Help Us, We Need Closure!!!

When he opened his eyes, he saw a scene that he could not recognize. As he got up, he pushed his black cloak out of the way and adjusted his graduate’s cap. He looked down at his apparel and saw that he was dressed like a graduate student, but he could not recall from what or where he graduated. He darted his head back and forth quickly trying to gather where he was and how he got here. It appeared that he was encased inside of a large box that was not bright enough to see everything, yet not dark enough to see nothing at all.

         “Hello, is there anybody in here?” He bellowed as he moved his hands along the walls looking for some way to escape. As he moved his hands around, he noticed that the walls felt as if they were made of cardboard.

         “Don’t even try to find an exit. There is none,” a mysterious voice said to him.

         “Who’s there? Who said that?” The graduate student asked.

         As he turned his head around, he saw a girl of about seventeen years standing beside him. Her hair was done in a ponytail and her shorts were too short to be wearing casually. Her jersey and sneakers suggested that she was a track runner, and due to her composure, a good one. Her sudden appearance frightened him and as a result, he recoiled in surprise.

         “Who… who are you?” The graduate asked.

         “I wish I could tell you, but I have no recollection of who I am” The runner said in a remorseful tone.

         “Well, you are dressed like a track runner, so I would assume that you are into running” The graduate concluded.

         “Well…you’re dressed like a graduate student, so I would assume that you graduated from somewhere”

         Giving a blank stare, the graduate looked off into one of the walls as he was trying to recall who he is.

         “Odd, I can’t remember who I am, all I know is that I woke up in here, with absolutely no other recollections” The graduate said.

         “What I want to know is where we are, how we got here and how we can get out of here” The runner said.

         “Well, I suppose we can keep searching these walls. I’m sure that there is a button, a knob or anything that can get us out of here” The student said as he continued to feel the walls.

         “Don’t bother looking for an exit, we’ve felt around these walls for a long time and could not find one” The runner said.

         “We? I’ve only just regained consciousness and known you for only a minute, is there anyone else in here?” The student asked.

         The track runner pointed to a darkened corner where three figures emerged from the shadows. As they slowly made their way to the student, they were found to be a bride, a groom and a WWII soldier. The three of them walked over to the student and runner with blank and morose looks on their faces. When the student saw them, a worried look began to appear on his face. For a few seconds no one spoke, they just simply looked at each other until the bride said as a continuation to what the runner was saying earlier:

         “We’ve been looking for an exit within these walls, and we have yet to find it.”

         “How long have you been here?” The student asked interestedly.

         “About as long as you have.”

         “We don’t know who we are or how we got here, all we know is that the five of us are in this box with no current means of escape” The soldier said.

         “But surely there must be something on the other side, we must have been put in here for one reason or another” The student said.

         “Whatever the reason may be, I shudder to think of what it is” The groom said.

         The five of them thought for a while, until the student said:

         “Maybe if we figure out who we are, we may have some semblance as to how we got in here.”

         “But we don’t know who we are, we all woke up in this box with no memories of ourselves” the runner said.

         “Well, I’m dressed in a cap and gown, which means I probably graduated from somewhere. You’re outfit suggests that you do running. You’re a bride, you’re a groom who must be getting married or already are married, presumably to each other. And you’re a soldier who fought in the Second World War” the graduate said.

         “Our outfits may suggest that, but does that really mean anything?” the soldier asked.

         “I don’t know, I’m just assuming right now, unless proven otherwise” The student said with a great deal of insecurity.

         Overcome with stress, the student leaned against a wall and sank down to the ground with his face in his hands. He began to weep softly so none of them would notice, but everyone knew that he was upset.

         The runner knelt down beside him to offer him some comfort:

         “It’s going to be okay, we’ll find out who and where we are, eventually.”

         “What if we never do?” The student said through teary eyes.

         “Even if we don’t, we still have each other to shoot the breeze” The groom said.

         The graduate student looked up, still upset, but somewhat comforted by the groom’s optimism. The rest of them sat down to comfort themselves and began thinking once again on how to escape and what they were doing there in the first place.

         “Do you think that we were put in here to be protected from whatever is going on outside?” The bride asked.

         “Well, if that’s the case, then I would at least like to know what I am being protected from” The student said defensively.

         “What if it’s something absolutely horrific, such as a nuclear holocaust, or a mass killing of people?” The runner asked, terrified.

         “I don’t care what’s out there; I want to know what’s on the other side, even if it is something like that. I’m not going to idly accept being in here without being provided some reasons” The student said getting progressively angry.

         The student then got up quickly, at the peak of his anger, and began to bang on the walls with his fist demanding to be let out. The rest of them continued to sit on the floor, until the soldier asked in a nervous, yet solemn tone:

         “Is this purgatory?”

         Everyone turned to look at him, trying to understand his question with puzzled expressions on their faces.

