The Box

Elena sits staring at the box on her kitchen table. She’d been looking at it for at least three hours.

Occasionally she reaches out for it, only to stop at the last moment. So far she’s got as far as loosening the ribbon slightly. She exhales deeply. Carefully she unties the knot binding the box shut. She places the ribbon on one side and slowly lifts the lid off, resting it gently on her kitchen table. Nervously she peers inside.

She gasps at the sight of the contents. She removes each carefully, lining them up on the table. Elena looked over them all in turn. The first item is a small, black leather bound book, a small clasp holding it shut. She undoes it, revealing it to be some kind of ledger. Each page contained around thirty lines, followed by a line number and date.

She flicks through several pages, each containing the same kind of date. She turns back to the first page and notices the earliest date is in 1614, the word Nassau written as a page header. The dates continue.

Only the figures change, on up to the present day.

Confused and not really understanding it Elena puts it back down on the table. She glances at the old leather parchment beside it. It appears was quite old and exceptionally well preserved. The strange language of the words on the page baffles her. Three paragraphs in all.

The third item is a small, perfectly formed clear gem. She holds it up to the light. No flaws, no imperfections. Such a stone would fetch a high price in the Diamond District, or elsewhere for that matter. Any Joe Blow or third world dictator would be all too happy for it to fall into their grubby little hands. Too bad Elena’s knowledge of gemstones is flimsy.

Holding it however, is another question entirely. The sensation of the warmth in her hands makes her feel…uplifted? For lack of a better term.

She glances at the remaining two scraps of paper. Both appear to have been printed quite recently…very recently. From the look of it, they’d been done on a typewriter rather than a computer. Whoever wrote it is definitely no fan of Windows XP.
She holds up the first and read it slowly.

"Abstinence sows sand all over." She scans it again and again. "The ruddy limbs & flaming hair. But Desire Gratified . Plants fruits & beauty there.'

She vaguely remembers it as a fragment of a poem, but not much else. The second one is no less nonsensical.

“Nor motion nor breath,” She sucks in a breath. “Stuck We. Painted idle as a ship”

Elena puts them down and glances at the last item--a part of a painting, the upper half seemingly torn off. The piece portrays the lower half of a white building and two men stood below it. One is knelt clad entirely in black, praying to whatever god struck his fancy. The second, grey-haired man stands behind him, wearing a robe befitting Rome’s finest cardinals.

And the uncertainty grows.

She places it back on the table. She’d hoped the box might have provided some answers, but all she has are questions. None of the items connect with the others. Like a Zen koan but without the hidden wisdom. It’s all she can do not to scream.
Out of the corner of her eye she spies several photos tucked into the top of the box. Excitedly she grabs them. They’re all in black and white. All appear very old.

The first depicts a distraught woman holding her wounded husband while a policeman stands guard. There date on the back of the photo reads 1938. The second is of two women in a crowded restaurant, one wearing a stylish hat with her head slightly covered by a veil, circa 1943. The third is of several black men enjoying themselves in a night club, followed by a fourth photo of two men in the back of a police wagon, covering their faces from the camera.

But it’s the last that catches her eye the most. The young woman must be either nineteen or barely twenty, wearing a ruined dress that speaks of rough times. The pained look on her face catches Elena off guard. Could it be…is it…Diane?

She glances back over the other photos, studying two women in the earlier one. If she didn’t know any better, she’d make a dead ringer of her boss. The similarity is just too striking.

Elena slumps in her chair, unable to work out anything from what she had found in the box. She is **** in need of answers. But where to turn? She sure as hell can’t turn to Mr. Mot, and this sounds like a case for a forensic expert…or Fox Mulder. She chuckles at the thought.

She breaks out her Yellow Pages. Surely an anthropologist or historian from Columbia, NYU or even S-U-freakin’-N-Y could shed some light on this matter. The New York Public Library, even. As she pages through the listings, her excitement builds up.

What’s the worst that could happen?