Boxland
a short story
Note: I submitted this story to multiple science fiction magazines for publication; all turned it down. I understand why—it’s a tone gap issue, I presume—but I think the piece is really strong and I wanted to share it with the world anyway. I hope you enjoy!
He and She were part of a group on the prairie, running barefoot across the grass for hours, tossing back and forth a ball of sewn bladder, launching spears into the side of grazing things to burn, popping fats over sparking fires, eating deeply of organs and meat and sleeping full and warm and pressed close beside under hot flatland summer breeze. She charted the stars at night and He grazed her back lovingly with the dirt-stained tips of his fingers, half-asleep, ready for whatever the constellations had for them in the morning when the sun––furious, loving, life-giving sun––would return and rouse the group from journeys through the dream world back to the heat and sting of waking life. If the sun was his God, the stars were hers, and She trusted them without question, followed their directives and heeded their warnings, and this was why when the two were in a shaded spot over by the big rocks and bleached bones, She did not quail at the sight of a shiny, round object in the sky. The stars had always spoken to her, and perhaps now they had simply come to visit.
Their language, such as it was, was not complex––simple commands and descriptions, more tonal than grammatical––and therefore they did not have the ability to describe to the tribe what they had seen out in their private place. She was not inclined to, anyway; He, more circumspect, more attuned to outside threat, was nervous, but She patted him on his matted hair and stroked his beard and cooed at him that it was okay, that the heavens spoke in mysterious ways. She traced for him a line in the sky with her finger, reminding him of a comet they had seen not two moons ago, and He relaxed, just slightly.
Days went by without the shiny thing, and it began to become another memory, another mystery. The world was full of mysteries, and the line between dream world and waking life was thin, and his concern had begun to recede––not dissipate entirely, but sit uneasily like a half-remembered nightmare. Back to the rhythms of every day life––back to splashing in the shallow ponds dotting the plains, back to chasing her around just to hear her squeal with terror and delight, back to long hot afternoons hunting with his cousins, brothers, friends. Their lives revolved around rhythms and cycles, and over time, the rhythms and cycles overcame him again.
She did not forget about the shiny thing. Every night, as She and her sisters and aunts and cousins and friends sat by the fire staring at the stars––ignoring the laughs and farts and growls of the punch-drunk and overfull men––She let the memory of the shiny thing play in her mind’s eye. The tribe had two elders employed as rainmakers, dancers during the dry season to call down the rains, and She began to feel, deep inside her, like a rainmaker for the shiny thing. She didn’t dance, but She sent her intentions out into the dream world to reunite with it. She had begun to believe that it was meant for her––her stars come home to speak directly. Try as She might, though, She got no answer.
The shiny thing did return, after a time, to the same spot that they had first seen it, their private place by the big rocks and the bleached bones. It came just as before, from too high to see or nowhere at all, glinting off the sun, but this time it came lower, and they felt the heat of it and the vibration ringing deep in their ears. He instinctively pushed her behind him and brandished his flint knife, but She laid a soft hand on his hard shoulder and gently steered him aside. The shiny thing––blinding in the sun––had settled upon the dry ground, and the side opened up and out came a man, or something like it, face obscured in glass and body by soft armor. This man from the stars waved at them, and approached, and She took one step forward and He one tentative after, and before very long they had been shepherded into the thing, and when the side closed again and the rumble began their eyes had no time to adjust to the light before they blacked out.
When they awoke, they were in a box, with four walls and more walls and boxes inside and a ceiling and a floor. Here, a place to sit, a long soft chair, and He suspiciously eyed it before accepting its invitation, a jolt of comfort softening his spine. There, a room full of strange instruments: a box that turned hot, and another that turned cold, and steely knives sharp and true which She was careful to not cut herself on. Two more rooms: one, mysterious, full of water and things that make water. The other, with a large pad that fit both bodies, soft and elevated off the ground. Neither had seen anything like this. The artificial lights throughout the box were white, distinct from the warmth of the sun and the cool of the night, and unlike those, could be turned off and on with the flick of a switch. She spent much of the first day flicking the lights on and off, a nameless faceless man from the stars watching implacably, before he left them to their devices.
