The box under my bed has wooden sides banded with metal and a curved lid secured with an old-fashioned lock, like a pirate chest. The kind that would open with a creak to release a cascade of coins onto the sand of a faraway beach. Except this chest wouldn’t hold anything larger than an orange, so the coins probably wouldn’t pay for the week’s supermarket shop. A thick coating of dust has turned it grey and dull, and makes me cough as I bring it out of its hiding place.
I haven’t known what to do with it for a decade. A wiser
head would throw it away. I’ve just tried to forget about it, until now. It
took me a week to find the key lost in the detritus of a life lived without
quite enough time to do anything properly. Then another week wondering whether
I should open it when life has so many other priorities. I locked the box for a
reason. But I’m desperate.
The sound of the key in the lock is small and ordinary. A
tiny snick of tiny tumblers turning in a tiny lock in a tiny chest.
There are no coins inside. Just a dark grey stone with uneven
ridges and folds and a roughened texture that hints at scales. It takes up most
of the chest, crammed into a space barely large enough for it to fit. I poke it
gently and it’s cold and hard. Just a funny shaped stone. I poke it again and whisper,
“I need help.”
If it’s possible for a stone to look even stonier, the box’s
occupant achieves it.
“But I remember what it was like and I need it. Just a bit.”
I’m begging a rock. So pathetic.
“Please? Just a little bit. They’re making me write a
marketing article for LinkedIn and I don’t know where to start and I need it.
Please.”
The stone twitches and shifts, becomes something else
without changing shape because somehow what it was had always been there. Then
it stills and it’s a stone once more.
“Please?”
A never-ending minute stretches out before it shifts again. One
delicate scaly leg appears, followed by another, then two more. Slowly the
stone lifts and a fold becomes a head which had been curled into the body. Another
fold becomes a tail which had been tucked in tight beneath it. It uncurls and pushes
itself up out of the box to perch unsteadily on the edge. Two obsidian chip
eyes open and the stony scales gradually suffuse with copper tints as it
stretches out one leg at a time and yawns with a mouth full of tiny sharp
teeth.
It sinks tiny claws into the timbers of the box and, still
wobbling, unfurls bright, iridescent wings. It’s impossible that they ever
fitted into a box big enough to hold an orange. It gives them an experimental
flap and they cast light into every corner of the room.
And in that light, stories play out. Explorers pass under
trees hung with bird skulls and carved masks, while extraterrestrial mothers
escort their eight-legged babies across a plain covered with sulphurous yellow
bushes. Nixies peek from darkened lakes and sirens practice their song on
passing pelicans, and hedges pulse with sullen red flowers and thorns which crave
flesh, and paper cats battle with monsters made of smoke and ash. Herds of tiny
unicorns the size of a finger nail dance along kitchen counters and leave
hoofprints in the butter, and banshee children prepare for their end of school scream
test, and tearstained marionettes waltz in a darkened storeroom to save
themselves from curious goblins peeking out from behind the boxes all around
them. I remember them all and I remember my pencil filling notebook after
notebook.
The box’s occupant hops onto my shoulder and wraps a scaly
tail around my throat, and new thoughts trail feathery kisses along my neurons.
Every one carries an echo of laughter because it doesn’t care about marketing
or LinkedIn and it has no intention of ever going back in the box again. It is
mine, and I am its, and we left a baby with snakes for hair alone in an
unfinished world waiting for its father to find it. It’s time for us to find a
pencil.
