The Winter Box Read online

  He wants to say something glib in reply like “Sounds kinky” or “Do your worst” or “I’m a big boy, I can take it.” But her tone is deadly serious and there’s nothing playful in her expression, and her eyes are as cold and empty as a doll’s. In the end, he merely nods once.

  “Good,” she says. Then without any explanation of what she intends to do, she jams a hand into his mouth. He struggles but she grips the side of his head with her other hand to hold him steady. He doesn’t remember her ever being this strong. She slowly pushes her cold fingers past his tongue and into the back of his throat. The cold burns, he starts to gag, and he feels a surge of panic. For the first time since waking to find himself tied to the bed, he realizes that he’s entirely at Heather’s mercy. She can do whatever she wants to with him, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it.

  He feels the tips of her fingers probing before finally taking hold of something. She withdraws her hand and holds a small object before his eyes. It’s a small plastic whistle, the kind of thing you might get as a prize in a box of Cracker Jack. The whistle is coated in mucus and saliva, and thin ropy strands hang from it.

  “Why this?” she demands.

  At first he doesn’t understand the question, but then it hits him. He’s seen this whistle before. It’s one of the items from the Winter Box. Not one that he contributed, though. This is one of Heather’s, and she’s asking him why she chose it and what it represents to her. It’s one of the earliest objects she contributed, sometime in the first few years of their marriage, so long ago now. How in the hell is he supposed to remember? If their roles were reversed and he was holding one of the items he chose and interrogated her about it, would she remember what it symbolized to him? He knew the answer to this question. Of course she would.

  As he wonders these things, he doesn’t question how she pulled the whistle from his throat or how the damn thing got there in the first place. It doesn’t even occur to him that there’s anything all that strange about it. No more so than everything else that’s happening, that is.

  “Answer,” she says. When he doesn’t respond, she grabs one of his nipples between thumb and forefinger and gives it a vicious twist. It hurts like hell, and he can feel himself softening inside her.

  “I…don’t remember.”

  She draws her hand back and then brings the whistle down hard on his forehead. The plastic breaks and one of the jagged edges cuts his skin. The blood that wells forth from the wound is hot on his flesh, and he thinks, Just how fucking cold is it in here, anyway?

  Despite what she just did, there’s no anger in her expression, not even a hint. Her eyes are still as unfeeling as glass.

  “I added it to the box on our third anniversary. I told you that it symbolized the fact that I’ll always be there whenever you need me. All you have to do—”

  “—is whistle,” he finishes. He remembers now. Not the specific details, though. Not how her face looked at the time, not the tone of her voice as she originally spoke these words. He wishes he did, but he doesn’t, and he knows he never will. This realization should sadden him, but right now he’s too goddamn scared of what his crazy-ass wife might do next.

  “You’ve made your point, Heather. Now free me, please.”

  He keeps the fear from his voice as he speaks, but he also tries not to sound as if he’s issuing an order. He wants to sound rational, one adult speaking to another. Blood trickles from his forehead wound, down the bridge of his nose, sliding off to the right then continuing down his cheek. He can’t help it. He starts trembling. His penis has become a tiny shriveled snail-like thing inside her.

  For the first time since he awakened, she smiles. It’s not much, a small uptick at the corners of her mouth, but it’s there. It’s not a comforting smile, though. Far from it.

  “We’re not done playing yet. If you want me to let you go, you have to answer one of my questions correctly. But be warned: three strikes and you lose. And you already have one strike against you.”

  She reaches into his mouth again, and he thinks about biting her hand. He doesn’t, though. Not because he doesn’t want to hurt her, but because he fears it will only make things worse for him. He gags again as her fingers wiggle around in his throat, but he endures the sensation. She pulls out another object and holds it to his face for inspection.

  It’s a paperclip.

  An innocuous, ubiquitous, mundane-as-all-hell paperclip. He doesn’t remember it being in the box, let alone what it represents.

  “Second verse, same as the first,” she says. “Why this?”

  He stares at the paperclip, its metal tinted blue by the eerie light on the night stand. Since he can’t remember anything about it, he’s going to have to bullshit his way through this round. What the hell could a paperclip represent? It’s such a utilitarian object, so simple and basic that there doesn’t seem to be any possibilities for metaphor or symbolism in it. For fuck’s sake, all it does is hold papers together, he thinks.

  Together.

  He breaks into a triumphant grin. “It symbolizes our love, which holds us together.”

  It has to be that, he thinks. What else could it be?

  She looks at him for a moment, then she begins reshaping the paperclip, bending it into a straight line. She speaks as she works.

  “Sixth anniversary. I brought it home with me from the bank. I’d only been working there for three weeks. I’d been too afraid to apply for the job, was worried that I might not be as qualified as some of the other applicants. But you encouraged me to apply. You said I was just as good as anyone else, if not better. I chose the paperclip to represent how I could always count on your support.”

  He remembers her being afraid to apply to the bank, remembers encouraging her to do so. But he doesn’t remember the goddamn paperclip.

