úthleypt

How is it that there are always boxes yet unpacked? Even after she seems to herself to be all moved in, settled and fully engaged in living life in the new space, yet more mysterious, taped-shut cardboard boxes will emerge and then weigh unsettlingly on her mind. Do they find each other in the back of the closet and engage in furtive mating rituals, snuffling and rustling beneath the long winter coats, disrupting the neatly lined-up shoes and producing offspring in the form of still more boxes full of unknown, half-remembered articles?

She feels like Pandora in reverse, a packrat of mythic scale. Today several more of them appear, heavy, dense. What could be so important that she bothered to pack it or them in these boxes and haul them here, yet so unessential to daily life that it has not yet been missed? She reaches for the knife with one hand and slices one open, removes its contents, and puts them in their proper places, or places that will pass for proper. Old notebooks half-filled with notes, fiction purchased in distant airports, these are set on a lower shelf; audio cassette tapes - those relics! - stowed in a drawer; whimsical hats stacked above the woolens and foul-weather gear. The empty cardboard she slashes again and folds down, turns into a satisfyingly flat thing with no secrets in it. The activity has a pleasing forward momentum, a feeling of getting things done.

The third box beckons, and she reaches again for the knife, slips the point into the translucent tape and draws it down, down, and it bursts open at her. She is blinded, arms held before her face by reflex, the knife forgotten, and when she opens her eyes to look out past her wrists, she sees the room full of small birds. They wheel in a mass in the cramped space and flow like smoke out the open window. Her skin tingles every place their feathers brushed by her.