The Cigar Box

When I was a boy my grandfather, whose ordinarily wily nature was well known to us all, handed me a small cigar box with a padlock on it, and a key. He told me to keep them both safe, and under no circumstances whatsoever was I to open the box. I did the best that an eight year-old boy could do, and hid the thing under my bed, and shoved the key up into the stomach of a stuffed bear I kept around. He'd given me the box with such gravity, with such dead seriousness, and even with a look of inexplicable sadness in his eyes, the thin glaze of pulled-back tears, that it scared me white and seemed so out of sorts for who I'd thought he was: a jovial man, a grinning man, a playful rook who'd come by with card tricks and wild stories he'd heard traveling the world, grandiose stories of elephants carrying away children to become kings of the underworld, impossible stories about alleyways in Europe that twist and turn and spit you out a hundred thousand years into the future, after everyone's died, hilarious stories about men with books for heads and guns for eyes arguing over a woman's hand in marriage, and more, breathlessly more besides. There wasn't a damn hint of play in this gesture, in this gift. It scared the honest shit out of me, to be frank. A grandfather can give a boy of that age a gift and say, “Don't open this till Christmas,” knowing full-well the boy will tear it open that very night, and so much the better for everyone. But a grandfather cannot give to his own grandson a padlocked box and key and say, with the deepest possible severity, with a leaden quality of voice that suggests something terrible is afoot, never open this box, never open it, swear to me boy that you will never open this. No, a grandfather does no such thing, unless something is horribly, inexpressibly wrong.

I kept that box locked tighter than a Moorish King's concubine, and hidden twice as well, and even managed, for a few days at a time, to forget about it. It helped that my grandfather still came by, in those days. He never mentioned the box, but every time he set foot inside our home, at the precise moment he came in and closed the door behind himself, I can remember it even now slowing down to a crawling, glacial, epochal speed, the half second before my mother came rushing in to plant a hug and two kisses on either cheek of the old gizzard, the very instant before time resumed its regular pace, his eyes connected to mine and therein a single unspoken query was transmitted: piercingly, his gaze inquired: have you unlocked it? And I, just eight, hardly even aware that lying existed, let alone how it might be done, was so fully incapable of the slightest dissimulation that I, trembling, shook my head and clutched my shirt and almost began to cry, whereupon his look was satisfied and the laughter, kissing, and revelry could begin again. But not, really, in truth, for me. The spirit of it had been fouled. The weight of a secret kept me at arm's length of the happiness I'd known before. I didn't understand that then, nor really for many, many years.

Not too long after he'd bequeathed me his terrible secret box, not too long at all really, even by the reckoning of a child, my grandfather passed away. Old age, in his sleep, a look of calm satiety on his face. Plump and self-satisfied, they said. A man who'd led a good, long life, and who'd done right by him and his. That's when I started to chafe a bit. There wasn't any watchman of the secret now. No one to keep me honest. Just me and the leaden, gnawing curiosity. The strange, nagging fear of the unquantifiable, the potentially daemonic, that lay just inches from my head and heart, just inches below my bed, and the vile, malefic key that sat acidic in the stomach of a bear, and turned my own stomach into knots with the threat it represented. But my resolve never weakened. In addition to my fear of it, I learned to hate the box. I constructed elaborate scenarios in which the box was destroyed utterly, or even better, contrary-to-fact histories of the world that made it impossible for the box ever to have existed. I dreamed of worlds where boxes were never invented, or for that matter keys, or cigars; I dreamed of worlds where grandfathers were forbidden by law to give anything to their grandchildren; I dreamed of worlds where parents could read their children's minds and expose their secrets, rescuing them from their private laborious torments. To my immediate shame, I dreamed of a thousand worlds where my grandfather had died before he could have ever presented me the box: by stabbing, in a dark alley, at the hands of a thief intent on stealing the box; by being hit by a drunken driver, mere blocks from our house; by falling down a ravine, or by being devoured by the wild beasts who live under the soil, or by opening his own box and succumbing to whatever horrors lay therein.

But being a child, it was a burden far too great for me to bear. Not without help or escape. So I fled: to the four winds and the seven oceans. I ran up mountains and down streets, I buried my eyes in the bosoms of a hundred women. I drank and caroused and scrapped with more than one or two loveless men. I might have even fought in a war, but of those things the memory is dark, like a cloud of blood covering my eyes, an impenetrable layer of red that doesn't subside, just continues to flow interminably. I tried my best to forget the box, the curse, the key, the constant temptation to open it, and somehow, despite the great burden of keeping that stupid secret alive for so many years, I grew up, and old, and had a family of my own, and in turn became a grandfather myself to a house filled by precious grandchildren. And oh the stories I would tell them, when I came to visit. Of the places I had seen, of the tricks and secrets I had learned, of the wyrms I had tamed and the skies I had sliced in twain; of the earth I had turned to dust, of the wine I had poured into wounds, of the gushing sea that fills our voices, of the flags I had buried; of the faeries I'd met and loved, and convinced to abandon their Bacchic gods; of the dying lights I'd placed in corners remote and forgotten; of the suns I'd stolen from on high and the moons I'd unearthed from the deep; of the wending and winding and weeping roads that go and ever return; of the ghosts who walk and the angels who live in their teeth; of the wonders and the treasures that drench the earth to our knees if we only knew how to see. And I'd tell them everything I could, and their eyes would grow first wide and then heavy, and they'd dream the sweet soft infinitude of child magic, and I'd envy them.

Tomorrow I give my dear grandson the box and the key, which I have with me unopened to this day, and hate like the blood of martyrs, like the ripping shock of being born, like the rolling death of the sun-bound earth. Oh god, it'll be his soon, and then finally I can sleep.

The Seething

It creeps in from the outside somewhere, maybe in through the ear. Can't help it, it gets in. It starts to percolate around in the head, confounding ideas and leading to interrupted dreams. Then it slowly drips down the nasal passages into the throat, poisoning the taste of everything that passes through its creamy putrescence. Then onward into the gullet, the gut, the intestines, all the while seeping laterally into the heart, lungs, kidneys and liver. Each of these in turn becomes foul smelling. Once-healthy organs turn raw; their energetic ardor is drained in quick-fire bursts of emotion. What results is a seething, oozing, angry complaint that penetrates to the farthest reaches of the skin. The feeling accumulates into a cloudy inability to move, think, or experience positive emotion. The host body can suffer this state for days, weeks, and even months. There is no known cure, other than the refusal to be porous.