The Black Box

            She caressed the box with hands so frail they seemed translucent.  It had rested on the mahogany table for fifty years, centered on the lace doily.  Every day she dusted it, squared its sides with the sides of the table, touched it almost reverently.  But she never opened it.

            Something would have to be decided about the box.  Her children had given her only a week to make up her mind: live with her daughter Nora, or move to The Manor.  She couldn’t imagine her treasure in either of those places.

            “Nonsense,” she huffed.  “Just because I forget about the gas burners sometimes.  I’m not ready for an old folk’s home.”  But Nora was stubborn, a quality the old woman knew she had inherited from her father.

            “I can’t sleep nights worrying about you, Mom.  It’s not fair to Bob and the kids.”

            Nora always added that bit about the kids to play the guilt trip.  It usually worked.  Nora was a wheedler.  Always had been.  Just like her father, thought the old woman.   I wonder if he had lived longer, would she be trying to put him in an old peoples’ home like she is me?

            Nora married late in life.  She was a career woman.  As much as she loved her grandsons, the old lady could not imagine living with them in Nora’s house.  She’d always been in awe of their home.  New furniture.  White carpet.  Four bathrooms.  She spilled a bit of wine on the carpet once and Nora almost knocked her down to get to the spot to blot it up.

            “Its O.K, Mom.” She’d offered.  But the old woman knew it wasn’t.

            “I suppose it will have to be The Manor.”  She sighed, staring out the window at the park across the street.  Already the afternoon sun had a hooded glow to it; an early fall luminescence bathed the trees. A woman about her age sat on a bench, shawl pulled around her shoulders, engrossed in a book.

            The chiming of Papa’s clock startled her.  Already five.  Time to start supper.  Where had the afternoon gone?

            She paused beside Papa’s clock on her way to the kitchen.  It had ticked off her hours, her days, her years since childhood.  Very soon now she would pass it on to one of her children.  Give it away with the rest of her things, bits and pieces of her life.  She couldn’t take them with her.  Not to the Manor.

            Everything the old lady owned had a history, a personality.  Even...no, especially the black box. She remembered the day she’d received it. She remembered Martin.

            Martin was twenty then, fragile, thin and porcelain white.  He had a bad heart, the doctors said. Congenital.  Back then there wasn’t a lot they could do for him.  Martin spent hours with her in the shade of the chinaberry tree reading Chaucer and Thoreau.  An anemic young man and an awkward, gangling girl, they swung back and forth in Grandpa’s old glider.  Martin read aloud in his soft voice, the heavy southern accent coloring the words he spoke.  She was his audience.  They talked and planned for a future they knew they wouldn’t share, but in those warm soft days it didn’t really matter.

            He first told her about the box on one of those glider afternoons with the sun filtering through the leaves of the chinaberry.  The box had certain powers he said: magical powers.  It could stop time.  Make it stand still.  If you just knew when to use it, you could freeze your life the way it was at that moment. Youth would be youth forever.  Love would be eternal.  If you only knew for certain when to use it.  You wouldn’t want to stop time before it was the best it would ever be, when it might get better yet.

            At first she laughed at the notion of a magic box, but Martin believed.  He believed so strongly that she began to think it must be true.  They had put their heads together, his pale thin hair lying lightly against her thick brown braids, and dreamed of a time, predestined, when they would open the box.  Time would stop and they would be together forever.

            She could still see him, holding the black box tightly in thin hands, his ice-blue eyes shining with excitement.

            “ But where did it come from?”  She’d asked the question many times.  Martin just smiled and scrubbed at an imaginary spot on the box’s ebony surface or pretended interest in some bird or other. Finally she stopped asking, and wondering.  It was just there.  Like Martin.

            Only Martin didn’t stay.  Gradually he developed a cough.  It interrupted the readings in the glider and made her worry  .His voice became weak and it seemed hard for him to get his breath.  They never opened the box as they had planned.  Papa found Martin, sitting alone in the glider under the chinaberry tree, his hands lying on an open book of Lord Byron’s poetry.  It was so like him to go gently, leaving her alone in the setting sun the way he was accustomed to doing.  That time though, Martin didn’t come back.