         “That is a possibility I’m not willing to rule out quite yet” The bride said.

         “I imagined that this is what it would be like” The runner said.

         The student looked at him square in the face and said:

         “As much as I’m willing to accept that, I won’t until I’m proven wrong with substantial evidence.”

         “Well, that’s part of what purgatory is, not knowing where you are and not given enough evidence to support it. You can search all you want, but you won’t find anything” The groom said.

         “Well, at least we’re not alone. We still have each other” The soldier said.

         The soldier got up and adjusted the strap of the gun on his back as it was getting uncomfortable for him. He ruffled it quite noisily and could not have done it any more obtrusively. From his actions, the student saw him, and got an idea.

         “Wait a second, that gun on your back, do you… do you think that we can fire it and create a hole in the wall?” The student asked changing from his earlier gloomy mood.

         The others including the soldier looked at him in surprise at his idea. In a quick movement, the soldier removed the gun from its strap and looked at it incredulously.

         “Yes… Yes I think I can do that just give me one second to check my ammo and get ready” The soldier said.

         While he was doing that, the other four gathered to share their excitement of escaping the box. They all bore grins that stretched from ear to ear as they heard the clicking from the soldier’s gun. Inside each of their minds was an array of anticipation as to what they might find on the other side.

         “All right, the ammo’s ready and I should be good to go” The soldier said.

         He then warned the others to step back and cover their ears. As he took his aim and was very close to pulling the trigger, the track runner yelled “Wait!”

         “What?” The soldier asked impatiently.

         “What if we aren’t meant to see what’s on the other side?” She asked.

         “Listen” the student said “It’s not natural for us to spend our lives inside this box; I’m just as scared as you are, if not more, but I still want to know why we’re in here and what’s outside.”

         Looking at him with a blank expression, the runner said “Okay, I suppose that I have no choice by this point.”

         The student turned back to the soldier, and with a nod of his head, gave the soldier the signal to carry on. Once again, he removed the safety lock and took aim. The others stood a fair distance away, covering their ears as the soldier pulled the trigger; what followed was a tiny cloud of smoke and a loud bang as the shell from the bullet landed on the ground next to him.

         When everyone looked up, they saw nothing different than what they had seen before. Everyone searched the walls looking for even the tiniest hole the gun made, but was not able to find it.

         “What happened, why isn’t there a hole of some kind?” The groom asked.

         “I thought you said that everything was working” The student joined in.

         “It was; let me look again” The soldier said.

         He ejected the magazine out of his gun and took a close look at the bullets, including the one that flew out of his gun.

         “Well I’ll be, turns out that this was a blank, these are all blanks” The soldier said in astonishment.

         Everyone stared at the blank cartridge while the student developed a twitch in his left eye. Trying to take in the failure of the plan, he ran up to the wall and started banging mercilessly on it demanding to be let out. The others stared at him.

         “Let us out of here, let us out, it’s not fair… it’s not fair” The student yelled at first, then sank to the ground in utter despair.

         His once flaring rage now turned into a fit of weeping as he curled up into a fetal position on the ground. The others felt sympathetic for him as they too felt that anything they did now was for naught.

         “I had the feeling deep inside me that this wouldn’t work out, this gun’s as worthless as the walls that surround us” The soldier said.

         Flustered with his personal failure, the soldier threw the gun onto the ground. The force of the gun hitting the ground caused the latches of the bayonet to undo itself as the bayonet flew off the gun and towards the student, who was still on the ground in anguish. He looked at the bayonet with widened eyes, as if he was thanking its presence. Grabbing the end, the student looked interested at it and said to everyone, in a rather dark tone:

         “If we can’t shoot our way out, then we’ll carve our way out.”

         “The walls may be made of some sort of cardboard material, but they are too thick to penetrate with that bayonet alone” The track runner said.

         “Then we’ll have to find some way to soften them up” The student said.

         Almost immediately, everyone started looking around for something that would soften up the tough cardboard walls. The soldier pointed to the track runner and brought their attention to the water bottle hooked onto her shorts.

         “Yes! We can use that to soften up the walls and carve through them with ease!” The student said with great excitement.

         Understanding the idea, the runner took the bottle of water and tossed it to the student. Running to the wall, everyone gathered to see the plan in action. After eagerly unscrewing the top of the bottle and pouring the cascade of water down the wall, the water didn’t take long to absorb into the wall, and the once uniform wall now had a soft, dark brown spot where the water was poured. Gripping the bayonet tight in his hand and letting the bottle drop to the ground, the student sunk the bayonet into the wall with ease. Water began to run down from the wall, where the bayonet sank in as if it were blood from flesh and the student carved a horizontal line as the start of a doorway. The others waited in bated breath as he was carving two vertical lines at the ends of the horizontal line, and another horizontal line at the bottom to complete the rectangular escape.

