The Anything Box

away the pelu and droppedit to the dust.
Deci's eyes widened in terror, his hand clutched at the kiom but dared nottouch it.
'No!' he screamed. 'No!'
Then Veti's eyes widened and her hands reached also for the kiom, but nopower she possessed could undo what she had done and her scream rose withDeci's.
Then knowing himself surely dead and dead unbeloved, already entering theeternity of darkness of the unlighted kiom, Deci crumpled to the ground. Underhis cheek was the hardness of the weapon, under his outflung hand, the beautyof the fabric, and the sunlight, bending through the water, giggled crazily onhis chin.
One dead unbeloved is not as much as a crushed flower by the path. For theflower at least there is regret for its ended beauty.
So knowing Deci dead, the coveti turned from him. There was for memory ofhim only an uncertainty to Veti's feet and a wondering shock in Veti's eyes asshe turned with the others to prepare to move the coveti.
The wind came and poured over the dust and the things and Deci.
And Deci lay waiting for his own breath to stop.
Turn the Page
When I was in the first grade, my teacher was magic. Oh, I know! Everyonethinks that his first teacher is something special. It's practically aconvention that all little boys fall in love with her and that all littlegirls imitate her and that both believe her the Alpha and Omega of wisdom—butmy teacher was really magic.
We all felt it the first day when finally the last anxious parent wasshooed reluctantly out the door and we sat stiff and uneasy in our hard,unfriendly chairs and stared across our tightly clasped hands at Miss Ebo,feeling truly that we were on the edge of something strange and wonderful, butmore wonderful than strange. Tears dried on the face of our weeper as wewaited in that moment that trembled like a raindrop before it splinters intorainbows.
'Let's be something!' Miss Ebo whispered. 'Let's be birds.'
And we were! We were! Real birds! We fluttered and sang and flitted fromchair to chair all around the room. We prinked and preened and smoothed ourheads along the brightness of feathers and learned in those moments the fiercethrobbing restlessness of birds, the feathery hushing quietness of sleepingwings. And there was one of us that beat endlessly at the closed windows,scattering feathers, shaking the glass, straining for the open sky.
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Then we were children again, wiggling with remembered delight, exchanging
pleased smiles, feeling that maybe school wasn't all fright and strangeness
after all. And with a precocious sort of knowledge, we wordlessly pledged our
mutual silence about our miracle.
This first day set the pace for us. We were, at different times, almost
every creature imaginable, learning of them and how they fitted into the world
and how they touched onto our segment of the world, until we saw fellow
creatures wherever we looked. But there was one of us who set himself against
the lessons and ground his heel viciously down on the iridescence of a green
June-bug that blundered into our room one afternoon. The rest of us looked at
Miss Ebo, hoping in our horror for some sort of cosmic blast from her. Her
eyes were big and knowing—and a little sad. We turned back to our work,
tasting for the first time a little of the sorrow for those who stubbornly
shut their eyes against the sun and still curse the darkness.
And soon the stories started. Other children heard about Red Riding Hood
and the Wolf and maybe played the parts, but we took turns at being Red Riding
Hood and the Wolf. Individually we tasted the terror of the pursued—the
sometimes delightfully delicious terror of the pursued—and we knew the blood
lust and endless drive of the pursuer—the hot pulses leaping in our veins, the
irresistible compulsion of hunger-never-satiated that pulled us along the
shadowy forest trails.
And when we were Red Riding Hood, we knew under our terror and despair that
help would come—had to come when we turned the page, because it was written
that way. If we were the Wolf, we knew that death waited at the end of our
hunger; we leaped as compulsively to that death as we did to our feeding. As
the mother and grandmother, we knew the sorrow of letting our children go, and
the helpless waiting for them to find the dangers and die of them or live
through them, but always, always, were we the pursuer or the pursued, the
waiter or the active one, we knew we had only to turn the page and finally
live happily ever after, because it was written that way! And we found out
that after you have once been the pursuer, the pursued and the watcher, you
can never again be only the pursuer or the pursued or the watcher. Ever after
you are a little of each of them.
We learned and learned in our first grade, but sometimes we had to stop our
real learning and learn what was expected of us. Those were the shallow days.
We knew the shallow days when they arrived because Miss Ebo met us at the
door, brightly smiling, cheerily speaking, but with her lovely dark eyes quiet
and uncommunicative. We left the door ajar and set ourselves to routine tasks.
We read and wrote and worked with our numbers, covering all we had slighted in
the magic days before—a model class, learning neat little lessons, carefully
catching up with the other first grades. Sometimes we even had visitors to
smile at our industry, or the supervisor to come in and sharply twitch a
picture to more exact line on the bulletin board, fold her lips in frustration
and make some short-tempered note in her little green book before she left us,
turning her stiff white smile on briefly for our benefit. And, at day's end,
we sighed with weariness of soul and burst out of class with all the unused
enthusiasm of the day, hoping that tomorrow would be magic again. And it
usually was.
The door would swing shut with a pleased little chuckling cluck and we
would lift our questioning faces to Miss Ebo—or the Witch or the Princess or
the Fairy Godmother—and plunge into another story as into a sparkling sea.
As Cinderella, we labored in the ashes of the fireplace and of lonely
isolation and of labor without love. We wept tears of hopeless longing as we
watched the semblance of joy and happiness leave us behind, weeping for it
even though we knew too well the ugliness straining under it —the sharp bones
of hatefulness jabbing at scarlet satin and misty tulle. Cinderella's miracle
came to us and we made our loveliness from commonplace things and learned that
happiness often has a midnight chiming so that it won't leak bleakly into a
watery dawn, and finally, that no matter how fast we run, we leave a part of
us behind, and by that part of us, joy comes when we turn the page and we
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finally live happily ever after, because it is written that way.
With Chicken Little, we cowered under the falling of our sky. We believedimplicitly in our own little eye and our own little ear and the aching of ourown little tail where the sky had bruised us. Not content with panickingourselves with the small falling, we told the whole world repeatedly and atgreat length that the sky was