            “Do you have any notion what this is, Dear?”  Martin’s mother asked her a few days later, the black box clutched against the pleats of her apron. “They said they discovered it under your Paw-Paw’s glider when your Daddy found Martin.  I’ve never seen it before.  Is it yours?”

            “Why yes,” she’d said, “It is mine.”  And she took the box quickly, hungry to have a bit of Martin to keep.  And now, here it sat on her coffee table on the white doily waiting for her decision.

            The jangle of the telephone made the old woman jump.  It was dark outside.  “Hello, Mother?” The voice belonged to Nora.  “I hadn’t heard from you today.  How are you?  Have you had supper?”

            “Yes, I think...no, I haven’t had supper.  I was going to get it when...”

            “Honestly, Mother,” Nora interrupted. “It’s nearly seven.  What can you be doing?”

            “Doing?  Well, I...” but the old woman’s voice died away as she looked up and saw the girl by the plant stand.  She dropped the phone back on its cradle and stared at her visitor.

            The girl was tall.  She wore a dark print ankle-length dress and clumpy scuffed shoes.  Her brown hair was caught back into waist length braids.  She seemed at once strange and oddly familiar.

            “How did you get in here?” The old woman demanded.

The child said nothing.  She smiled, sat down in the rocking chair and stroked the

 wooden arms.

“What is your name?” the old woman’s voice trembled.

This time the girl answered softly.  “Faye.”

            “Why, my name is Faye too.”  The old woman was amazed that she wasn’t afraid. 

It seemed right that the girl was dressed in clothes from another time.  Seventy years ago

she had worn dresses just so.

            “This chair used to have a broken rung,” said the child.

            “I had it fixed...”  The old woman pointed down to where a line of glue evidenced

the mended wood.

            “She used to rock while she crocheted,” the girl went on.

            “ I remember.  When we got the electricity, Mama put that chair right underneath

the light.”

The child nodded in agreement.  The old woman shivered.  “Faye,” she asked,

“How did you know that?”

            Faye left the chair and knelt on the floor by the table where the black box sat. 

“Martin’s family never knew about the box.”

            “Who are you?” asked the old woman quietly.  She thought she knew the answer.

            The girl looked up and smiled.  She stood and walked across the room, out

through the door, not looking back.

            Nora and Bob came later.  They pummeled her with questions.  Assessment

questions.  They were trying to see if she was oriented to time, place, date, she knew.  She

was afraid that if she told them anything she would have to tell them about her visitor. 

About Faye.  The young girl’s vivid image still floated before the old woman’s eyes.  How

could it help but come out?  So she was quiet and agreeable, and Nora left telling Bob that

her mother seemed more confused than normal.  Nora hoped it was just because it was

evening.  Mother was always more difficult in the evenings.

            The little girl didn’t come again for several days.  Then, late one afternoon, the old

lady looked up from a picture album and the girl was standing, silhouetted against the

setting sun.

            “Martin was awfully thin, wasn’t he?” She asked.

            The woman nodded slowly. “I remember when he first took sick. They said his

heart was failing.”  She was glad to have the girl there.  Glad to talk about Martin.  The

child sat down on the floor in a patch of dying sunlight.

            “I always wondered why he didn’t open the box,” the old woman mused.

            The child traced the pattern in the carpet with her index finger.  “He did.”

            The woman drew in her breath sharply, so fast it made a whistling sound.  “How

do you know that?”

            The girl ignored the question, kept her head bowed to the carpet, and the

reddening sky cast a halo around her head.  “Do you remember gooseberry pie?”

            “I make it sometimes.”  The woman waved her hand as if to dismiss the subject. 

“But the box...,”the old lady pressed impatiently.  She leaned forward in her chair to better

see the child’s face.

            “Why haven’t you opened it?” Faye asked.

            The woman sat straight, holding her white-narcissus hands tight in her lap, and

thought for a long time before answering.  “It never seemed to be the right time.  After

Martin died, I met Gerald.  Then there were the children and a house to keep.  I wanted to

see my grandchildren.  Then, well…”  The woman was quiet and she laid her hand gently

on the black box.

            “And now?”  The girl stood and came close to the wrinkled face.  “Now?” she

whispered, her braids brushing the lace collar on the old lady’s dress.

