Heart-Shaped Box

The Earth breathed. Kurt paused his search for blacksticks to feel it as he always did. Saying Earth still breathed would be generous. What brushed over him as he trudged towards the bottom of the next hill was weaker than a breath, but definitely not a death rattle. Kurt thought Earth would spin on for many seasons after he had become just more dust.

Maybe Earth had more of a wheeze these days.

Earth’s wheezed a long, wandering breeze over the dusty foothills void of vegetation through which Kurt was making his way. Only his eyelids were exposed to the air, but the wrappings covering his body and limbs stirred in the wind. The skeletons of buildings stood in distant cemeteries here and there on the horizon. One of those gargantuan gravestones was at the top of the next hill. He adjusted his ragged gloves, and checked his arms and legs for exposure. Sunlight no longer nourished Earth, or what little still lived off it.

Satisfied with his coverage, he got moving again. The next hill was steep. The climb up was going to be hard. The Sound would make that easier, so he got out his minibox. The Sun wasn’t too high in the sky yet. The Sound would be clear.

When he first found it, Kurt had had no idea what the minibox was. It was small enough to be held in one hand, but not so small that he could close his hand all the way around it. The holes on one side had seemed to serve no purpose, but there were pushable pieces on the top. After pressing the pieces down in various orders and combinations, the box started making noise, startling him so bad that he had thrown it away in a panic. Luckily it was made of a durable material. It only had a small crack in one corner when he picked it up again. He had held it at arm's length, wary, but all it had done was keep Sounding. After a few more moments, the Sound had changed, blasting up in volume so violently that he almost dropped it again. After he examined the minibox more closely, he could see through a clear part next to the holes, where the Sound came from, apparently. Through that clear part he could see two black wheels turning, spooling some sort of string within the innards of the minibox.

It was a strange sound. Continuous, predictable, steady, reliable, and fascinating to him. There was a snap and thump and tsk that happened at a rhythm, and gentle mumbles that were at a different speed and at a different pitch but that somehow went with the snap and thumps. As he listened, the sound changed the same way again, becoming louder and angrier, but it always kept the same thump and snap at regular intervals. During the louder part, the mumbles became snarling shouts and screeches that were in time with the crashes, and the thumps and snaps became cannon fire and gunshots. Something sounded like it was shattering, over and over, like someone shaking tiny bullets in a tin can, and then stopping them suddenly. Through the chaos, a cohesive, horrifying beauty flowed out, creating something entirely new that had no business being joyous but was undeniably cathartic.

The sky had gone orange before his parents could explain to him how people were made, and so Kurt had only the vaguest idea of how human reproduction worked, but his parents had dropped enough hints and alluded to things enough that he knew it combined parts of each person involved into one completely new person. Making children was an action requiring effort and purpose and intention from each person. Children did not simply drop out of the sky.

That’s how the minibox Sound made him feel. Like something was happening; creation, maybe? There was clearly more than one noise happening, but they all worked towards the Sound together, and when the Sound ended, he had a feeling that made him want to lie down and bask in its radiance, taking deep breaths in the hopes that he could somehow inhale the Vibrations. But deep breaths were hard to come by these days.

There were also words mixed into the sound, but he had trouble making out whatever the person was saying. The words were the strangest part, like a particular warble that stayed at a pitch until going into another pitch on the next word, but the pitches all made sense with each other. It was like his ear was being led through all the other noises by that voice, but the other noises didn’t distract from the words; they made the words better. Near the end of the Sound, something started to talk. It was like a voice without words, but it dripped from the minibox like melting metal. For some reason, to Kurt, that dripping no-word voice sounded sad, desperate, trapped. Eventually, after a few more bursts of loudness and bash, the sound had ended on a long, growling drone that screeched one last time before all was silent.

By the time Kurt reached the foothills through which he now hiked, he had long since figured out how to get back to the beginning of the Sound and hear it all over again. It got to where he could predict where every thump and snap landed. It felt so good to know where the voice and growls and crashes were going that sometimes he flailed his arms with the rhythm. After so many days of playing and replaying and replaying the sound, he had been able to glean three words from the voice - Heart Shaped Box.

Before the sky went orange, his mother had had a Heart-Shaped Box to keep her threads and needles. His father gave it to her as a present, on something he could no longer remember. Holidays, he thought they were called. He remembered little of that life, but he had been so young when the sky went orange. He did have fleeting impressions, though, especially after the Sound had brought back the memory of his Mother’s Heart-Shaped Box.

