Before she’s born, the mother dreams of who she wants her daughter to be, and selects the perfect wooden box to compliment her own. After the amniotic fluid is wiped off, the mother places the baby inside. As she grows, her mother drills holes for her head, arms and legs. The box is so heavy that the girl cannot run with it on. In fact, she has never run. During recess, everyone else plays tag while she sits on a swing and imagines other worlds. For every Halloween she’s a Rubik’s cube. She’s growing up, and the box is not growing with her.
It used to be that she could turtle shell and disappear inside where she was safe. Now her arms and legs don’t fit comfortably. Her mother won’t get a new box that suits her prepubescent body. “My box has never been a problem,” her mother says over her cup of coffee. Her body is delicate and frail. In stature she doesn’t look that different from the girl’s classmates. “You just need to lose five pounds. Maybe ten.”
The girl’s stomach is in a series of complicated knots. Her breakfast plate was empty that morning. Left out for show. “What happens when I’m too tall for it?”
“Well, that won’t happen, dear. Your father and I aren’t that tall. You won’t be either. It’s genetics.”
“What about outliers and recessive genes…”
“Don’t get smart!” she said. “Mind over matter.”
But the girl does mind, and it doesn’t matter. Her body was preprogrammed with its own parameters that her mother hadn’t pre-approved. “Oh dear,” her mother says, “I guess it was more like ten to fifteen pounds. Time to get to work!” The girl is given a restricted diet. But it seems like all her food goes straight to her chest and ass. Uneven distribution does not suit the box. It throws off her gait and leaves wood burns on her thighs. Her mother sighs as she enlarges the holes, then says, “This is the last time! You don’t want to end up like all those Jezebels who don’t have one!”
The wood warps and whines from age and weather. Inside the box, the girl is cramped. At night the girl stretches to relieve some of the tension. Each move is tentative, so as not to harm the box. But her body is a miracle of muscle and sinew, crafted for fluidity that a felled tree, treated and shaped around her, cannot imitate. A panel cracks, separates and falls to the floor. She tries to imagine the consequences of her failure to maintain her body inside the box and the box itself. And as she’s spiraling, another part of her brain notices that she is not actively aware of every single inch of her body during every single movement. Not anymore. Not with the panel missing.
There are so many tools she can use to destroy the box. The meat tenderizer. A golf club. A crosscut saw. She chooses her body. Bends, twists, jumps and dances around her room. Patches of thin, decaying wood fall off the frame until all that’s left is the skeleton of her cage. It slides down her body. She steps outside it.
