Angela Jooste

THE GIRL IN THE BOX

A magical tale inspired by Joseph Cornell’s series of ‘Medici’ box constructions.

short story 

1

Ariel was born in a house built in a field circled by a grove of oak trees. An English grove of trees in a country far from their origin. 

            The house was grand with winding corridors of polished oak floors, and double doors leading to rooms Ariel would get lost in. When she was learning to walk, her mother, Wilhelmina, would hold Ariel’s hand to lead her around the vast spaces, charmed at how her daughter’s feet teetered to walk then run, at times never quite touching the ground.

            Wilhelmina sensed Ariel was closely linked to the spirit of her own mother, now long departed, whom many believed had the gift of flight. This was said in whispers, yet it was Wilhelmina’s father who would shout the fact to anyone who would listen. He was a strong and robust man with the name of a warrior, Alexander, and walked the earth so that it vibrated with his strength. He had a marvellous baritone singing voice, and more often than not, he would address his daughter in song, not bothering to explain this desire of his to project his voice and words beyond the person he was speaking to.

            “She could fly your mother could, yes, SHE COULD FLYYYYY!” He boomed this particular observation during a meal they were having at Walter’s restaurant, a renowned establishment close to where they lived. Once his beloved Myrtle had passed away, Alexander couldn’t bear to eat in the house where she used to cook. Despite the many maids and expert cook he employed, he chose to dine out each night with Wilhelmina and her brother, Maxwell, who had an amazing capacity to eat, no matter what the distraction, and would scarcely notice his father’s bellows so intent was he on what was on his plate. Often Wilhelmina could hear the neighbouring diners gasp, cutlery screeching on their plates at the sudden roar, yet Alexander was so well known to many of them, he was tolerated. He was also the most talented lawyer in the city and one day, most likely, they would need his services.

            “Oh what a beauty she WAAAAS!” He gloried in singing this particular detail and Wilhelmina had the photograph by her bedside to prove it. 

            “Pass the salt please, Mina,” Maxwell said, unflappable as he mowed through his requisite four courses. All of them were served at once. When they had first taken to dining at Walter’s, it did not take the chef and his staff long to realise Maxwell was a serious consumer. They could not keep up with his demand and the exquisite palate of their youngest guest, devising a separate menu specifically for his delectation. 

            Wilhelmina had no such inclination and it was no surprise to her that Maxwell would one day become a famous food critic. As for Alexander, of his son he would say to anyone and everyone, “HE’S BLOODY MAAAARVELLLLOUUUUUS, MY BOOOOY!”

            It was during one of these dinners that Harold Abbott, known as Harry to his family and friends, found himself unable to stop gazing at Wilhelmina’s profile. He had been warned about the antics of her father, as his own father came to the restaurant whenever he and his mother were in the city. They travelled from their farm in the country, and its simple but beautiful colonial homestead with portraits of the successive Abbott generations lining the long and cool central hallway. Harry’s father, like his father and grandfather, bred fine merino sheep with a small but profitable interest in racing horses. It was the horse racing that often brought them to the city, and the hankering of his mother, who had been wooed and taken from her life in the city, to see her family. 

            Such had been the way with the Abbott men, seeking their wives further afield than anyone else in the district. They were often striking, strong and wilful women, who adapted somehow to farming life. The Abbott men were charming, comfortable on the land, spending much of their days riding and attending to whatever job might be at hand, ending the working week swigging a few pints at the local pub with the stock hands and locals, before scrubbing for a dinner in the homestead’s formal dining room. They made no distinction between themselves and those who worked for them, but their frequent visits to the city and their schooling set them apart from an early age. 

            Harry in many ways was no different, except that when he first saw Wilhelmina he could not quite picture her at the homestead of his youth, but in some large and stately home that could easily be placed in the city. However, he couldn’t contemplate the thought of leaving the countryside he loved. It was this spark of a thought and the graceful line of a profile that began the journey to the house in the field, built not far from the homestead of Harry’s youth. Yet it set him apart from his family and heritage, creating a distance that encircled that bewitched place. 

