The Box of Pandora

The following is an excerpt from my short story "The Box of Pandora"

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DEDICATION

​​For my wife, this and all things. For the people of Kansas, there's more coming.

The Box of Pandora

by Geoffrey Allison.

   Kansas had coal mines. Lots of people don't know that. But it's true. It had a history of pride in standing up for the poor. The taken and forgotten. The yearning to be free. The disenfranchised. A home to socialist and worker’s rights outfits lead by women. Wives, sisters, and daughters of laboring men.
 
   When I share that fact about Kansas, people look at me as though I just told them some ancient myth. They don't believe it. Some people don’t believe other stories. Think they are myths, too. They believe, for example, Pandora's Box isn't real.
 
   But it is.
 
   My friend, Tommy, and me… we've seen it.
 
   On a summer night, crouched under the low branches of trees spiked into a hilltop located just outside Pandora, Kansas, the proud home of Ad Astra College, with the Sunflower River quietly snaking behind us, we saw workers—men and women—coddling steel cables dropped and disappearing into a hole.
 
   Into a great pit in the shape of a square located smack dab in the middle of one of the abandoned strip-mine channels. And of an impenetrable darkness allowing not even the light of the giant floodlamps the workers used to guide their efforts slip in or out from its surface plane.
 
   Four cranes—one on each side of the pit—lifted from that puncture wound of perfect symmetry a giant cube slowly rising from the void, as though nothing else of it existed except that which could immediately be seen. The shape revealing itself to this world through a bend of physics. Melting in reverse, and only becoming real through that process.
 
   The workers guided the suspended box to the flatbed of a big rig quietly waiting like a mountain lion come down from the western highlands to hunt in the Kansas grasses. And just as soon as its cargo was secure and could depart, as though something important at some unknown destination impatiently awaited its arrival, the semitruck pulled away from the workers and their floodlights and drove away. Heading in the direction of Grace City, the taillights faded into a night made less dark by the knowledge that that pit below Tommy and me was real.

​And darker still.

​...

© 2021. All Rights Reserved.

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