         The carving took barely any effort and when the student was done, he was more excited about escaping than he was tired. He then told everyone that it wouldn’t push out on its own and would require a running charge to knock down. Someone had to volunteer to take the risk and see what was on the other side before the others. Nobody volunteered as they were all too scared to take such a risk.

         “What if what’s on the other side is outside our grasp of comprehension?” The bride asked.

         “What if we were put in here for a reason and we weren’t meant to see what is on the other side?” The runner asked.

         All of these questions, plus more, were asked regarding the validity of their escape. Each one of them worried about their escape as if it came into conflict with an established edict that told them not to leave. After another minute of debate, the student stepped up and volunteered to lead the running charge into the unknown.

         “Aren’t you scared of what you might see?” The soldier asked.

         “Of course I’m scared, but it can’t be anymore scary than letting our imaginations run wild with an open concept such as this” The student replied boldly.

         “You’re a brave man indeed” the runner said “and hopefully we’ll be able to find out who we are once we escape.”
         “That’s the spirit” the student said as he took a few deep breaths and stepped back to ready himself for the charge.

         Once he was a few feet away from the cut out area, he gathered himself and prepared to charge. The others stood far away from him with a look of both awe and fear in their eyes as he took off with an incredible amount of speed. To the student, it felt like he was running for quite a while and the other four could barely breathe when they saw him getting closer to the cut out area in the wall. Four feet, three feet, two feet, one foot, the student managed to knock the wall down and enter the other side.

         But when he knocked down the wall, he lost his balance and fell into a dark abyss beneath the area of the box. He fell screaming into the unmeasurable abyss below. The others rushed to the open doorway to see where the student was. They did not hear a thud; they simply stopped hearing his scream once he fell a certain distance.

         When they couldn’t hear him anymore, they looked up to see what was on the other side of their cardboard prison. All they saw was nothing but darkness. They all stood in the doorway, stunned at this discovery.

         “Is…Is this all there is?” the runner asked.

         “It looks like it, my dear” the groom replied.

         “Was there a reason we were put in here? Were we put in here to be saved?” the soldier asked.

         “Or to be forgotten?” the bride replied.

         Everyone began to feel overwhelmed as they tried to piece together what they were seeing, but the soldier was the most affected as he broke down on his knees in tears.

         “That’s it, isn’t it? We were put in this darkness to be forgotten by the world” he said through his sobs.

         The others rushed to comfort him and brought him away from the doorway. Expressing her sadness, the runner said:

         “As much as I hate to say this, we belong in this box, away from the terrifying mess out there. What all that darkness means, I dare not think what.”

         With that, they went inside the box, with the rectangle of darkness, juxtaposed from the rest of the wall.

         Meanwhile, two people, a man and a woman, were moving boxes into a new house,

         “Oh Dianne, I can’t believe it, our first house, so many great memories to be made here” the man said.

         “I know John, here we are, where the memories and good times are ripe” Dianne said.

         “I’ll be right back, I’m going to see if there’s any space in the attic for some of these boxes” John said, then made his way up the stairs into the attic.

         Once he was up there, John flipped the lights on and saw plenty of room for storage, except for one box sitting alone on a shelf. John took a closer look at it, and then called Dianne up to have a look at it.

         “Did you move this box up here?” John asked.

         “No” Dianne simply replied.

         “That’s odd” John said “Must have belonged to the people who lived here last.”

         As John got closer to the box, he saw that there was something on the floor beneath the shelf. He bent over to pick it up, and then looked at it; his wife asked what it was.

         “Well, this certainly isn’t one of ours, it appears to be a picture of a student graduating high school in his cap and gown” John said.

         “It must have fallen out of the box from this hole” Dianne said as she pointed to the rectangular hole in the box.

         “Looks like it suffered some water damage there” John said “Let’s put this picture back inside.”

         John took the box off the shelf and opened it to find a photo album to the only page with photos. He took the photo and stuck it near the caption that said “Our son, Thomas, graduating high school, 1995.” Upon closer look, he noticed that there were other pictures as well with captions beneath them.

         There was the picture of the track runner with the caption “Our daughter, Mary, finishing her 100 meter dash.”

         The bride and groom with the caption “Edward and Jean, married at Sacred Cross Church.”

         The WWII soldier with the caption “Grandpa Jim, returning from Europe, 1945.”

         John and Dianne looked at the photos for a long time and felt something inside.

         “Why would anyone leave behind such beautiful pictures?” Dianne asked.

         “Maybe the owners simply forgot them” John replied.

         “That must be it.”

         After that, they put the box back on the shelf and turned off the lights. Unbeknownst to the couple, the characters previously mentioned heard every word and proceeded to weep the kind of tears only produced at the notion of being forgotten by the world.