On self-induced probation 'til I actually write fiction. It's a three-day weekend, and, college applications be damned, a perfect opportunity.

However, the well has, so to speak, run dry. Luckily for me, the internet can deliver anything. Including writing prompts aimed to home-schooled third graders. So here we go, deep into another crapventure.

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Target Words: mystery, treasure, dangerous, crowbar, dark, removed, pried, hidden

I always wondered what was in the metal box in the back of our attic. One day as I was up there, watching dust motes transposed over the view of a small back yard (only a young sugar maple straining into the sky, a dead car, a heap of weeds), it struck my mind again--I'd never even known where the box had come from. It had always been there, as far as my knowledge went. It was the type of box used to carry fishing tackle, but the sound of the box betrayed the fact that it didn't carry such things, and besides, why would anyone feel oblidged to lock up fishing tackle?

Turning from my perch on the linen-covered sewing table, no longer used since my grandmother's death except to bear my weight at times like this when I felt it nessecary to see the world, I looked at it again. Even from a distance, it taunted me. The lock was seemingly fragile, but I'd never been able to pry it or break it off, and had long since gave up trying. The dark sides had proved resistant, as well--only the black paint had yeilded to my attacks.

I went towards it, to touch it again, to remind myself that it existed again. Sometimes I thought that I'd imagined it all. After all, surely a box such as that could have been pried open by now? Surely I could have made some dent in it other than a multitude of scratches showing silver through the darkness? The metal was still as chill against my fingertips as it had always been.

It had been years since I had last attempted to open it. I remember the last time. It was raining, then--one of those days where dust motes are something that you're sure you just imagined, they're so far removed--and I had found, in the mess my brother always left in the garage, a crowbar. The box seemed weaker back then, to be honest--that's why I stopped trying, then. I had always felt, back when I was that age, that I was close to opening it. And I was no closer than that day, when, with the stolen crowbar, I tried to pry it open. Box cornered against the wall (the same position it is now, I realize), I had jammed the end under the lid, ripping at it. The metal began to give. I can still remember it, the sound of steel groaning. I can still remember it, the way my hands slipped, ripping against the rough metal of the opposite end, as I heard my brother's voice asking me what I was doing. The crowbar clattered to the ground, forgotten. My hands, hidden behind my back, continued to leak a puddle of damning crimson.

"The fuck're you doing with my stuff?"

I had winced then, more out of the fear of him than the pain of the wounds on my palms.

He had cocked his head at me, as if discovering something unknown about me, as if he had unveiled some mystery on my inner workings. "It's not safe, y'know? Playing with my tools. You're just a kid."

I had continued to hide my hands, the skin ripped away, the blood making them slick. But if he noticed, he made no sign at that moment. He just stared at me.

"I'm going," he had said in a strained voice, as if he was trying to get away from me without sounding too nervous, "to get Mom. Just... stay here. And don't do anything."

True to his word, he had got her, and I went to the emergency room to get stitches in both hands.

After that, the box had seemed heavier. My brother talked to me less, devoted more and more time to the graveyard of automobiles he so worshiped. I no longer helped him, first citing the wounds as an excuse, but eventually giving up. But I never really figured out why, until the day he left.

Looking at the scars, my body's desprate cover for the removed skin, I remember his words as he left home for better lands, for a place where he could do more than change the occasional oil filter.

"What is it you're so afraid of, anyway?"

"Why?"

Mother continued her movements in the next room, the sound of water running in the sink over plates a steady harmony under her tuneless humming.

"You've always been weird, jumpy. It never struck me until that day," he gestured, disdainfully, at my hands, "But you've always been really strange. As if something is after you."

"It's nothing," I had said, then.

He had left without another word on the subject.

I wonder, still, if it was nothing. Have I always been this way? What was it, that day, that made me fear him? What was it that seemed so dangerous in his manner, in the way he seemed to know exactly when I was about to make it to the innards of that goddamned box?

But on that day of the dust motes, it didn't matter. Touching the lock, it seemed thicker than ever. I stood again, and looked out the window at the scar my brother left on the lawn, the dead car. It was my last summer in that house. My last week, my last day. It didn't matter anymore. I, like him, was about to seek better climes. I picked up the box, and staggered as it was lighter than I remembered.

Raising it above my head, the scars where black gave way for sliver caught the light of the afternoon sun and reflected prisms against the upward-sloping walls of the attic, a mockery of crystal.

I threw it down, and the lid burst easily, the lock catching the brunt of the weight.

I realized then that most of the weight had only seemed so much because of the metal in the box itself. As marbles, melted crayons, baby teeth, paper, a thousand memories in solid form spilled across the dusty wooden floor, I saw the treasure left from a childhood.

Stunned, I stepped away. Then, desprately, as if to make up for lost time, I fell to the ground and grasped at the toys and locks of hair and letters and a now-broken plaster cast of a baby's footprints and jammed them back in. There was a letter in there, too--one to me--but I couldn't read it. My palms suddenly ached. I didn't want this back, did I?

I shoved the box into another corner, threw a moth-eaten afghan over it, and ran downstairs.

I didn't matter. No one was there to hear.