The Box Has Twelve Sides: Thirteen Curious Tales to Delight and Disturb

EPILOGUE: THE THIRTEENTH SIDE

DAYLIGHT, FAINT AS IT was, forced its way into my eyes.

Almost afraid to open them, I allowed my eyelids to part a bit, just enough to see the light was coming from above, not from the box.

The box.

It sat in my lap, as lifeless as boxes were meant to be. No glow shone from within its walls. It was dark and dull and everything a plastic container should be. I felt its sides with my fingers, ran my nails across its surface. It was unremarkable.

But there was everything remarkable about the journey from which I had returned. What I had just experienced was as alien to me as anything I had ever experienced.

Alien.

Odd I chose that particular word to describe it. And yet, alien it was.

If I tried to rationalize what happened to me overnight, I know I'd keep coming back to the logical conclusion that I had been dreaming. An extremely vivid dream, but a hallucination nonetheless. Yet I knew this was much more than a product of my subconscious mind. It could be even turn out to be much more than a life.

My life.

Regaining my senses, raw after what they had been through during the night, I took in the room. Light was spilling through the cracks in the door above the stairs where I had originally come in. The morning glow was enough to illuminate the room without the expired firelight. The empty space looked like it did when I first entered. Nothing had changed during my brief stay just like nothing had changed in the years it lay abandoned.

I grabbed my backpack for the water jug. My thirst was severe and the water was the sweetest I'd ever tasted. I finished the bottle in seconds.

As I was putting it back into the backpack, my hand brushed against the cardboard cover of my composition book. Or what was left of it; I had torn out several pages to get the fire going last night. There was still a hundred or so crisp, white, virgin pages almost glowing back at me. I guess better words would be beckoning to me.

Suddenly I saw, with a clarity I hadn't felt in years, the meaning of what had happened to me.

Purpose. Something I hadn't known in years.

I now had purpose in my thoughts, my reasoning, my soul. I knew what I had to do. I knew now why my life had gone so awry, why I was forced to live on the streets and why, ultimately, I found myself at the very place I was: a forgotten shell of a man, merely seeking shelter from a winter's evening down in an abandoned depot who had somehow stumbled upon something otherworldly.

Stories. Those visions I had just experienced. They needed to be told. They needed someone to breathe life into them. They needed me as much as I needed them.

Across the room I noticed the aged, faded sign above the booths. Tickets. In this decrepit, abandoned station, twenty feet under the city streets, I may have found my ticket back to the real world.

I slid the old, chewed up No. 2 pencil out of the spirals, and, with a shaky hand, started to write:

I live on the streets, but I don't come from them.

**********

Kind Reader,

This concludes my collection of short stories in the book, The Box Has Twelve Sides: Thirteen Curious Tales to Delight and Disturb.

It is available at Amazon/Kindle as an electronic download. Or if you prefer an actual flesh and blood book, from all the fine booksellers, including Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.

If you are in the Asheville, NC area it can be found on the shelves at both area Barnes & Nobles and downtown at Malaprop's Bookstore.

Thank you for taking this journey with me. I truly hope you got as much reading it as I did writing it.

Please consider adding it to your library or book list, casting a vote or leaving a comment or two.

More information about the author can be found at: www.mkbagwell.com.