            The room was suddenly still except for the ticking of Papa’s clock and the raspy,

uneven breathing of the woman.  Her hand fumbled as she lifted the lid of the magic box. 

She shivered with anticipation as her eyes scanned its depths.

            “Nothing.”  She sighed.  “There’s nothing in it.  All these years of waiting and its

empty.”  The old woman laid the box back on the table, confused, and looked up at her

young guest.

            Faye extended her hand to the woman seated in the antique rocker  “Papa’s clock

has stopped. Come on, I’ll show you.”  She tossed her braids and skipped the length of the

room, then returned for the old lady.

The old woman stood, amazed at how light she felt, how effortlessly she moved. 

She took the child’s hand.  At first, they walked, but then her feet began to move, faster and faster.  Together they danced past the photos and plants, whirled through the door and disappeared into the dusk.

            Nora tried several times to call her mother the next morning.  At last, she and Bob

drove to the old woman’s house.  Inside, they found her seated in her mama’s rocker.

            “She was looking at family pictures when she died,” Bob said, and took the heavy

album from her lap.  “Who’s this?”  He pointed to a picture the old woman had circled in

red ink.

            “Mother.”  Nora touched the picture of an awkward young girl with long braids

and a strange smile.  “That’s Mother as a child.”  Then she closed the album and laid it on

the coffee table next to the open black box.

Caryl A. Harvey

504 E. Furry St.

Holyoke, Co. 80734

970-854-2665

harvey@schollnet.com

The Black Box

            She caressed the box with hands so frail they seemed translucent.  It had rested on the mahogany table for fifty years, centered on the lace doily.  Every day she dusted it, squared its sides with the sides of the table, touched it almost reverently.  But she never opened it.

            Something would have to be decided about the box.  Her children had given her only a week to make up her mind: live with her daughter Nora, or move to The Manor.  She couldn’t imagine her treasure in either of those places.

            “Nonsense,” she huffed.  “Just because I forget about the gas burners sometimes.  I’m not ready for an old folk’s home.”  But Nora was stubborn, a quality the old woman knew she had inherited from her father.

            “I can’t sleep nights worrying about you, Mom.  It’s not fair to Bob and the kids.”

            Nora always added that bit about the kids to play the guilt trip.  It usually worked.  Nora was a wheedler.  Always had been.  Just like her father, thought the old woman.   I wonder if he had lived longer, would she be trying to put him in an old peoples’ home like she is me?

            Nora married late in life.  She was a career woman.  As much as she loved her grandsons, the old lady could not imagine living with them in Nora’s house.  She’d always been in awe of their home.  New furniture.  White carpet.  Four bathrooms.  She spilled a bit of wine on the carpet once and Nora almost knocked her down to get to the spot to blot it up.

            “Its O.K, Mom.” She’d offered.  But the old woman knew it wasn’t.

            “I suppose it will have to be The Manor.”  She sighed, staring out the window at the park across the street.  Already the afternoon sun had a hooded glow to it; an early fall luminescence bathed the trees. A woman about her age sat on a bench, shawl pulled around her shoulders, engrossed in a book.

            The chiming of Papa’s clock startled her.  Already five.  Time to start supper.  Where had the afternoon gone?

            She paused beside Papa’s clock on her way to the kitchen.  It had ticked off her hours, her days, her years since childhood.  Very soon now she would pass it on to one of her children.  Give it away with the rest of her things, bits and pieces of her life.  She couldn’t take them with her.  Not to the Manor.

            Everything the old lady owned had a history, a personality.  Even...no, especially the black box. She remembered the day she’d received it. She remembered Martin.

            Martin was twenty then, fragile, thin and porcelain white.  He had a bad heart, the doctors said. Congenital.  Back then there wasn’t a lot they could do for him.  Martin spent hours with her in the shade of the chinaberry tree reading Chaucer and Thoreau.  An anemic young man and an awkward, gangling girl, they swung back and forth in Grandpa’s old glider.  Martin read aloud in his soft voice, the heavy southern accent coloring the words he spoke.  She was his audience.  They talked and planned for a future they knew they wouldn’t share, but in those warm soft days it didn’t really matter.