The cold box had food in it, and that night they supped on raw ground meat––blessedly free of skin, fur, and bone––and uncooked asparagus spears. They could not believe their fortune; free, finally, of the deprivation of the prairie, of the blinding heat of the sun, and although they felt flashes of missing the tribe they left behind, those were quickly erased by their new world, soft and clean, climate-controlled and carefree. Every morning, the cold box refilled. The fourth day, He realized that the smaller box inside the water room could be made to fill with water by turning a handle, warm water, like a hot spring, and He spent nearly all day in it, splashing around, and when He got out He looked in the reflective glass and saw that He was clean. She did the same, and after they saw each other anew, freshly scrubbed.
The men from the stars did not visit often after the first day, but when they did it was precise. They showed them how to use the special chair in the water room very early on, and how to make fire on the hot box in the instrument room on which they could cook their meat and vegetables. The men from the stars also introduced them to even easier foods; it turned out there was a smaller box above the hot box that also became hot after pressing two buttons, and in the icy box (below the cold box) were softer, smaller boxes full of frozen food. Whole meals, nutritionally balanced and precise, just for them, in minutes, strange new flavors they thrilled to, textures unknown to the prairie. If they had the language to say it, they would have believed this was Heaven.
Next to the comfortable long chair, of which He had grown very fond, was a wall made of something different. It reminded him of a particular kind of stone He would see after wildfires, hard and shiny and black. He’d rap his knuckles on it suspiciously, and found that it rang back hollow. If this were their home on the prairie, He would have rounded up his hunting party to investigate, spear and bone in hand, to ensure that it was friend and not foe. Without them, He was left to sit on the long comfortable chair and stew, looking warily over every few minutes until He stopped noticing it altogether, and tuned out the sounds like murmurs and steps from the other side.
He had begun, after a time, to discover feelings that He had never felt before. He was growing soft around the middle, and found his patience very thin. He snapped at her when She was taking too long in the water room, which filled him with shame and regret. For her part, She had begun finding it difficult to sleep, and found that her cycles––once regulated easily by the moon––had become nearly impossible to track. She could not see the stars, and found herself longing for their guidance.
They had copulated a few times when they had first arrived but over time as their sleep rhythms were disrupted under new lights they found decreasing interest in doing so. Without sex and without the hunt and without the stars they found new things to entertain themselves––especially once the men from the stars brought in another shiny black rock, wide and flat as a mesa on its side. This one was across from the comfortable long chair, and when a wand was waved at it just so it opened up a portal to other worlds: others like them, almost, in environments like their new one, wearing strange skins and speaking strange tongues. Transfixing; they began to find themselves wanting to be like these strange others, rehearsing arguments in the instrument room, pausing for the portal’s ghost laughter they longed for the way the rainmakers longed for rain.
He started to get headaches. His posture shifted, craned over, hunched from gazing into the portal. Both of them continued to gain weight, began to urinate more often, get dizzy spells. And they were angry. They were angry with each other, they were angry with the boxland, they were angry that their gods had gone quiet in the piercing hum of the cold box and the deafening roar of the wet room and the nonstop chatter of the portal.
They had settled into a routine of a kind. He sat on the long comfortable chair and waved the wand at the portal all day long, watching a million different unknowable lives. She stood in the room with the boxes, mindlessly putting ready meals into the small hot box or rinsing utensils in the water hole, and She found herself crying for no reason over very little things. The men from the stars would visit, and check their pulses, and take their blood, and give them medicines to stop the crying, and they would murmur in unknown tongues, an unnamed concern pulsating between their steady breaths. The two began sleeping in different rooms; She on the elevated sleeping pad, He on the long comfortable chair. The portal was never closed.
She forgot what the stars looked like, lost the names they had given them. He had long since forgotten the sun, its warmth and terror. They never grieved what they lost; they took it out on one another, and themselves, and they never learned the language to express the enormity of their loss. They didn’t know that the sun and stars were looking for them, just outside the boxland.
—
“Mommy, look!” said the boy from the stars, pointing at the one-way glass labeled “Homo Sapiens” in a strange alphabet. On the other side was an apartment, which the plaque nearby said was based on authentic human environments reconstructed from radio observations. Inside was a man on a couch. In the kitchen, a woman was doing dishes. They did not speak.
“Let’s go,” said the mother from the stars, impatiently, already walking to the next exhibit. “They’re not doing anything.”
“Okay,” said the boy, and he too loped away.