He was inside a box.

He didn’t awake to find himself inside a box, he was just there. A few seconds ago he was lying in his bed, putting his journal and pen back onto the bedside table, finger and thumb reaching to put out the last lit candle, and then this. The box. No loss of consciousness, no sense of waking from a dream, he was there and now he was here.

It was all very confusing.

His first reaction was one of utter disbelief, trying to understand how this happened.

Maybe this was a nightmare, the one where people are buried alive inside a coffin. But this wasn’t a coffin, his legs were not stretched out. He was curled up in a fetal position, his knees and hands pressed close to his face.

Maybe this was a prank, from his fellow colleagues at the Academy, and he just had to tear off the paper shell encasing him. They would be just outside, waiting for him to wake so they could all laugh and cheer, then head down to the pub for drinks. But the walls around him were not paper or cloth, they were solid wood.

His next reaction is confusion, trying to understand his situation.

There was no light. Opening and closing his eyes, he saw nothing, just darkness. The box pressed against him on all sides, he had no room to uncoil his limbs and stretch his body. He was wearing clothes and holding a large hat in his hands. He had a large hat pressed against his face, he had no idea why.

Shuffling his body around as much as he could, he felt small objects in the box with him. Leather and metal, what seemed to be small belts and harnesses. The bottom of the box was lined with rough cloth. There were hinges on one of the top edges of the box. He couldn’t feel a lock, but this box certainly had a top that could be opened. Unfortunately, the top of the box was as immovable as the other sides.

Perhaps he was indeed buried alive, six feet of dirt pressing down on the box.

There was an overwhelming smell of leather in the box, along with a faint scent of manure. Sniffing his nose, he realized the manure scent was from his own clothes, particularly his boots. Now he added a dire feeling of grime and uncleanliness to his confusion.

This last feeling triggers an instinctual reaction. He couldn’t stand the feeling of being dirty. He spun his right hand in place while his fingers formed a shape he didn’t recognize. His mouth opened and he spoke a word that he didn’t understand. He did this out of routine, unthinking, like tying his shoes.

Nothing happened.

A spell. Magic. He just tried to cast a spell. A spell he used everyday to clean small bits of dirt on his hands and ink on his fingers.

He can’t remember the name of the spell. It was something very common, something he reached for and used everyday, something as common as snapping his fingers, but now it was gone.

He tries to remember what he knows of magic, the name of spells. He could escape the box with just the right words. Maybe.

While trying to remember things, he suddenly realized that he couldn’t even remember his own name.

This was probably a bad thing.

There was something wrong with his memory. There was probably, almost definitely, something wrong with his mind, some injury or wound in the pink brain matter inside his skull.

Now the panic began to seep into his thoughts, the fear sank into his heart.

Something had gone wrong. He was trapped inside a dark wooden box and he was going to die.

Living beings need a fresh supply of air or they die. At least he remembered that fact.

He could feel the increasing beating of his heart, his pulse pounding in his ears. He tried to stay rational, he really did.

He tried calling for help. He tried screaming for help. He even tried begging for help.

He tried knocking against the wood. It didn’t sound like there was empty space beyond the box, there was something pressing against it. Perhaps it was dirt, perhaps this was confirmation that he was buried alive. Only the floor sounded different when knocked, like something much more solid was beyond it.

He tried another approach. He was wearing clothes. Clothes very often have pockets that people put things inside of them for later. Perhaps he had something useful in his pockets. He began to feel around his own clothes, quite difficult to do in the confined space.

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There was something in the pockets of his pants, objects pressing between his leg and the wall, but he couldn’t reach them. There was a belt around his pants. Perhaps he could unbuckle, remove it, and slap the belt against the walls. Probably not useful.

Maybe he could use the edge of the buckle to scrape and dig against the wood. Did he read that in a book somewhere? This could do something, so he kept the buckle scraping option in his head.

He was wearing a robe. Maybe a bed robe. It was light cloth, but there might have been something in pockets that he couldn’t reach. His hat was made of heavier cloth, had a rim quite large and a top that seemed to be shaped like a cone. There was nothing inside the hat, just space for presumably his own head.

His fingers slid across his buttoned shirt, and he realized he had something in his front shirt pocket. It was a small flat square. His heart beat much faster, but with hope replacing fear. He knew what this was.