            Some would say that the house was cursed, others believed it was charmed, for the bride that Harry brought back from the city was surely the most intriguing of the Abbott men’s wives. It became local lore that when Wilhelmina, or Mina as Harry came to call her, first walked down the main street of the town, her feet were not quite touching the ground.

2

Ariel flew in her dreams.

            She loved the sky, fascinated by the birds with wings stretched in flight. She’d lift her arms to mimic them, to soar above the ground into the blue.

            When she was still a baby, Wilhelmina would take Ariel out to the garden and lay her on her back in the cool of the grass. Ariel would play with her toes and try desperately to suck her feet while the blue above filled her eyes as if she were a part of it. She actually felt she was in it. 

            And the sky. The sky would be like slipping her hand through water.         

            That feeling never changed for Ariel. In fact, the bigger she got, the more convinced she became that a time would come when she could touch it; reach high above to stroke the clouds that she imagined would feel like the woolly sheep that her father tended to each day. He sometimes took Ariel riding, seating her in front of him on the saddle, and she’d lean back so that she could feel his heart pounding like a drum. Ever since she could remember, there would be stray lambs to bottle rear. Ariel never wanted for a pet, she had paddocks full of them, having grown to love the sheep as much as Harry did.  

            Entranced by anything blue, Ariel insisted her room be painted the same colour of the sky when the sun was at its highest, clear and bright. Wilhelmina gave Ariel’s room the finishing touches, taking a small sponge dipped in white, dotting puffy clouds in drifts along the walls and ceiling. When Ariel fell asleep and then woke, she was aloft in the heaven she sought to guide and secure her each day. She would even dress in either white or blue, and as her white-blonde hair grew in long and shiny wisps, she would tie it up with a blue silk ribbon. 

            For her fifth birthday she asked for a pair of wings made from feathers, and while at home she wore them constantly, feeling the spread of them against her back, as if they were always meant to be a part of her.

3

It was Ariel’s Uncle Randall who gave her the box. 

            But not just any box.

            Randall was Harry’s oldest brother and a quiet man, slight and reedy with a smile that creased his face into folds, and with bright, piercing eyes that smiled on their own. He would often drop by the house after he’d been out for the day tending to the sheep and pasture, leaving his horse to graze on the lawn. Ariel loved Randall’s visits because she’d get to pat his horse named Molly and just sit with her and let her be. A bit like her Uncle Randall.

            One day, Randall came by in the family car and had a parcel with him, a box-shaped parcel, wrapped in brown paper with string.

            He walked to where Ariel and her mother were waiting for him on the veranda, sitting in his usual seat, grinning, so that Mina had to ask: What was in the parcel? He didn’t divulge the contents, just that he wanted to thank them for their generosity, and that he’d made Ariel a gift. 

            Ariel opened it, and what she saw was truly wondrous. Randall had made a box out of timber; planed, sanded and stained with a varnish. It was like a shoe box without a lid and inside he’d pasted images, random images from magazines and books, all about the circus, but then he’d created a little stage, a ledge in the box, and on it he’d pasted a three dimensional circus ring with a crowd behind it, a paper cut-out ringmaster, and a girl trapeze artist with wings. The effect was like looking through a peephole into the circus tent and seeing the colours and sights.

            Ariel was mesmerised, with a quiet and joyous delight. It was the only response Randall needed.

            And this box was the first of many. 

4

Randall made more than boxes. He also made cabinets. 

            Mina had been left a collection of rare eagle and albatross feathers by her mother. She had no idea where they’d come from, or why her mother found them precious, but Alexander gave them to her in a rare moment of not having the words to express what they meant after she had married. 

