For a while, the deliveries were expected. As all deliveries should be, you believed. You’d ordered what you’d ordered; you received what you deserved. Until one day, when one was not. The box was a big one—six feet high, three or four wide. You carried it inside, marveling at its lightness. You opened it, and found nothing inside.
Packages of this sort continued to arrive for a number of weeks. No return address—no address at all. You did not know if they arrived from UPS, Amazon. Just box after box, each with nothing inside. You considered various allusions and subtextual meanings—Schrödinger’s cat, the Skinner box—but rejected each in turn. Real life was decidedly more complicated than that.
One weekday, you called out sick, set a watch on the front door. Your hope: to catch your tormenter in the act, boxcut a hole into the tight drum of their gut.
You waited all day, your stomach pressed flat against a bed of composting leaves.
When you awoke the next morning, another box, the largest one yet, greeted you at the door.
Promptly, you cut it to cardboard bits.
You sent an email to the Oxford English Dictionary asking for “boxcut” to be made a verb. Boxcutter was a noun, so why not? Give the boxcutter a purpose, a verb to perform.
The Oxford English Dictionary did not reply.
Years passed. You grew and shaved a beard. You married, divorced. You balded. You became a Buddhist. You adopted and buried a cat. You quit drinking. You started writing. You developed a bad habit of telling stories in the second person. Instead of starting over, you never picked up a pen again.
Nothing, you at last concluded, could match up to what you expected was coming. Better for it to end with nothing at all. Which was to say: better for it to never end at all.
At this thought, as if triggered by it, the doorbell rang. You went to the door. Another box. Six feet high, three or four wide. But this time it was heavy, inconceivably so. You were forced to open it on the front porch.
You boxcut its contents free in a series of vicious, desperate slashes.
You realized, in the aftermath, that you’d expected to find yourself.
This was not what you’d found.
–
Colin Lubner writes from Harlem. You can check in on him on Twitter @no1canimagine0. He’d love it if you checked in.