  She moves so fast this time that at first he doesn’t realize what she’s done. But then fiery pain erupts in the corner of his left eye, and he feels hot blood well. He realizes she’s used the paperclip to stab him in the tear duct. It hurts like a motherfucker, and his back arches. He lets out a loud cry that isn’t quite a scream, but it’s damn close. He pulls at his restraints, thrashing back and forth. Heather clamps her thighs to his waist to avoid being dislodged. There’s a lot more blood this time, and it runs down the side of his face and soaks into the mattress. His body goes limp and he lies back, breathing harshly, blood flowing from one eye, tears from the other.

  Heather tosses the straightened paperclip aside.

  “Strike two,” she says. “One last chance. I hope you get this one right, sweetie. I really do.”

  He clamps his mouth shut this time, but it’s a futile gesture. All she has to do is pinch his nostrils together, and he eventually opens his mouth to breathe. He hopes to pull in a quick gulp of air and then close his mouth before she can jam her hand inside him again, but he isn’t fast enough. In goes her hand, her fingers feeling around inside his throat. He does bite her hand this time, but all he gets for his effort is a chipped tooth. Her flesh is hard as a rock, cold and unyielding. He doesn’t gag, and he supposes a person can get used to almost anything, given enough time.

  She withdraws her hand from his mouth once again, and this time she holds an object that he recognizes immediately. It’s one of his contributions, the last one he added to the box. It’s an adhesive bandage, still in the wrapper. Relief washes over him. He’s going to get this one right, and when he does, Heather will release him. She promised.

  “I chose it to symbolize how a strong relationship can help a person heal—even from wounds caused by problems in the relationship.”

  He smiles in triumph. He’s got this one right, and now she’ll stop playing this sick game and let him go.

  Her lips stretch into a smile of her own, but her eyes are colder than ever.

  “That’s what you told me. But that’s not why you chose it. You lied. The real reason you chose it was because you thought our marriage had become irrepar
ably damaged and all our efforts to fix it were like putting tiny bandages on deep, gushing wounds. Too little, too late.”

  As cold as the air in the room is, her words make him feel colder inside. He didn’t tell her any of that, so how could she know? He supposes she knows the same way she can withdraw objects from his throat, the same way her skin is cold and hard as stone, the same way her touch is frozen fire. Right now, this is simply the way of things.

  She tears open the wrapping and pulls the bandage out, lets the paper fall to the mattress. She removes the plastic backing from the sticky part of the bandage, takes hold of both ends between thumbs and forefingers, and pulls. The bandage lengthens and widens it as if it’s made of putty. She continues to stretch it until it’s ten inches long and five inches wide. She smiles the whole time she does this, and when she’s finished her smile grows larger, stretching past the point of what a human face should be capable of.

  “Strike three, sweetie. You’re out.”

  With gentle, almost loving movements, she places the overlarge bandage to the lower half of his face, covering his mouth and nose. She presses it to his flesh, smoothing the bandage until it adheres to his face like a second skin. The seal is airtight, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t pull in even the smallest of breaths. His lungs begin to burn almost immediately, and panic ignites inside him like wildfire. His starts to thrash, desperately trying to break free so that he can remove the bandage and get the air his body needs. Heather grips him with her thighs once more and grabs hold of his shoulders to prevent him from throwing her off. She leans her face close to his and kisses him on the forehead, right on the spot where the broken plastic whistle cut him. When she draws back he can see his blood smeared on her lips.

  “You know what it says in the contract, Todd: Til death do us part.”

  He struggles for a few more moments, his exertions lessening as the oxygen in his bloodstream is used up. Darkness creeps in from the edges of his vision, and the last thing he sees is Heather smiling at him with blood-slick lips.

  * * *

  Heather looks around, trying to orient herself. She’s in a dark place—Literally and figuratively, she thinks—and it’s hard to see. There’s dim light above, but it does little to illuminate her surroundings. Everything is draped in shadow, and she can only make out hazy, indistinct forms. She stretches out her hands before her and comes in contact with something. It’s large, and its surface is smooth and flat. Some kind of plastic, she thinks. She continues exploring it with her hands, finding sharp corners and raised round areas on one side. She frowns. It almost feels like…

  Bright light floods the area, and she squints her eyes against the glare. When her eyes adjust she looks at the object she examined with her hands and sees that it’s a bright red plastic brick, almost six feet in length. It stands upright, held in place by other objects surrounding it.

  It’s a toy building block, she thinks. A giant one.

  She looks at the other objects in her vicinity, turning around in a slow circle to see them all. She stands amidst a jumble of odds and ends, all blown up to gigantic proportions. A button, a torn movie ticket, a beer bottle cap, a length of twine, an acorn, and more. They’re packed together so tightly that there’s almost no room to move, and she feels a sudden overwhelming sensation of claustrophobia. She knows these objects, half of them she chose herself. They’re from the Winter Box, but how did they get here and how did they get so huge?