            He first told her about the box on one of those glider afternoons with the sun filtering through the leaves of the chinaberry.  The box had certain powers he said: magical powers.  It could stop time.  Make it stand still.  If you just knew when to use it, you could freeze your life the way it was at that moment. Youth would be youth forever.  Love would be eternal.  If you only knew for certain when to use it.  You wouldn’t want to stop time before it was the best it would ever be, when it might get better yet.

            At first she laughed at the notion of a magic box, but Martin believed.  He believed so strongly that she began to think it must be true.  They had put their heads together, his pale thin hair lying lightly against her thick brown braids, and dreamed of a time, predestined, when they would open the box.  Time would stop and they would be together forever.

            She could still see him, holding the black box tightly in thin hands, his ice-blue eyes shining with excitement.

            “ But where did it come from?”  She’d asked the question many times.  Martin just smiled and scrubbed at an imaginary spot on the box’s ebony surface or pretended interest in some bird or other. Finally she stopped asking, and wondering.  It was just there.  Like Martin.

            Only Martin didn’t stay.  Gradually he developed a cough.  It interrupted the readings in the glider and made her worry  .His voice became weak and it seemed hard for him to get his breath.  They never opened the box as they had planned.  Papa found Martin, sitting alone in the glider under the chinaberry tree, his hands lying on an open book of Lord Byron’s poetry.  It was so like him to go gently, leaving her alone in the setting sun the way he was accustomed to doing.  That time though, Martin didn’t come back.

            “Do you have any notion what this is, Dear?”  Martin’s mother asked her a few days later, the black box clutched against the pleats of her apron. “They said they discovered it under your Paw-Paw’s glider when your Daddy found Martin.  I’ve never seen it before.  Is it yours?”

            “Why yes,” she’d said, “It is mine.”  And she took the box quickly, hungry to have a bit of Martin to keep.  And now, here it sat on her coffee table on the white doily waiting for her decision.

            The jangle of the telephone made the old woman jump.  It was dark outside.  “Hello, Mother?” The voice belonged to Nora.  “I hadn’t heard from you today.  How are you?  Have you had supper?”

            “Yes, I think...no, I haven’t had supper.  I was going to get it when...”

            “Honestly, Mother,” Nora interrupted. “It’s nearly seven.  What can you be doing?”

            “Doing?  Well, I...” but the old woman’s voice died away as she looked up and saw the girl by the plant stand.  She dropped the phone back on its cradle and stared at her visitor.

            The girl was tall.  She wore a dark print ankle-length dress and clumpy scuffed shoes.  Her brown hair was caught back into waist length braids.  She seemed at once strange and oddly familiar.

            “How did you get in here?” The old woman demanded.

The child said nothing.  She smiled, sat down in the rocking chair and stroked the

 wooden arms.

“What is your name?” the old woman’s voice trembled.

This time the girl answered softly.  “Faye.”

            “Why, my name is Faye too.”  The old woman was amazed that she wasn’t afraid. 

It seemed right that the girl was dressed in clothes from another time.  Seventy years ago

she had worn dresses just so.

            “This chair used to have a broken rung,” said the child.

            “I had it fixed...”  The old woman pointed down to where a line of glue evidenced

the mended wood.

            “She used to rock while she crocheted,” the girl went on.

            “ I remember.  When we got the electricity, Mama put that chair right underneath

the light.”

The child nodded in agreement.  The old woman shivered.  “Faye,” she asked,

“How did you know that?”

            Faye left the chair and knelt on the floor by the table where the black box sat. 

“Martin’s family never knew about the box.”

            “Who are you?” asked the old woman quietly.  She thought she knew the answer.

            The girl looked up and smiled.  She stood and walked across the room, out

through the door, not looking back.

            Nora and Bob came later.  They pummeled her with questions.  Assessment

questions.  They were trying to see if she was oriented to time, place, date, she knew.  She

was afraid that if she told them anything she would have to tell them about her visitor. 

About Faye.  The young girl’s vivid image still floated before the old woman’s eyes.  How

could it help but come out?  So she was quiet and agreeable, and Nora left telling Bob that

her mother seemed more confused than normal.  Nora hoped it was just because it was

evening.  Mother was always more difficult in the evenings.

