Joy Baglio
1. THE DISPATCHBox of Ghosts
You’re sixteen when the woman thrusts the box into your hands on the street, so forcefully that you catch it hard against your chest. It’s shoe-box sized and wooden, with a fancy metal latch. She's no one that you know, but she's wearing a white dress, long and outmoded, and you imagine she might be some ancestral countess, a distant cousin perhaps; maybe you are related to vampires. She stares at you for a long instant with sad-seeming eyes, then slips past you, gone in the crowd. You open the box on the way home: It smells sweet, like incense, but there’s no incense in it. It’s empty.
The next day, you decide to use the box for pencils, but when you open it, you glimpse a turtle, tiny as a fly, walking around the perimeter of the box. The thing is, it’s not just any turtle: it’s the turtle you ran over last week. You still remember the shell, orange and black, crunching under the car. You’d cried because it was your first week driving and because you hated death and turtles aren’t the kind of thing anyone is okay killing. But the turtle in the box seems good as new, just very small. You watch it inch over the floor of the box then up the wall. You put your finger near it, over it, through it, and it keeps walking, unfazed.
Other creatures appear in the box that day. When you step on an ant, it is suddenly there, alive in the box. When a sparrow hits a window and you find its feathered body still warm on the ground, you look for it in the box, and there it is, flitting around the cramped space. All through high school when your parents fight, you lie belly-down in the dark of your closet, headphones on, staring into the box. For better or worse, you seem to have become the keeper of tiny, dead animals.
You watch every dog your family ever owns live its life, die, then appear small and excited in the box, frolicking, tail-wagging, happy as ever, then eventually gone, evaporated and traceless. You wonder if the box is a kind of heaven, or limbo at the very least. Is it just for the dead things you encounter, a corner of the afterlife connected to you alone? Or might it link to some wider network? And who was the woman? Did she hand you the box because you needed it for something? Or because you looked sad? Or because she knew you’d started worrying about death, realizing your own mortality, which still feels impossible, even though, rationally, you know it’s inevitable? Did she originate the box, build it herself, or did she simply seek to be rid of it? And is it just animals, because what about your family, eventually?
You take the box with you to college, into the world of dorms and late-night music and debates about philosophy. You feel full of life here, but there’s a loneliness that haunts you too, mostly at night when you lie hung-over in bed, the lights from the quad filtering through your thin curtains, your roommate’s loud breathing across the room, and you start sleeping with the box on your pillow, contemplating the logical laws of the universe that govern all things, and must, in turn, govern the box.
* * *
You graduate, land a job, live your life. The woman you marry, whom you meet almost a decade after college, laughs at the idea of an afterlife. The last thing she believes in is our self-delusions, our blind hopes, she tells you. You’ve never shown the box to anyone; it’s been your secret, but one night you lead her into the dark of your closet and lift the lid for her.
“Do you see them?” you ask, but she just squeezes your hand, smiles at you.
“See what?”
With your wife, there are cross-country road trips, houses rented in treed neighborhoods, jobs taken in foreign cities, and when her diagnosis comes, it feels like it’s meant for someone else’s wife, not yours. In her final days, something defiant and warlike comes over you, and you imagine, brazenly, the powers of the box saving her from the inevitable, offering life, instead of death. When she’s given just days to live, you’re there every moment: at her bedside as her breathing slows, as she falls away into the void, into the wideness of something else.
At home, alone, you stare at the box, unable to bring yourself to open it. You’ve had many theories over the years: the box as an ante-chamber, a waiting room for more expansive realms; or, maybe, a portal into nothingness. You tuck the box near you when you sleep, place it on the seat next to you in the car, press it against your skin as often as you can, leave it on the table for days after the funeral, wondering at your own cowardice.
It’s this possibility of her presence in the box that haunts you the most - all that you cannot face and will never understand. You have been thinking, crying, waiting, hoping for days. And one morning, you carry the box on a walk through a park, hold it out to a boy who is playing in the dirt, digging for something. He takes it from you as if it’s a present, smiling, wide-eyed and full of wonder.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYMason jar of water
Appointment book / planner
Laptop stand
Lantern
Owl statue
Mysterious box
3. BIOGRAPHYJoy Baglio's short stories have appeared in journals such as Tin House, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, The Fairy Tale Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Recent honors include residencies at Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, and The Kerouac Project (spring 2023); scholarships at Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences; and grants from The Elizabeth George Foundation and The Speculative Literature Foundation. Joy holds an MFA from The New School and is the founder of the Western MA literary arts organization Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop, which offers a wide array of virtual and in-person writing workshops, author readings, and literary events. She is at work on a genre-bending collection of short stories and a novel. You can find her online at JoyBaglio.com, PioneerValleyWriters.com, and on Twitter: @JoyBaglio.