Within These Five Walls
He sat on his hands.
Sweat slicked down his back in the long vertical groove of his spine. His head was beaded with it and when the beads swelled to drops, they would roll down his forehead and drip from his nose or chin. He cursed his fresh shave. The sweat lit every pore afire and his baldness did nothing to dam back the plummeting sheets of salt-tinged fluid.
It was hot in the box.
His fingertips ached beneath him but their numb pulsing had nothing to do with his weight bearing down on them. They were red-raw and near bleeding from searching the walls; this perfect, this horrible box’s walls, and they had found nothing. If there was a way out, it wasn’t to be divined by prodding or scratching.
“It was the boogerman put me in here,” he said. There was no echo. The sound was swallowed up as soon as it left his lips, but it felt good to speak.
The walls. They were as smooth as sheets of glass. No faults, no gives, no pries, nothing to sneak a finger into or to whack a banging fist against. No gives. So he had resigned himself to sit in the center of the box and think. And the sweat had come gradually pouring down.
“The boogerman...”
That was from his grandfather. The boogerman was always after him growing up. Chasing him through the wood between his grandparents’ cottage and the green-shuttered house where he was raised. The boogerman could only be viewed in peripheral and he was tall and thin and teethy with long grabbing hands that reached through the darkness for little boys’ wrists, ankles, necks. And he was shifty; morphing into head-high blackjack stumps or the low limbs of oak trees.
His grandfather had warned him of the boogerman God knows how many times. Said he always caught up with what he was chasing.
“He got me this time, Granddaddy,” he said. “He finally did.”
But all this occurred in the top layer of his brain. The rest of him fought to find a way out of the box. Maybe not with fingernails clawing at the flawless corners, but struggling all the same. Peeling back the cobwebs of reality that, at first, were light and stringy but had progressed in dimensions to that of thick occluding curtains of white. And he slung them back, digging his mind deeper and deeper into what he did not know, but digging deeper none the less.
Until at last he was faced with a mirror and in the box, his eyeballs jittering under clenched lids, he spoke.
“This isn’t real.”
His eyes spun in their closed-up sockets as he spoke and he forgot where he was. The box or behind the cobwebs and curtains, he no longer knew. In front of the mirror or behind. Totally forgot, but at the same time realized that it didn’t matter.
“Real is what some would call a relative term.”
“I don’t care about all that,” he said. “If you knew me, you’d know I’m not much for semantics.”
“I think I know you well enough. And the simple dumbed out answer is no. This is not real.”
His tongue swiped itself across his lips and came back salty. Tasted real. The weight of his body, the pull of gravity with his hands between his buttocks and that which did the pulling, felt real. It all felt...so...
But he knew the truth.
“I’m
a construct aren’t I? A character?” He breathed and
the air filled him up.
“I’m a character in someone else’s story.”
And then the images came flooding, rolling through his head the way the sweat was rolling over his body. Playing tetherball with his father because no one else would, not with the litter-runt, his father hitting the ball low so his tiny hands could reach. Blood gushing from above his baby brother’s eye. Red clay making red circles around the ankles of white socks. Bus 371 running yellow against the green leafy backdrop of home. The wedding and the tossed birdseed caught in her hair. The morning that the boogerman finally caught up with his oldest and craftiest quarry and then the day of Granddaddy’s funeral. The day they laid him in the clay.
It all felt so...real.
“You are so much more.”
It felt real, it did. But those memories felt loose in his mind, as if they weren’t altogether his own. As if they were borrowed photographs from someone else’s picture album.
“Whose memories are these?”
“Mine,” I said.
He licked his lips again, not allowing himself to believe the taste of oily salt.
“Then this is your story,” he said, “and you’re the boogerman that’s got me in this box.”
“You think this is my story and that you are simply a part of it? Like the whale in Moby Dick or the Hatter in Alice? Have you considered the possibility that it is the other way around? Perhaps you are the storyteller and if so, then your being trapped here is of your own design, and you can escape whenever you’re good and ready. Have you considered that?”
No. He had not.
“And just to be quite clear: THERE IS NO BOX!”
And for a moment, behind the curtains, he believed it.
No box.
And sitting there on his hands, he felt a sudden cool breeze staunch the flow of sweat and heard the gentle back and forth chatter of sweet bob-whites high in what must be trees. Everything smelled open and sugary like honeysuckle and cut grass. And just before he opened his eyes, he had time to say one thing.
“I’m home.”
Bio: Kevin Winter resides in Northern Mississippi with his wife and two dogs. His short fiction may be found in Bartleby Snopes, The Battered Suitcase, Sparkbright, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Until the completion of his website, he may be contacted at kswinterrx@yahoo.com.