  She doesn’t pause to consider whether or not this is real. It feels real, and that’s all that matters to her. She’s more concerned with how she’s going to get out of the box. She doesn’t know how it’s gotten so large, but based on her size relative to the objects around her, the sides of the box—she supposes she should think of them as walls—are too high for her to climb. . . that is, unless she can find a large enough object close to one of the sides to use as a ladder or ramp. Or maybe she could put a pile of objects together that will allow her to climb out. So the first thing she has to do is find a side. She knows she’ll eventually find one regardless of which direction she goes, but she would rather take the shortest route if she can. She might be close to a side without knowing it, and she might start walking away from it only to end up heading toward the other side of the box. None of the objects in here are dangerous, at least not at their normal size. But now they are large enough that some of them—like the toy building block—can hurt her if they fall on her. Maybe she can find something sturdy, climb up on top of it, and take a look around. There’s plenty of light now, and she should be able to see well enough to tell if she’s close to a side or not.

  Now that she has this settled, she starts looking around for something sturdy enough to bear her weight and braced well enough by the other objects around it that it won’t move too much when she attempts to climb it. But before she can find something suitable, a sound like thunder issues from high above her.

  “You’ve always been a problem-solver.”

  It’s Todd’s voice, amplified to a deafening volume. She grimaces and claps her hands over her ears. The bite mark on the back of her neck begins to throb.

  “That’s something we share. We’re both problem-solvers, even if we go about it differently. I’m more dispassionate. Typical engineer, right? You’re more emotional. But that’s what works so well about us. We balance. We’re symmetrical.”

  His voice is so loud she can feel it thrum throughout her body, the cadence of the words conflicting with the rhythm of her heart, making her pulse—which pounds in her ears—sound erratic. A shadow—deep, dark—falls over her then. She doesn’t want to look up, is terrified to do so. But she does.

  She can only see a vast silhouette looming over her, one that resembles a human head. A giant’s head. The sight is terrifying enough, but she’s grateful that she can’t make out any real detail. If she could see his face clearly—his eyes, his mouth, every feature increased to monstrous size—she might go insane.

  “That’s the one thing I don’t get. If the two of you are such problem-solvers, how come you haven’t been able to make things right between you? How could you let things get so bad?”

  She doesn’t understand what he’s saying. Is he talking about them? If so, why is he referring to himself in the third person? But that’s the least of her worries right now, and the thought drifts from her mind almost as quickly as it’s born.

  “We’re going to play a game, Heather, the symbolism of which won’t be lost on you, I’m sure. You’re in the exact middle of the box. If you want out, all you have to do is find your way through the maze of objects and reach this light.”

  As if in response to his words, a pinpoint of blue-white light glows into existence to her left. It looks something like a star, a solitary one hanging low in a very dark sky. She assumes it’s positioned atop one of the box’s sides, which means her goal is essentially unchanged: get to the side of the box and find a way to climb out. Only now she has a specific direction to follow and a light to guide her.

  She’s afraid to speak to the gigantic thing she senses both is and isn’t her husband, but she forces herself to do so. She shouts to make sure she’s heard.

  “And what happens when I reach the light?” She almost says if I reach the light, but she corrects herself in time. She’ll make it. She has to.

  Todd pauses before answering.

  “You’ll be free,” he says.

  That sounds more than a little ominous to her, but what choice does she have? She starts moving toward the light, carefully wending her way around and between the oversized objects, all of which she recognizes and remembers. She hasn’t been aware of it before now, but she realizes how cold it is in the box. She’s dressed, but not too warmly—a thin blouse and slacks—and her clothes do little to keep the cold out. She does her best to ignore it as she makes her way through the box’s maze, but she eventually begins to shiver, and she sees her breath mist the air.

  It’s getting colder,
she thinks.

  The temperature decreases with each step she takes toward the light. If it keeps up like this, she fears she’ll freeze before she can reach it. She continues on, sometimes having to squeeze between objects, which have also grown cold. It’s like shoving past ice sculptures, and before long her body becomes numb. Still she perseveres, moving past a giant postage stamp with the image of Betty Boop on it, an old-fashioned key the length of a bus, a smiley-face button grown so large that the backing pin looks like a javelin, and more. Some of the items shift as she makes her way through them, some more than others. They come crashing down, starting a chain reaction and causing more objects to shift violently. Her left hand gets caught between a metal thimble the size of a Volkswagen and a hoop earring as wide as a door. It’s one of the earrings she wore back in college, on the night she and Todd first had sex. The recognition of this does not make her hand hurt any less. She pulls it free of the two objects, and checks to see if it’s broken. She can’t tell, though. She only knows it hurts like a motherfucker.

  She continues more carefully after that, but she still manages to sprain her right ankle when her foot gets wedged beneath a gigantic corkscrew they used to open the bottle of wine they shared on their tenth anniversary. But she makes steady, if circuitous, progress toward the light, and eventually—after traveling how long she can’t say—she reaches the box’s side. She presses her body against it, palms flat, head turned to the side, cheek flattened. She closes her eyes and stands there for a moment, breathing and doing her best to ignore the pain in her hand, foot, and especially on the back of her neck where Todd bit her. The wall—for at this size, it seems like one to her—is cold as ice, but she doesn’t care. Not only because she’s so happy to be here, but because she’s half-frozen already.

  She’s made it.

  A loud blast of shattering thunder startles her, and she flings herself away from the wall and huddles in a ball on the floor, shivering with terror. It’s followed by a second burst, then a third.