            Mina showed Randall one afternoon during tea and he was in awe at their beauty. “But I have no way of displaying them,” she said despairingly. “I feel they should be seen somehow, not locked away.” Randall quietly set about making a rosewood box with a glass inset in the lid and a red velvet cushion to rest the feathers upon. Mina was thrilled by his gift and once they had laid out the feathers, it was then a question of where to place the box itself. That was how the first rosewood cabinet was made and it was the beginning of a collection of cabinets that lined the hallway of the house that Harry built. 

            Harry said little, except he admired the craftsmanship and suggested that Randall should perhaps sell them further afield. But that was not Randall’s intention. He never made anything for profit, his sole aim was to create something that gave himself and others pleasure.

            In time he made another box for Ariel, one that was housed in its own rosewood cabinet and that had a key to unlock it. 

            It was a mystery, said Randall, a box with a riddle. 

            The box housed the photograph of a girl, but Randall would not say who she was. And he looked incredibly sad when he looked at it, but said nothing more.           

            Can you see?The girl’s look beckoned, questioned. Ariel held it and then shivered a little. She placed the box in the cabinet that featured glass doors so that Ariel could peer inside without unlocking it. But the girl kept looking out.

            Ariel walked away, glancing briefly over her shoulder to see the girl’s eyes watching her. 

            “Who is the girl in the photograph in the box Uncle Randall made for me?” Ariel asked her father at dinner that night. Harry puzzled at first, having seen it when Randall gave it to Ariel, his eyes squinting slightly trying to remember where he’d noticed it before.

            “I honestly don’t know,” was all he could say before chewing on a piece of steak that the cook had seared to perfection. A few visits from Maxwell had put all the cooks on their toes in both Harry and his parent’s households. Everyone welcomed Maxwell’s unannounced visits, it kept the cooks guessing and the meals were now being prepared with particular attention that none of the Abbotts could recall. 

            Ariel had to be content with that and she ate a mouthful of potato having decided at a young age that she could not eat meat because she loved the animals too much. Maxwell said her palate would be better for it despite Ariel having no idea what he meant. Maxwell was a hazy presence for Ariel. He mostly had an abstracted look about him and would walk for miles each day while at the farm, never saying where he was going, but miraculously he’d turn up for meals.        

            When Ariel visited the puzzle box she’d sit cross-legged in front of the cabinet and gaze intently at the girl inside. 

            One day, unexpectedly, the girl spoke.

            I can see you, the girl whispered. 

            I can see you, she said it slightly louder this time and Ariel was in no doubt that she heard a voice. 

            I can hear you, she whispered. I can hear you breathe. 

            At this Ariel held her breath, then let it out slowly.

            “Who are you?” she asked the girl. “Where are you from?”

            Another world, the girl said. Ariel sat and waited but nothing further came. She stared at the box housed in the cabinet. A box within a box. Worlds within worlds. The cabinet door was unlocked, and easily opened, but the box was sealed. And encased within it was the girl, pressed and trapped in a photograph.

            A girl in a box.

            But now that the girl had spoken, she’d become so much more.

            Ariel sat watching the girl until her mother called for her to go riding, her favourite time of day. 

            “Goodbye,” she said softly. She waited for a reply, but none came. 

5

“And do you like it?” Randall asked Ariel. “The new box?”

            Ariel was not sure how to answer. Randall was looking at her with such intensity that she had to be honest. Yet Ariel felt compelled to be honest; somehow what she was thinking came out on her face. 

            “You’re not sure are you?” 

            “No. I don’t know what to make of it.” Could she tell him that the girl in the box spoke to her? She lowered her eyes and reached for a wedge of cucumber sandwich. Her mother had made the cucumber sandwiches and they were especially good with a dash of mayonnaise, a hint of lemon and a smattering of pepper. She chewed and pondered, deciding not to say anything. 

            “I thought so,” he said quietly. Randall looked to the distant clouds that spoke of rain. “I’ll have to go soon.”