The box had come with a small Heart-Shaped Locket as well, and on the inside was engraved the words “my favorite seamstress”, along with a small fish. Father had called it a pisces when Kurt asked about it. Pisces was his mother’s “sign”, whatever that meant. She had thanked his Father with a quick, quiet kiss on the cheek, and took the box back into the closet where her sewing supplies were, and where she kept she told Kurt were her discarded “boxing gloves” and “wrestling headgear”, stowing the present somewhere out of sight and out of mind. Her breathing was shallow, her “thank you, dear” a little too reserved and soft spoken to be true, her eyes a little too wide, darting from the Box to his Father and then to Kurt, then back to the Box like a caged animal. It had been a long time until she seemed like she could take a full breath again. She had spent the rest of that day in her chair by the window where she usually hemmed, patched or otherwise repaired their family’s clothes, staring blankly out with those too wide eyes, rubbing her thumb and forefinger together, circling the callus where she pushed the needle through the cloth. Every so often she would break out of her reverie, and look at her hands, tracing her knuckles, slowly clenching her fingers into fists and then relaxing them again.

But now that was all like another world, a dream. The idea of a home and gifts and chairs and windows were clouds on the horizon - real but nearly intangible. There were no presents, celebration, or people to say thank you to anymore. All he did was get over the next hill to look for food, water, and a place to crawl into at night to hide from the dying and diseased beasts and “people” that roamed the crumbling roadways. That is, until he had found the minibox. Now he searched for blacksticks.

Blacksticks were essential to the minibox. After maybe 100 plays of the Sound, it had started to slow down, as if sleepy. The wheel in its guts turned more slowly until it stopped completely, and the Sound ceased. Luckily, Kurt had known what blacksticks were before the sky had gone orange. He knew that you could put blacksticks into certain machines to make them work. He had fiddled with the minibox until he found where the blacksticks went, and removed the used up ones.

Blacksticks were not hard to find. The challenge was finding ones that fit the minibox. Around his waist he kept a small pouch of the ones of the appropriate size. Whenever the Sound slowed down too much, he simply replaced the blackstick in it with a new one. At first he had played the Sound only every so often, still amazed at the effect it had on him, but soon that wonder had worn off, and he had only wanted the feeling that came with hearing so much destruction and pain turn into beauty. Soon he was burning through his blacksticks like water, but that was no problem. He would happily go a day without food or another hour without water if it meant finding another blackstick to keep the Sound going.

Now hardly a day went by when he didn’t hear the Sound at least 10 times. It gave him purpose. When the Sound played, he felt like he could cross a whole mountain range on one sip of water and a bite of banana peel.

But that phrase “Heart-Shaped Box” gnawed at him. He couldn’t get the sewing box out of his head, couldn’t unsee the fish in the locket making his mother’s face fall. Though he loved the Sound of the minibox, he had come to hate the two moments when he could hear the words “Heart Shaped Box” come through the rest of the glorious cacophony. Sometimes he would turn the holes away from him during the part, so it was harder to hear.

He was about halfway up the next hill, the Sound comfortingly loud even underneath his wrappings, when he felt something wet trickling through his clothes. He stopped climbing and began to feel around for the source. When he discovered it was the minibox, his breath caught in his chest.

He drew it out, and though the Sound still rang, he saw something dripping from the blackstick slot. It was also crusted with something. Kurt stared at the minibox in confusion. He remembered nothing about blacksticks and a crusty liquid from his life before. He stopped the Sound with a frustrated “uggh” and carefully removed the old blackstick. As he did, more of the crusted liquid flaked out of the blackstick slot on the minibox’s back side. He put in a fresh one, and with a jolt of fear realized he only had one left. He reached the hilltop just as he was able to properly seat the black stick in its slot, and hurriedly pressed the piece to make the Sound start again.

Nothing happened. His heart lurched. He pressed the go-back piece, but the string guts did not spin. He stood dumbstruck for a moment, then dropped his arms, still holding the minibox. The building bones on the hilltop seemed to mock his dread, clearly empty of blacksticks. The horizon held nothing but more city-graves. Were there blacksticks in any of those buildings? Would it matter if the minibox was broken?

As Kurt came to realize what he just lost, he felt his face fall into the shape he thought his mother had when she received her own Heart-Shaped Box and Locket. All was quiet.