Into the Box
by Thaddeus Rutkowski
I found some scraps of wood in my father’s studio and decided to make a box. I picked up a flat piece that was the right shape for the base. To fashion a container, I could glue slats around the sides and attach either a sliding or a hinged piece for the top. I started by cutting the sides to length with a coping saw.
When my brother saw me working, he asked, “What are you making?”
“A box,” I said.
“What for?”
“To keep my collections.”
In a drawer, I had a few pieces of shale with seashell fossils embedded in them. The shells were common types—clams or snails—from the time when a sea covered the land where we lived. I could store the fossils in the box.
*
When I heard my father yelling at my mother, I worked on the box. I sanded the wood pieces, then applied lacquer. I didn’t put the pieces together; I left them on a tabletop to dry.
My father was repeating a line he’d heard in a movie: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” His voice became louder with each iteration.
Using a pencil, I sketched a diagram showing how the pieces would fit together.
“When I speak,” my father shouted, “you listen!”
My mother said something in reply, but her voice was too soft for me to make out the words.
I heard my father say, “He’s a fairy.”
“What do you mean?” my mother asked.
“He’s a small creature with wings.”
*
I checked my nipples and discovered that they had grown larger. Each nipple had a small lump behind it, which made the dark tip protrude. I wondered if I was sprouting breasts. Such a development would mean I wasn’t a man. At best, I would be a hermaphrodite, a she-male. With the Asian features I’d gotten from my mother, I would be a dragon man-lady.
There weren’t many Asian hermaphrodites around. If I became one, I wouldn’t fit into society as I knew it. I might belong in a sideshow—that would be where I could be myself. I could be part of a circus community.
I put on a T-shirt but made sure it wasn’t too tight. If it clung to my skin, the contours of my torso would show. If I were around my family—riding in our car, say—they might look at my chest and see my budding nipples.
*
My mother gave me a shirt made of a slippery material. It had a wide collar, and it fit close to the body. It was a disco shirt.
“I want to exchange it,” I said.
My mother gave me a ride to a clothing store. On the way, she said, “Your father can’t be creative unless he drinks. When he gets drunk, he gets ideas. The drunker he gets, the more bright thoughts he gets.”
When we arrived at the store, I went straight to the flannel shirts. I picked a baggy one, and my mother bought it for me.
At home, my father noticed my new shirt. “Now you’re a lumberjack,” he said. “Why don’t you go out and chop some wood?”
*
I picked up a hatchet and took it outside. There was a living tree in the backyard, but the hatchet didn’t do much damage, even when I swung hard. The branches flexed, and the hatchet blade just bounced off.
I had to find some dry wood. Old sticks were lying on the ground. A couple of blows against a lengthwise stick would sever it. But the best wood to split was a dry plank. The outside of our house was covered with wood siding. I took the hatchet to a slat. The wood split cleanly down the middle, along the grain. I attacked the walls of the house. When I was finished, the siding was scored with dents and cracks.
*
Later, my brother asked me, “Where’s that box you were making?” He chuckled as he spoke, as if he knew I’d forgotten the project.
I went back to work on the box but couldn’t figure out how to make the top. With my rudimentary skills, I couldn’t attach a hinged or sliding piece. So I left the top off. I had a box with a bottom and sides—a tray. I could use the tray to hold things.
*
My father took me to a local art gallery. The showroom was in a well-kept house next to a paved road in the country.
“Do you remember me?” my father asked the gallery owner when we walked in.
The owner, a large man with dark hair and a black beard, looked at him and said, “No.”
“I’ve lived here for years,” my father said.
“So have I.”
“I gave you some artwork on consignment,” my father said.
“I don’t remember it.”
The man slid open flat files and found some works on paper. They were silk-screened prints of butterflies.
“I thought these were commercial,” my father said.
“You can take them back.”
Before we left, we saw a dish that held polished stones—they were as smooth as glass. The dish was next to a bin filled with rough stones. My father paid for a couple of the rough ones.
“We’ll set you up with Carborundum powder,” my father said to me, “so you can make your own gems.”
*
At home, I mixed the abrasive powder with water and went to work on the rough objects. I rubbed them with a cloth soaked in the mixture. After what seemed a long time, I hadn’t made much progress. The stones were still dull.
My arms got tired from sanding, so I moved them to loosen the muscles. When I rotated my shoulders, the blade bones stuck out on my back. I looked into a mirror to see if the protrusions were the beginnings of wings. If I didn’t have breasts, I might have appendages that I could flap. I would go to a high place to test my wings. I would jump off, then either fly away or drop straight down.
I put the sanded stones, along with pieces of shale containing fossils, into the box I’d constructed. The box still had no top. Everyone could see what I’d collected. If I couldn’t get a job in the circus, I might become a gemologist. There might be a call for such an expert, I thought.
Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the books Tricks of Light, Border Crossings, Guess and Check,Violent Outbursts,Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. Guess and Checkreceived an Electronic Literature award for multicultural fiction. Haywirewon the Members’ Choice Award, given by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared in Copper Nickel, Cosmonauts Avenue, Fiction, Fiction International, FRiGG, Hayden's Ferry Review, Identity Theory, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Posit, Potomac Review, Sou'wester and many other journals. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA and works as a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been a resident writer at Yaddo, MacDowell and other colonies, and has been a sponsored reader in Berlin, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as in a number of other cities. He lives with his wife, Randi Hoffman, in Manhattan. His website is www.thaddeusrutkowski.com.