            “What is her name?” This Ariel felt she could ask. 

            “I don’t know.”

            “Is she part of the family?”

            He shook his head. “No. It’s just a picture of a girl that I’ve had for many years.”  

            “So, why did you put her in the box?” Randall smiled then and spoke as if what he said should have been obvious to her.

            “I thought you’d be able to tell me who she was.” And with that he picked up his hat from the chair next to the one Mina had vacated, and went inside to find her mother to say goodbye. 

            After Randall had left, Ariel went and opened the cabinet to sit before the girl in the box. She looked intently, like Randall had looked at her. There was another world in that box. She could see a glimmer of it reflected in the girl’s eyes. If she looked closely she could see something. A field edged with trees and a house. This house? No, surely not. But it looked like the house that Harry built, and that puzzled her more. The girl’s eyes were showing her something, and Ariel marvelled at how the more she looked the more she discovered. Perhaps it was a house that the girl once called home. It wasn’t the Abbott family homestead. Suddenly she had a flash of insight, like the thought had been placed in her mind by someone else—a family had lived in that house and the father had liked collecting things in cabinets similar to the ones Randall made. 

            In each cabinet is auniverse,the father would say to his daughter. The contents of each cabinet were like a constellation, a pattern of his imagination. Ariel stopped with that thought, her mind closing quickly as she glanced down the hallway and could see the row of rosewood cabinets that was steadily accumulating. This was only confusing her more as the past and the present were blurring and the girl, whose eyes were shaped like hers, continued to stare and reveal what lay behind the surface.   

            There was a story that Ariel remembered hearing, and she remembered it because she wasn’t meant to be listening. Her father and mother were entertaining guests, potential buyers for the fine merino wool they were known for, and it was her father who told it, the story of the house that he built.

            “It was quite strange. I had this vision for this house the first time I saw Mina.” Her parents smiled at each other while Ariel stood outside the dining room door, hiding in her favourite spot, a curtain that draped ceiling to floor and was a lush, deep, dark blue.

            “Well, my mother informed me about this block of land. The previous house had been raised to the ground in a fire.”

“Was there anyone living there at the time?” asked the gentleman with the walrus moustache that Ariel so much wanted to touch.

            “Actually, no one was sure. There was an elderly man who acted as a caretaker, or so people thought that was who he was. Only his remains were found, so everyone assumed no one else perished.” There was a pause as Ariel heard chewing and gasps of delight at the food. 

            “Anyhow, when I showed Mother the plans for the house she let out a cry of surprise. Apparently, this looks exactly like the house that was here before.”

            “Oh my!” 

            “Really?” 

            “That’s simply amazing!” 

            Harry nodded. “Yes it is.” 

6

Ariel discovered many inexplicable and miraculous worlds in the cabinets filled with boxes, objects and images.

            Randall described the cabinets as telling stories reflecting memories, feelings and dreams. One cabinet held a book. A solitary book, the pages barely written on. Another held voices and the whisper of the sea. Then there was one full of tears and rain. One cabinet would sing, and another was silent, dark and quiet. 

            Each cabinet had a key and Randall would randomly select one for her to open. To delight her. 

            Harry would watch, bemused at what was akin to a game between his daughter and brother, while Mina reached for his hand, smiling to reassure him. 

            “I don’t know why we let Randall install all these cabinets,” said Harry tersely. Mina only saw how Harry wished he could give his daughter such marvels. 

            “You’ve given her the world, Harry. Randall has such a short time when he visits to be with Ariel and give her all the love he has. You have every day and a lifetime.”

            Harry looked at Mina, wondering how she could know so precisely what he needed to hear. Although, she was always honest. She would not shy away from telling him something unpleasant if it was the truth. And he knew the truth of how Randall felt, how he would like to be in Harry’s shoes. He would not take for granted what life had blessed him with. So, he allowed Randall his joy, as well as Ariel.

