeing him parading around like this up and down the sidewalks for a week or so, I confronted him. “Hey, buddy, so what’s in the box?” I figured he’d already been spoken to; I figured he’d have a set answer by now, maybe three if he was smart.

A snarl. “Do you really care?” It was the box that spoke. The man wielding the box kept going, his trajectory not unlike that of a rickshaw operator with dementia. I followed a half step behind, like a piece of toilet paper stuck to his foot. As I thought this, I looked down—sure enough, a piece of toilet paper was affixed to my foot. I removed it, deploying a forceps with a special toilet-paper-from-foot-removal accoutrement, which took a mere half hour to assemble and but a half hour to disassemble, and thoroughly eradicated the least trace of the toilet paper in only fifteen minutes. It didn’t just yank it off—nay, it vaporized it and scorched the bottom of my shoe, too, applying with a gleeful flourish a gloss that would ensure that future toilet paper scraps would think quadrice before attempting to stow away from bathroom tile onto my sole.

I spotted Box Man coming up the landfill feature known locally as “the Molehill,” comprised of tens of thousands of moles that had been surgically excised from their source—cheeks and derrières. Those who desired to graft a mole onto their visages knew they could always rely on this reservoir of protuberances, as well.

Now I was ready for him. “I do care,” I pleaded as he got close. “I really, really do.”

The box sputtered but then responded as instantaneously as though our conversation had been continuous.

“What is it that you think you care about, exactly?”

“I do not think I care. Yes, I think. And I care. But notwithstanding your skepticism, I do not think and care in a single semantic swoop.”

“Harumph,” said the box. “You’re the last person who would know what you care about. And, in any case, I can almost guarantee that you do not care about what is in me. What you do care about is seeing what you can’t immediately see, what’s concealed from your vantage point. As soon as you see what’s inside me, you’ll cease to care and will wish to discard me like any piece of cardboard that isn’t ruggedly constructed with such Euclidean virility as myself.” With this, it began to do the box equivalent of flexing, bending its flaps, making its corrugations ripple outward.

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