A Box Full Of Stars

• Erina Luu, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2022

It was known to resemble merely a simple cardboard shoe box, ones that are used to hold school shoes, yet it was caged in thick concrete slabs and locked behind 7 centimetres of bulletproof glass. The information etched onto the rippling black marble provided witness statements of what could, should, and may have been inside that block of unsightly grey. ‘It was like hell with a stopwatch attached to it’ a death row inmate wrote. ‘So simple yet so pleasing’ another wrote, this time of a scholar studying economics.

Every decade, one person is picked from each continent to enter the cage and witness the box, the media glorifying it as an event equal to the coming of the fat man riding his reindeers. For years, the results have been the same. The same faces of shock yet acceptance. The same cliffhanger-worthy responses were given to the newspapers. The same time taken for those people to move on with their lives.

The box held inside the human cage was praised and worshipped as an anomaly in the world, the key to unlocking the secrets of one's self, yet at the same time, no answer given from that box would change anything, the world progressing as according to those predicted by scientists.

This time, I was chosen as a player to enter the realm of the box.

The area holding the entrance of the box this time was surrounded by panes of glass, geometrical shapes of copper, and a short path towards the glass crate paved by white pillars. 7 women, wearing various articles of clothing ranging from ragged dust-stained cloth to leopard fur to police outfits, came out from the pillars and handed us clipboards with ordinary A4 paper attached. The paper held only 2 questions, both only having one line of writing allowed for each question.

What did you think?

What will you do?

I could barely finish reading the paper given to us before we were sent in to see the box full of stars.