7

It became a ritual where each day Ariel would open the cabinet with the girl in the box and wait for her to speak. It was thrilling and a little frightening that Ariel could actually hear her.

            Keep looking, the girl whispered on one occasion.  

            Without questioning the voice speaking to her, Ariel did. 

            Around the girl’s neck hung a key. A twisted key looped on a chain that seemed improbable to open anything. Yet its spiral shape was somewhere else. 

            Closer, the girl said urgently.

            Her dress. A smock dress of a girl not yet a young woman. Embroidered on its front was a spiral. It was pink, a deep pink that burrowed beneath the fabric’s surface to become flesh. Deeper than flesh. 

            A key to her heart. 

            Look, she said. Look at me.

            A hue overlaid the black and white of the girl. A faint vermilion halo. A slight tint to her hair and skin, the cast of her eyes and the fabric of her dress. Randall had laid her there, in that box. Laid her flattened image and sealed her with glass. Tinted, tainted. There was no key to unlock it, no way to alter her over time.

            Look…

            …and nestled in front of the photograph, wedged against the length of the glass, was a slim wooden box. 

            A box with a spiral keyhole.

            Ariel was amazed she hadn’t noticed it before.

            Can you see? The girl’s voice pleaded.         

            Ariel felt a slight breeze so that she shivered looking once more at the small box and the girl before closing the cabinet, not sure whether she wanted to know, whether she wanted to see.

            For whatever was in that box could only be further evidence of a girl who no longer existed in this world. Interred for all eternity.

8

On Ariel’s ninth birthday Randall gave her a key tied with a blue ribbon. It was also the day she told him about the girl.

            “I know who she is,” Ariel said simply. 

            They were sitting on the veranda while Mina had gone to the kitchen to bring back the special cake for their tea party. A dinner with the whole family was to follow that evening, but Mina knew that Randall would prefer this quiet celebration.

            “And who is she?” Randall sipped the tea that Ariel had poured.

            She paused, not so much for dramatic effect, but because she wanted to order her words before she spoke. “She lived in the house that was here and that was burnt to the ground.”

            Randall placed his cup carefully onto the saucer. He looked out to the oak trees that had survived the blaze. Somehow only the house had burnt that day. It happened a long time ago and strangely enough, he’d been nine years old when it did. He remembered his father and as many men from the district as they could muster trying to help put out the fire. But the house was a tinderbox, made of wood. A house not unlike this one, except sensible Harry had built his out of stone.  

            “Go on,” he said quietly.

            “The girl lived here with her father. Daddy said there was a caretaker as well. But, her father was here. That’s what I imagine. She had no mother, because she seems very lonely. I can see it in her eyes. And her father was scared to let her outside the house, because he was afraid he’d lose her as well.”

            Randall nodded as if to say she was right. He was also seeing the house and the day he’d got off his horse and went to stand by one of the oak trees, feeling the solid trunk, the breadth and age of it, shaded by the leaves in the green of summer that could easily burn and wilt in the heat. A flash of light and he’d turned to look towards the sun and instead found himself staring at a widow and in it, framed perfectly, had been a girl. A beautiful girl with honey-brown hair cut just below her chin, and delicate features with large dark eyes. He had thought he was imagining her until she placed her hand on the glass of the window as if to wave or say goodbye. Then she’d disappeared and he’d blinked, not wanting to believe she wasn’t real. As quickly as she’d gone she was back again, lifting up the sash window, beckoning him to come closer. Randall wasn’t as brave as his bothers, but he was intrigued. 

            “Please, come here,” she had called. He could still remember the soft trill of her voice. He’d walked tentatively looking around him, wondering who else might be lurking nearby. “Please,” she’d said again. When he was beneath the window she’d leaned over and in her hand she held something. 

            “Hello, I’ve seen you before. You ride past, but you never stop.” Randall was too stunned to speak. Her skin was so pale. He wondered why he’d never seen her in town. He’d seen her father, a dour man who wore black suits no matter the weather. 

