The Body Box
By SoulFire77
"A cage went in search of a bird."
- Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (1917)
- 158 reads
III. The Body Box - Part One
The truck was a Peterbilt and the cab smelled like coffee and diesel and one of those pine tree air fresheners that nobody believes in but everybody...
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- 239 reads
III. The Body Box - Part Two
He asked questions. I let him. "How long?" he said. About an hour after I got in. "I don't know." "A week? A month?" "Longer than a month." "How much...
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- 301 reads
III. The Body Box - Part Three
The roads got smaller. County to rural. Rural to gravel. The gravel to a dirt track with grass growing in the center strip. The truck barely fit —...
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- 267 reads
IV. Remains - Part One
The cabinet he was building when Marie died was a white oak sideboard with dovetail joints and a hand-rubbed finish that would take four coats to get...
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- 211 reads
IV. Remains - Part Two
He measured her hands. He couldn't help it. It was Tuesday — four days after the box arrived — and he was kneeling beside it with a flexible rule,...
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- 177 reads
IV. Remains - Part Three
He opened the lid on a Wednesday morning. Three weeks and a day since the box arrived. The garage was cold — the heating hadn't been on in days, the...
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- 193 reads
II. Processing - Part One
She woke into the dark the way you wake from anesthesia — not all at once but in layers, each layer bringing a new piece of information that didn't...
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- 146 reads
II. Processing - Part Two
The box moved. Not gradually. A lurch, a vibration that started in the base and traveled through the material and into her spine, and then she was...
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- 195 reads
II. Processing - Part Three
She sat at a table. She drank a second cup of water. She held the clipboard. She watched. The facility ran the way a warehouse runs — calibrated,...
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- 200 reads
V. The Dependents - Part One
The alarm went off at 4:45 and Teresa was already awake. She'd been awake since 4:12, which she knew because the clock on the nightstand was digital...
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- 178 reads
V. The Dependents - Part Two
Day one. She did laundry. All of it. Every towel, every sheet, every piece of clothing in the apartment. She stripped the beds and washed the sheets...
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- 377 reads
V. The Dependents - Part Three
She drove to the facility on Saturday morning wearing the dress she'd worn to Miguel's funeral. She didn't realize this until she was in the parking...
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- 199 reads
I. Deep Storage - Part One
The gloves were her own. The county provided a box of disposable nitrile, blue, size medium, restocked every Monday in the supply closet beside the...
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- 233 reads
I. Deep Storage - Part Two
Friday. Three-ten. She told the supervisor she needed to check a lot number in Section E for a discrepancy on her cataloguing sheet. He was eating an...
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- 182 reads
I. Deep Storage - Part Three
The fingers were the wrong temperature. A living hand would have been warmer. A dead hand would have been colder. This hand was the temperature of...
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- 280 reads