Opening the Box

Garkellia shut the door on another damn day. At last she could let her face fall into the expression she’d been feeling on the inside since that stupid, rotten meeting. Those horrible – no, Garkellia. Even verbalising what she thought of them in her mind might cause it to pop up on her face the next time she saw them. Better not to. Things could always get worse.

She realised she still had her hand firmly on the door handle as if the day might’ve tried to shove its way into her home. When it didn’t, she got a beer, which went crack-hiss as she opened it, slumped into a floral armchair, kicked her office shoes onto the rug and switched the telly on.

But she could not project herself onto the screen and lose herself in its images. She let the beer and dejection swill and foam in her blood, and she was surprised to find moisture come to her eyes, more surprised to find that it stung her, blinded her. She groped for a tissue from the box on the coffee table in front of her but retrieved only an empty box.

She jumped up in a tearful rage, rubbing and wiping at her eyes as the room was rinsed in a white light which just as quickly died away. Before her stood a middle-aged woman, even upper-middle-aged, but she stood bolt upright, and the blue of her eyes poured down on Garkellia. Compassion. Pity.

She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a checked shirt, a black vest, a pair of beige shorts, woolly socks and boots. Garkellia gazed at her wrinkled knees, the strange black box she carried, her freckled chest, the slack flesh of her neck and finally those bright blue eyes.

“Garkellia. This box is for you. You must look after it.”

“Thank you,” said Garkellia, taking the box as though it were a divine word in solid form.

“And one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget this. This moment. Remember me.”

Her voice was rough and deep but kind. There was so much to this woman. Garkellia felt her trust escape from her and attach itself to the woman.

“I will, I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Just do it.”

“Alright.”

Light flashed again. Garkellia covered her eyes, and when she lowered her hand, it was just her in her living room with a strange black box.

She put the box on the coffee table and continued to watch TV, but all she could really think about was that woman; how she stood, how she spoke, how she looked. When it got dark, Garkellia put the black box in a drawer she wasn’t using.

For the remainder of her twenties, a thought that lingered low in Garkellia’s consciousness was how much she admired that woman, how much she wanted to be like her, but how impossible that was, how she’d never put so much purpose, so much meaning into one word, how she’d never stand like that, like a hurricane wouldn’t knock her down.

As she grew older, she thought about the woman less and less often but, when she did think about her, the thoughts were less painful, the attributes she had longed for in her twenties didn’t seem quite so inaccessible. She moved from place to place and relationships came and went, but she always took the box with her wherever she went.

Of course, she wondered what was in the box, but if she ever looked at it, found her eyes rolling off in the direction of anything less troubling: the red of a book, the grey-blue of the sky.

One day, she prepared to go on a long hike and dressed appropriately. She packed an old rucksack with the few necessities such a trip required: water, a change of clothing, a torch, a good knife, a little money, a favourite book. Just before she walked out the door, it occurred to her that now might be the time to do the thing she’d put off for so many years.

She put down the rucksack, went to the bedroom cupboard and gently teased the box down from the high shelf.

‘It is time,’ she thought.

As she thought those words, everything disappeared in a flash of light, and before her, in a living room she hadn’t seen for decades was a very familiar person, a bright, handsome and resourceful young woman who lacked only self-belief.

As the red-eyed young woman looked her up and down in wonderment, Garkellia spoke the words that she remembered.

“Garkellia. This box is for you. You must look after it.”