Flash Fiction:The box

April 8th, 2014
Art

Small and wooden the box rested in the boy’s hands. His hands just big enough to touch corner to corner, finger to thumb and end to end. Chipped and painted wood once bright showed evidence of many coats and the boy held onto it for dear life, through all his quiet tears.   Strange people had wanted the box, tall men in biohazard suits.  They towered over him and he couldn’t see their faces.  And voices coming out through the speaker at the front of their suits, far away and remote muffled and clipped.

The boy held the box to his chest watching as the monsters moved around the oxygen plant.  He hid behind big green vats a mixture of genetically modified algae and Bactria bred especially to produce oxygen by processing reclaimed co2.  Plants like this one where everywhere.

The boy walked outside. Away from it all.  He was bred to take care of these plants.  Though he knew it he didn’t fully understand the fact.

It was his fathers box. It was his father who told him about the world before the dust.  Mythical things like trees and plants. Wild animals not confined to gm labs.  His father told him the box used to have a handle and would play a song if you turned it.  There was a hole in one side.  And a seam up the top but the boy couldn’t open it.  His father had said the box contained the last flower.  Though the boy couldn’t see why a flower would want to live in the dark.  It rattled when he shook it.  The last flower on the continent, and maybe the world and it was his. All his.  If he could keep it away from the tall men in their rubber suits.

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