Unicode

□

"Bro, whatever you do, I trust you won't open the box."

Tyler looked down at the thin iron container in his hands and then back up. 

"Sure, man...what's inside it, anyway?"

"If I told you, you'd open the box."

"Yeah, but now that you won't tell me, I'd want to open the box to find out."

"Dude. Just don't open the box."

Sighing, Tyler slips the box into his back pocket and shrugs. 

"Alright, alright, whatever, Derek. Why do you need me to keep it anyway?"

Derek digs his hands into the pockets of his blue jacket and looks away.

"Dude, it's an important box. Keep it safe, I'll come back for it tomorrow. You just gotta make sure no one opens it - not even you."

"Is anyone even allowed to open it?"

"Of course, man - but only when I allow you to."

"What's inside?"

"Can't say."

Tyler lightly punches Derek's shoulders, a resigned look showing through his brown eyes. He kicks at a pebble on the pavement with his sneakers, watches the pebble clatter across the ground, and then laughs.

"Come on, man, it's just a box."

Derek looks at him with a stern expression.

"It's not just a box, Tyler. I gotta go."

Tyler watches as he swivels his right leg over the seat of his bicycle, a sleek red metal frame, and pushes down on the pedal, the wheel starting to turn. He looks over his shoulder and waves back.

"Remember - don't open the damn box!" he yells, and then the cycle is in motion, his figure growing smaller in the distance - now only the faint crank of gears and the whirr of wheels can be heard.

Tyler walks away dejected, a few metres back to the front door of his house. He slams the door shut on his way in and slouches back on the sofa, feet propped up on the mocha-stained coffee table. He sits there for a while, tired and wanting to rest, and runs his hand through the long brown strands in his hair, feeling as they weave through the gaps in his fingers. Soft, he thinks, and maybe a little greasy from the sweat. But if you don't sweat after a good cycling session, it probably wasn't a good cycling session.

He and Derek don't go cycling very often. Lately, Derek's been kinda distant, now that he thinks about it. Always caught up in his own petty troubles - oh, Tyler, I can't come over, my hamster just died - and they haven't been meeting up so often. It was summer break, where the excitement that comes with newfound liberation is short-lived and boredom quickly sets in, and Tyler found himself more often than not bored. Not bored in the sense that he had nothing to do, but bored in the sense that everything he could have done he had now done, and now he was simply out of things to do. He could go to the beach again, but he had been there three times over the past month, and he was pretty sure no one else was in the mood for beaching. Especially not Derek.

"Man, why can't I just open the box?" he grumbles to himself. He slips his hand into his back pocket, feels the cold touch of metal course through his fingers, and grips it, sliding it out. Now in front of him, he moves it closer to his face and gets a better view - here it is, he thinks to himself, the fabled box. What the hell could even be inside it, anyway? It's just a box. Just a small metal box with the face of a snake. Funny looking snake, too, it seems to be eating itself. He places it on the short end table by his side, and turns on the TV, watching the black screen flicker to life, dark void replaced with technicolour imagery. An hour passes in the silence, just the sounds of people who aren't really there, the quiet hum of the old television set that he keeps telling Mom to replace but she never does, and the faint pattern of his breathing as he inhales and exhales. A commercial plays, something about buying a new watch, shows a man stepping on it to prove it doesn't break and then a cut to some cheesy slogan. "Time stops for no man," Tyler mimics the newscaster, and then the show resumes.