            The little girl didn’t come again for several days.  Then, late one afternoon, the old

lady looked up from a picture album and the girl was standing, silhouetted against the

setting sun.

            “Martin was awfully thin, wasn’t he?” She asked.

            The woman nodded slowly. “I remember when he first took sick. They said his

heart was failing.”  She was glad to have the girl there.  Glad to talk about Martin.  The

child sat down on the floor in a patch of dying sunlight.

            “I always wondered why he didn’t open the box,” the old woman mused.

            The child traced the pattern in the carpet with her index finger.  “He did.”

            The woman drew in her breath sharply, so fast it made a whistling sound.  “How

do you know that?”

            The girl ignored the question, kept her head bowed to the carpet, and the

reddening sky cast a halo around her head.  “Do you remember gooseberry pie?”

            “I make it sometimes.”  The woman waved her hand as if to dismiss the subject. 

“But the box...,”the old lady pressed impatiently.  She leaned forward in her chair to better

see the child’s face.

            “Why haven’t you opened it?” Faye asked.

            The woman sat straight, holding her white-narcissus hands tight in her lap, and

thought for a long time before answering.  “It never seemed to be the right time.  After

Martin died, I met Gerald.  Then there were the children and a house to keep.  I wanted to

see my grandchildren.  Then, well…”  The woman was quiet and she laid her hand gently

on the black box.

            “And now?”  The girl stood and came close to the wrinkled face.  “Now?” she

whispered, her braids brushing the lace collar on the old lady’s dress.

            The room was suddenly still except for the ticking of Papa’s clock and the raspy,

uneven breathing of the woman.  Her hand fumbled as she lifted the lid of the magic box. 

She shivered with anticipation as her eyes scanned its depths.

            “Nothing.”  She sighed.  “There’s nothing in it.  All these years of waiting and its

empty.”  The old woman laid the box back on the table, confused, and looked up at her

young guest.

            Faye extended her hand to the woman seated in the antique rocker  “Papa’s clock

has stopped. Come on, I’ll show you.”  She tossed her braids and skipped the length of the

room, then returned for the old lady.

The old woman stood, amazed at how light she felt, how effortlessly she moved. 

She took the child’s hand.  At first, they walked, but then her feet began to move, faster and faster.  Together they danced past the photos and plants, whirled through the door and disappeared into the dusk.

            Nora tried several times to call her mother the next morning.  At last, she and Bob

drove to the old woman’s house.  Inside, they found her seated in her mama’s rocker.

            “She was looking at family pictures when she died,” Bob said, and took the heavy

album from her lap.  “Who’s this?”  He pointed to a picture the old woman had circled in

red ink.

            “Mother.”  Nora touched the picture of an awkward young girl with long braids

and a strange smile.  “That’s Mother as a child.”  Then she closed the album and laid it on

the coffee table next to the open black box.

Caryl A. Harvey

504 E. Furry St.

Holyoke, Co. 80734

970-854-2665

harvey@schollnet.com

The Black Box

            She caressed the box with hands so frail they seemed translucent.  It had rested on the mahogany table for fifty years, centered on the lace doily.  Every day she dusted it, squared its sides with the sides of the table, touched it almost reverently.  But she never opened it.

            Something would have to be decided about the box.  Her children had given her only a week to make up her mind: live with her daughter Nora, or move to The Manor.  She couldn’t imagine her treasure in either of those places.

            “Nonsense,” she huffed.  “Just because I forget about the gas burners sometimes.  I’m not ready for an old folk’s home.”  But Nora was stubborn, a quality the old woman knew she had inherited from her father.

            “I can’t sleep nights worrying about you, Mom.  It’s not fair to Bob and the kids.”

            Nora always added that bit about the kids to play the guilt trip.  It usually worked.  Nora was a wheedler.  Always had been.  Just like her father, thought the old woman.   I wonder if he had lived longer, would she be trying to put him in an old peoples’ home like she is me?

            Nora married late in life.  She was a career woman.  As much as she loved her grandsons, the old lady could not imagine living with them in Nora’s house.  She’d always been in awe of their home.  New furniture.  White carpet.  Four bathrooms.  She spilled a bit of wine on the carpet once and Nora almost knocked her down to get to the spot to blot it up.

