Bird Box

by Josh Malerman

Dedication Sometimes I wish I were an architect, so that I could dedicate a building to a person; a superstructure that broke the clouds and continued up into the abyss. And if Bird Box were made of bricks instead of letters, I’d host a ceremony, invite every shadowy memory I have, and cut the ribbon with an axe, letting everyone see for the first time that building’s name. It’d be called ‘the Debbie’. Mom, Bird Box is for you.

In recent days, the Internet has blown up with a story people are calling ‘the Russia Report’. In it, a man who was riding in the passenger seat of a truck driving along a snowy highway outside St Petersburg asked his friend, who was driving, to pull over and then attacked him, removing his lips with his fingernails. Then he took his own life in the snow, using a table saw from the truck bed.

But then, a second story appeared. Similar circumstances. This time in Yakutsk, some three thousand miles east of St Petersburg. There, a mother, by all accounts ‘stable’, buried her children alive in the family’s garden before taking her own life with the jagged edges of broken dishes. And a third story, in Omsk, Russia, nearly two thousand miles southeast of St Petersburg, sprouted online and quickly became one of the most discussed topics on all social media sites. This time there was video footage. For as long as she could, Malorie had watched a man wielding an axe, his beard red with blood, trying to attack the unseen man who filmed him.

‘Did you hear me, Malorie? The story is everywhere. People are starting to say it’s related to seeing something. Isn’t that strange? I just heard CNN say it’s the one constant in all the incidents. That the victims saw something before attacking people and taking their own lives. Can you believe this? Can you?’

How far can a person hear? Malorie needs the children to hear into the trees, into the wind, into the dirt banks that lead to an entire world of living creatures. The river is an amphitheatre, Malorie muses, paddling. But it’s also a grave. The children must listen. Malorie cannot stave off the visions of hands emerging from the darkness, clutching the heads of the children, deliberately untying that which protects them. Breathing hard and sweating, Malorie prays a person can hear all the way to safety.

‘The Problem’ always resulted in suicide. Fox News had reported the word so often that they were now using synonyms. ‘Self-destruction’. ‘Self-immolation’. ‘Hari-kari’. One anchorman described it as ‘personal erasing’, a phrase that did not catch on.

Mental illness as a result of the radio waves in wireless technology is one. An erroneous evolutionary leap in humankind is another. New agers say it’s a matter of humanity being in touch with a planet that is close to

exploding, or a sun that is dying. Some people believe there are creatures out there. The government is saying nothing except lock your doors.

The days begin to mush together. That’s why we started keeping the calendar on the wall in the living room. You know, in a way, time doesn’t mean a thing anymore. But it’s one of the only things we have that resembles the lives we used to live.’ ‘The passing of time?’ ‘Yeah. And what we do with it.’

‘The night Don arrived, the three of us were sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio, when George suggested there might be some variety of “life” that was causing this to happen. This is before MSNBC proposed that theory. George said he got the idea from an old book. Possible Impossibilities. It talked about irreconcilable life-forms. Two worlds whose compounds were entirely foreign might cause damage to one another if they were to cross paths. And if this other life-form were somehow able to get here … well, that’s what George was saying had happened.

It’s true. She knows this. She’s known this forever, it seems. And what is she more frightened by – the possibility of a creature standing in her line of sight? Or the unfathomable palette of colours that will explode before her when she opens her eyes. What does the world look like now? Will you recognize it? Is it grey? Have the trees gone mad? The flowers, the reeds, the sky? Is the entire world insane? Does it battle itself? Does the Earth refute its own oceans? The wind has picked up. Has it seen something? Is it mad, too?