In the Box

His father gave me a box, and said This box contains every gift you will ever receive. If you open it, you will get them all at once. If you don't, you will get your gifts one at a time over the rest of your life. I shouldn't open it, if I were you. And then he left me alone with it. It was a box of bent and dinged cardboard, the tape peeling up at the corners. I walked around it. The top was about level with the couch cushions, and with my knees. It was square.

Once I had made a circle around it, I poked it. It didn't move. I picked it up, and it was heavy. It felt like things inside shifted as I lifted, and I had trouble with my balance, so I put it back down. I pushed on the top and it bent in, just like any cardboard box.

Finally, I leveraged it up onto the couch and shook it. At first I had no idea what the shook-shook sounds were, but then I heard Legos. Then it was no contest.

I still wonder how it would have felt, having surprises in store.

The Legend of Grandfather

Grandson was an inventive boy. He asked questions and proposed clever solutions, never deterred if they failed. He strove to protect the less fortunate, respect one's elders, and persevere through adversity. Grandfather and Grandson spent much time together, whenever the boy was free. They explored the woods and worked in the woodshop together. They looked alike: Grandfather had a young face, and Grandson an old face, both long and prominent in the chin.

As Grandson grew older, Grandfather grew ill. They no longer explored the forest, and the woodshop gathered dust. Grandson sought every remedy for Grandfather's suffering. He studied with distant physicians and experimented with herbs. He healed many people with his discoveries, but not Grandfather.

Grandson returned to ease Grandfather's death. Grandson's tireless search had aged him, and the two still looked very alike. As Grandfather's time neared, Grandson tried something clever and desperate. He hid Grandfather and took his place. When Death arrived, it took Grandson instead.

This is how Death crossed the wrong name off its list, how the one we call Grandfather came to live forever, and how Death came to forever seek Grandson, whose name we never utter lest Death mistake us for him.

Two-Epsilon-Seven

She imagined flying in one of the original biplanes. You could feel the wind in one of those, as much an enemy kicking you down as a friend keeping you up. You had to fight every moment. She imagined it was like being born, clawing her way free of the birth canal, or like sex. She craved it. Not like this. Another two-day tour in her Interceptor, properly a PDC.SO.m32. For the uninitiated, that’s planetary defense craft, single occupant, mark thirty-two. There is no wind in space. No fight to survive, just smooth acceleration along precalculated vectors, two days on, two days off, watching for aliens sneaking into the system fleeing some genocidal tyrant. Sorry, can’t help you, go home.

Even this dogfight couldn’t rouse her blood. Execute preprogrammed maneuver two-epsilon-seven, activate countermeasure tango-two-two. Two more destroyed. Lasers grazed her from behind. She grinned, then flew low, scraped the atmosphere for sudden braking, then surprise, behind the enemy, boom.

She sighed. Now for one more sterile day of—

—screaming klaxons. Enemy debris damaged propulsion, computer navigation. Stuck in the atmosphere on half power. Nothing in the manual about that.

She smiled. Time to feel the wind after all.

All Tomorrow's Bullies

"Teasing the Cygnan children," said the teacher, "will have consequences, possibly including being held back a year. So please be kind to our new students." Morning classes were quiet. No one passed notes or whispered, partly because of the checkerboard placement of Cygnans among the humans. The teacher lectured and children answered questions, in English words or Cygnan wordsong.

Recess freed their pent energy. Extra teachers watched the playground, but they could not watch everything. Eight-year-old Jonah and his friends cornered a Cygnan from their class. He was half Jonah's size, with skin the color of wine and jutting ribs in an alien pattern showing through his American t-shirt.

"You think you're smarter than us?" demanded Jonah. He pushed the Cygnan, who responded with his wind-chime voice. "He can't even talk," said Jonah. "I don't know what you're saying, Cyggie," he said. He shoved the Cygnan again, but vanished before his hands made contact.

After recess, Jonah and two more remained absent from the classroom.

"I see some of us have forgotten," said the teacher, "about the Cygnan reflexive ability to push their aggressors forward in time. The following students will be missing school until they reintersect our space-time continuum..."

Liability

My containment chair held me fast. It kept my spinal column from shattering further under my nervous shaking, what little the chair permitted, as I waited for a verdict. The judge stood. "The court finds the state liable for the plaintiff's injuries." And just like that, my tension drained away. Liable! Such a wealth of meaning for such a small word! Liable for this ruin of a body, transformed into my prison. Liable to repair its wrong by paying the enormous cost of a clone-and-copy, putting me into a new, healthy body. I shivered, to the extent that the chair let me shiver, and grinned.

"...and sentences the state," continued the judge, "to pay for a complete repair and partial transfer." The gavel came down.

I'm told there were congratulations, but I didn't hear them. I had no money to buy the bandwidth to turn a partial transfer complete. They'd make me choose what to keep. What would I leave behind? My wedding? My daughter's graduation? The years of work at the firm? Memories of childhood, like sunlight through fog? Who would I be if I forgot any of them?

"Wait." Would they hear me? "Wait, I changed my mind."

Summer Snow

Drifting cottonwood seeds and sunlight turned the backyard into a summer snowstorm. The boy walked about the yard and finished his cup of water. "Don't you have chores to do?" said his mother. "Homework?"

"Done them," he said. He stopped walking and stared into his cup. "A seed fell in my cup."

"So dump it out," said his mother. He didn't answer, instead walking around the yard in a zigzag, holding out his cup. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Catching seeds, Mom."

"But why?" she said. "Why not do something useful?"

"I dunno," he said.

"You could be studying, or practicing your piano," she said, but he kept catching seeds in the backyard.

"If you move the cup to catch a seed," he said, "the seed moves. You have to put the cup where the seed is already going."

"I'm glad you're developing strategies for something useless."

After a half-hour, he dumped the seeds out. "After all that, you just throw them away?"

"I wasn't catching them to have them, Mom," said the boy. He handed her the cup and went inside. A few seeds clung to the damp inside, and she looked from them into the summer snow.

Taking a Dive

I secured my parachute and dropped to my knee next to the plane's open door, wind howling around us. She thought I'd dropped something, but I came up with a small, iconic box and she covered her mouth in surprise. The plane hit an air pocket just then. The box jumped from my hand to the floor, inches from the door and ten thousand feet from the earth. I snatched at it. Instead of capturing it, my nervous fingers knocked it out into the open sky.

That's when she surprised me by leaping out after it. I'm glad she was wearing her parachute already, 'cause otherwise I'd've panicked. I stood and looked out after her. My friend joined me.

"You think she'll catch it?" he shouted over the howl.

"Might," I said. "She's damn good in the air. But I hope not."

"What?" He looked at me sharply. "That's your engagement ring, man."

"No, this is." I pulled out the box I'd kept hidden. "I was gonna jump and make it look like I'd caught it mid-air. She kinda spoiled my plan."

"You know," I said, "that just makes her more awesome." I leapt from the plane after my wife-to-be.