            “Its O.K, Mom.” She’d offered.  But the old woman knew it wasn’t.

            “I suppose it will have to be The Manor.”  She sighed, staring out the window at the park across the street.  Already the afternoon sun had a hooded glow to it; an early fall luminescence bathed the trees. A woman about her age sat on a bench, shawl pulled around her shoulders, engrossed in a book.

            The chiming of Papa’s clock startled her.  Already five.  Time to start supper.  Where had the afternoon gone?

            She paused beside Papa’s clock on her way to the kitchen.  It had ticked off her hours, her days, her years since childhood.  Very soon now she would pass it on to one of her children.  Give it away with the rest of her things, bits and pieces of her life.  She couldn’t take them with her.  Not to the Manor.

            Everything the old lady owned had a history, a personality.  Even...no, especially the black box. She remembered the day she’d received it. She remembered Martin.

            Martin was twenty then, fragile, thin and porcelain white.  He had a bad heart, the doctors said. Congenital.  Back then there wasn’t a lot they could do for him.  Martin spent hours with her in the shade of the chinaberry tree reading Chaucer and Thoreau.  An anemic young man and an awkward, gangling girl, they swung back and forth in Grandpa’s old glider.  Martin read aloud in his soft voice, the heavy southern accent coloring the words he spoke.  She was his audience.  They talked and planned for a future they knew they wouldn’t share, but in those warm soft days it didn’t really matter.

            He first told her about the box on one of those glider afternoons with the sun filtering through the leaves of the chinaberry.  The box had certain powers he said: magical powers.  It could stop time.  Make it stand still.  If you just knew when to use it, you could freeze your life the way it was at that moment. Youth would be youth forever.  Love would be eternal.  If you only knew for certain when to use it.  You wouldn’t want to stop time before it was the best it would ever be, when it might get better yet.

            At first she laughed at the notion of a magic box, but Martin believed.  He believed so strongly that she began to think it must be true.  They had put their heads together, his pale thin hair lying lightly against her thick brown braids, and dreamed of a time, predestined, when they would open the box.  Time would stop and they would be together forever.

            She could still see him, holding the black box tightly in thin hands, his ice-blue eyes shining with excitement.

            “ But where did it come from?”  She’d asked the question many times.  Martin just smiled and scrubbed at an imaginary spot on the box’s ebony surface or pretended interest in some bird or other. Finally she stopped asking, and wondering.  It was just there.  Like Martin.

            Only Martin didn’t stay.  Gradually he developed a cough.  It interrupted the readings in the glider and made her worry  .His voice became weak and it seemed hard for him to get his breath.  They never opened the box as they had planned.  Papa found Martin, sitting alone in the glider under the chinaberry tree, his hands lying on an open book of Lord Byron’s poetry.  It was so like him to go gently, leaving her alone in the setting sun the way he was accustomed to doing.  That time though, Martin didn’t come back.

            “Do you have any notion what this is, Dear?”  Martin’s mother asked her a few days later, the black box clutched against the pleats of her apron. “They said they discovered it under your Paw-Paw’s glider when your Daddy found Martin.  I’ve never seen it before.  Is it yours?”

            “Why yes,” she’d said, “It is mine.”  And she took the box quickly, hungry to have a bit of Martin to keep.  And now, here it sat on her coffee table on the white doily waiting for her decision.

            The jangle of the telephone made the old woman jump.  It was dark outside.  “Hello, Mother?” The voice belonged to Nora.  “I hadn’t heard from you today.  How are you?  Have you had supper?”

            “Yes, I think...no, I haven’t had supper.  I was going to get it when...”

            “Honestly, Mother,” Nora interrupted. “It’s nearly seven.  What can you be doing?”

            “Doing?  Well, I...” but the old woman’s voice died away as she looked up and saw the girl by the plant stand.  She dropped the phone back on its cradle and stared at her visitor.

            The girl was tall.  She wore a dark print ankle-length dress and clumpy scuffed shoes.  Her brown hair was caught back into waist length braids.  She seemed at once strange and oddly familiar.

            “How did you get in here?” The old woman demanded.

The child said nothing.  She smiled, sat down in the rocking chair and stroked the

 wooden arms.

“What is your name?” the old woman’s voice trembled.