            “I have something I’d like you to keep. I’ll just drop it on the ground.” An object fluttered and fell, making no sound as it landed on the grass. Randall could not take his eyes from her face. She’d smiled delicately, but also, sadly. He’d bent to pick up the object and found it to be an image of her, a photograph. In his opinion it didn’t come close to capturing her translucent beauty. It made her appear solid and fixed and stern. 

            “Please, take it.” 

            He’d stared at it, then turned it over hoping to see an inscription, a name, before he looked up at her.

            “But why?” he’d asked, finding his voice although it sounded faraway.

            “To remember me by,” she’d said, and without saying goodbye she shut the window. 

            Randall had stood there, staring at the now vacant window. If the clouds overhead hadn’t begun to look threatening, a summer storm brewing, he would probably have stayed longer, or maybe even dared to knock on the front door. Instead he’d raced to mount his horse, the photograph placed safely inside his shirt, and galloped all the way home. 

            By the time he had wanted to pay the beautiful girl another visit, the house had gone up in flames. No survivors, but only the bones of a man had been discovered among the dying embers. When Randall heard about the fire he’d gone to his room and retrieved the photograph from within a small box he kept under his bed where he stored all the things he felt were precious. He’d looked and looked at the image as if his eyes could bring her back to life. 

            He had never asked her name.  

            Randall cleared his throat and averted his face, eyes misted with tears. “And why do you think he was afraid to lose her?”

            Ariel had seen the glint of water in his eyes and suddenly, with an instinct beyond her years, she knew that whatever she said was of no real consequence. Uncle Randall had always known the girl. 

            “Because he loved her.”

            They could hear Mina’s footsteps, and the absence of them, as she made her way through the house and then along the veranda, holding a passionfruit sponge, one of Ariel’s favourites. 

            Ariel spoke low so that Mina couldn’t hear. “But she wasn’t free and she wasn’t happy.”

            Randall turned his head and the slow smile that Ariel loved was spreading across his face, lighting his eyes, which were now clear. 

            “No, she wasn’t,” affirmed Randall. “He didn’t let her live the life she wanted. She couldn’t be herself. But you’re right. He did love her. He was also afraid of losing her and this outweighed being able to love her for who she was.”

            Ariel watched as her mother drifted towards them, her face radiant with the simple pleasure of their shared afternoon, and the anticipation of Ariel’s delight at the cake. Ariel had never known what it meant not to be who she was. And the strange thought that she’d never actually wondered who she was. She just was.

            After they had eaten the scrumptious sponge and Mina was taking the leftovers back to the kitchen, Randall took Ariel inside the house. The key he’d given her fit a rosewood cabinet with a spiral lock. The key curled into the twisted hollow until it clicked and came to a halt as the latch loosened so she could then open the heavy cabinet door.

            Inside was a box.

            A box that had been made of oak from the surrounding trees, and holding a gift so precious it could only be opened by her. She marvelled at the carved beauty of the simple box, and then on opening it, she gasped as it did. The box inhaled her breath so that it swelled with it. It was a box that breathed with her and that only she could open as her breath was captured when the lid was closed. For a moment her own breathing stopped, caught as it was until she put the box back into the rosewood cabinet, and the air of the corridor became her connection again with the world outside this house and beyond herself.

            But the breath-box was her world. She could feel the air on opening it and she was flying in it, caught in its current and an imagined sky that it swirled within. She was flying and then she was falling; falling into the mulch and grass that carpeted the forest floor where the box came from. She would fly and fall and dream. 

            For the briefest time, she was free. 

            And she carried one dream away with her, that she would one day be part of the air of the sky that gave her lightness and grace. That she’d find wings to fly. 

            Ariel spoke of this dream, this wish to Randall, and in the quiet of that shared hope he said, “Perhaps it will be so.”

© Angela Jooste 2018