It was a book of matches.

He carefully removed it from his shirt pocket. He had only his touch and fingers to guide him in the darkness, something that the matches could fix.

He held the matchbook in front of his face. It had been opened before. His fingers shook as he carefully pulled out a single match. He dragged the match head against the rough surface patch of the book, something he had done perhaps a thousand times before in his life.

But that was then, without an anxious heart and tense, shaking fingers.

His hands shuddered, just once, and the matches went flying out of his hands.

He was stunned for a second, then screamed in anger, then tried to calmly search for a single fallen match. He heard their little impacts against the wood. It took a while, but he found one, a single match. Now he dragged the match head against the wood panel in front of him. It took several tries, each more terrifying than the last, but at last it was done. The match was lit.

He had light.

And it did nothing.

He was still trapped inside a box, his limbs were still folded against him, the wooden walls were around him, but now it was so much more real. Without sight it was like wading through a nightmare, but now that nightmare was brought into reality. He could see the yellow-orange wood planks in front of his face. He could see his blue robes and hat, stars and comets stitched into the surface with silver thread that reflected the flickering light of the match. He could see dirt on his clothes, the hinges on one top edge of the box, the scattered matches. He could see it all.

He could see he was trapped inside a box, his body folded up like a corpse hidden away by a murderer, his body covered in dirt.

The match went out.

This was when he really began to panic.

He thought he was a smart person. He thought he was civilized. But now he began to shake and flail, panicking, trying to escape. He kicked with his feet, he scraped with his fingernails, he pushed against the walls. He began to scream. He managed to flip himself around a few times.

This went on for a few minutes until he calmed down a bit and stopped in his struggles.

His memory had apparently turned to mush. And yet faint, seemingly random thoughts floated up into his mind, like driftwood scraps rising up from ocean depths. He remembered a young woman, maybe a friend, talking about how people processed grief in a progression of steps. She said it was like the acts of a theater play. Maybe he was in the final act, acceptance, and his curtain call was here.

He seemed to be thinking in a melodramatic way, was this typical of himself? Was this the lack of air in the box affecting his thoughts?

He began to despair. Unless someone came to rescue him, he would die quite soon inside this box. He would die without any idea of how this came to happen or where he was.

He began to try and unbuckle his belt. Perhaps he could scrape a hole through the wood and get some idea of what was beyond the box and had doomed him. He wondered if he would be fast enough to open an air hole before he died.

Then there was moisture on his face. There was a half-formed image in his mind of a kind woman. His mother. His last thoughts would be of his mother and he couldn’t even remember her name. He wiped away a tear.

But it wasn’t a tear at all. It was a drop of water from the top of the box.

Now he was alert again. He stopped unbuckling his belt.

He felt along the edges of the box. There was definitely moisture leaking in from the top edges of the box, accumulating to form droplets of water. The box had felt immovable, but whatever seal there was keeping it closed had begun to fail, letting in small, invisible particles of water.

He felt hope again. He flipped himself over to press his back to the floor, his legs to the top of the box. He began to exert force, pressing against the top of the box, trying to move it, trying to open even the smallest sliver, his heart beating faster.

He pressed harder, straining his muscles. His hands were now against the top panel as well.

He thinking became focused on pressing against the wood. His muscles were starting to shake. He believed he could almost feel the wood bending. He began shouting as well, shouting at himself to push harder.

He didn’t open the box. But he did feel something give. Now there were plenty of water droplets sliding across the wood.

He knew there had to be water outside. Perhaps the box was outside in a rainstorm, with a heavy object on top that was blocking him.

He took a break from pushing. He let himself smile. Even with progress measured in tiny fractions of an inch, he was opening the box. He would escape. He would see justice done to those who trapped him here.

Suddenly, something was wrong.

He was not pushing against the box, but the flow of moisture increased. More and more droplets of water fell on his face. It was if the water was pushing itself in.

Which it was, he realized. It all made sense now. He wasn’t buried in the dirt.

He was underwater, with the box keeping him from drowning.

The box that was now opening more and more as water flowed in.

Now he was about to drown to death.

He was not sure if this was an improvement in his situation. He considered this with some thought as the cold water rushed in and filled the box.