This time the girl answered softly.  “Faye.”

            “Why, my name is Faye too.”  The old woman was amazed that she wasn’t afraid. 

It seemed right that the girl was dressed in clothes from another time.  Seventy years ago

she had worn dresses just so.

            “This chair used to have a broken rung,” said the child.

            “I had it fixed...”  The old woman pointed down to where a line of glue evidenced

the mended wood.

            “She used to rock while she crocheted,” the girl went on.

            “ I remember.  When we got the electricity, Mama put that chair right underneath

the light.”

The child nodded in agreement.  The old woman shivered.  “Faye,” she asked,

“How did you know that?”

            Faye left the chair and knelt on the floor by the table where the black box sat. 

“Martin’s family never knew about the box.”

            “Who are you?” asked the old woman quietly.  She thought she knew the answer.

            The girl looked up and smiled.  She stood and walked across the room, out

through the door, not looking back.

            Nora and Bob came later.  They pummeled her with questions.  Assessment

questions.  They were trying to see if she was oriented to time, place, date, she knew.  She

was afraid that if she told them anything she would have to tell them about her visitor. 

About Faye.  The young girl’s vivid image still floated before the old woman’s eyes.  How

could it help but come out?  So she was quiet and agreeable, and Nora left telling Bob that

her mother seemed more confused than normal.  Nora hoped it was just because it was

evening.  Mother was always more difficult in the evenings.

            The little girl didn’t come again for several days.  Then, late one afternoon, the old

lady looked up from a picture album and the girl was standing, silhouetted against the

setting sun.

            “Martin was awfully thin, wasn’t he?” She asked.

            The woman nodded slowly. “I remember when he first took sick. They said his

heart was failing.”  She was glad to have the girl there.  Glad to talk about Martin.  The

child sat down on the floor in a patch of dying sunlight.

            “I always wondered why he didn’t open the box,” the old woman mused.

            The child traced the pattern in the carpet with her index finger.  “He did.”

            The woman drew in her breath sharply, so fast it made a whistling sound.  “How

do you know that?”

            The girl ignored the question, kept her head bowed to the carpet, and the

reddening sky cast a halo around her head.  “Do you remember gooseberry pie?”

            “I make it sometimes.”  The woman waved her hand as if to dismiss the subject. 

“But the box...,”the old lady pressed impatiently.  She leaned forward in her chair to better

see the child’s face.

            “Why haven’t you opened it?” Faye asked.

            The woman sat straight, holding her white-narcissus hands tight in her lap, and

thought for a long time before answering.  “It never seemed to be the right time.  After

Martin died, I met Gerald.  Then there were the children and a house to keep.  I wanted to

see my grandchildren.  Then, well…”  The woman was quiet and she laid her hand gently

on the black box.

            “And now?”  The girl stood and came close to the wrinkled face.  “Now?” she

whispered, her braids brushing the lace collar on the old lady’s dress.

            The room was suddenly still except for the ticking of Papa’s clock and the raspy,

uneven breathing of the woman.  Her hand fumbled as she lifted the lid of the magic box. 

She shivered with anticipation as her eyes scanned its depths.

            “Nothing.”  She sighed.  “There’s nothing in it.  All these years of waiting and its

empty.”  The old woman laid the box back on the table, confused, and looked up at her

young guest.

            Faye extended her hand to the woman seated in the antique rocker  “Papa’s clock

has stopped. Come on, I’ll show you.”  She tossed her braids and skipped the length of the

room, then returned for the old lady.

The old woman stood, amazed at how light she felt, how effortlessly she moved. 

She took the child’s hand.  At first, they walked, but then her feet began to move, faster and faster.  Together they danced past the photos and plants, whirled through the door and disappeared into the dusk.

            Nora tried several times to call her mother the next morning.  At last, she and Bob

drove to the old woman’s house.  Inside, they found her seated in her mama’s rocker.

            “She was looking at family pictures when she died,” Bob said, and took the heavy

album from her lap.  “Who’s this?”  He pointed to a picture the old woman had circled in

red ink.

            “Mother.”  Nora touched the picture of an awkward young girl with long braids

and a strange smile.  “That’s Mother as a child.”  Then she closed the album and laid it on

the coffee table next to the open black box.