No, Mark, I will not be breaking out into song.
Remember those days when we were kids around nine or ten and we just over-exaggerated EVERYTHING! The carpeting in the living room was really lava. Our parents were aliens. Our teachers were really FBI or witches out to get us. Well, I was going through some old writing stuff and came across a re-telling of one of my childhood stories. It was an assignment we did in English that required us to compare a story from our childhood to a fairy tale or myth. I chose Pandora's Box because it was the only thing I could think to even barely put against a story from my childhood. I posted it below mainly because I feel like making my page as hard to load as possible and it's nice and lengthy.
In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman on earth. Zeus ordered Hephaestus the god of craftsmanship, to create her and he did, using water and earth. The gods endowed her with many talents; Aphrodite gave her beauty, Apollo music, Hermes persuasion, and so forth. Hence her name: Pandora, "all-gifted". When Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus took vengeance by presenting Pandora to Epimetheus, Prometheus' brother. With her, Pandora had a jar which she was not to open under any circumstance. Impelled by her natural curiosity, Pandora opened the jar, and all evil contained escaped and spread over the earth. She hastened to close the lid, but the whole contents of the jar had escaped, except for one thing which lay at the bottom, and that was Hope.
My Pandora’s Box did not contain all the evils of the world nor did opening it threaten to reshape the universe. Pandora, also, was not the one my box was entrusted to. My older cousin Kate kept herself a separate room in the shed behind her grandmother’s house. She was often our “sitter”. Of course, though she was supposed to have been watching us, she was, more often than not, locked up in her spare room. So, my friends and I were left to our own devices. Despite this rather wonderful freedom we’d been gifted by my cousin’s laziness, we had such deep rooted curiosity, as children often do at a young age, that we spent most of that time devising plans for breaking into her padlocked room.
Earlier that year, her boyfriend, a carpenter‘s son, had added an extra layer of wood around the outside of the shed. My aunt had complained that Kate’s music could be heard from the house and wanted the volume lowered. In addition to my cousin’s laziness, she was also stubborn, so instead of turning it down, she set Joseph to work insulating the structure. This added an extra level of difficulty to our goal because then we couldn’t tell if she was inside or not as well as excluding several of the plans we’d come up with, the likeliest to be successful being the one that included the removal of a loose board at the back end of the building.
Faced with this new dilemma, we returned to the drawing board to concoct yet another plan to access the, by then, mystical dwelling. (Imagination runs rapid in such circumstances.) It took us several weeks to develop a solution to each hindrance. Telli, our Spy, was posted behind the trees in the backyard to keep an eye on Kate’s comings and goings so we could create a schedule. Sare, our Strategist, used this information to work out our plan of action while I set to work procuring the needed supplies, including the “invitations” to Telli’s sleepover. (Telli lived next door.)
It turned out, however, that Kate inadvertently moved up our plans while simultaneously making things easier for us. On Monday of the following week after our plan had been perfected, she told us that on Tuesday night, when she would be “watching” us while all the parents went to bingo, she had a sleepover, herself. Aware in that way that older kids are, she warned us sternly to stay away from the shed. “You’ll regret getting in there, trust me,” she said. The next day, Telli reported that the padlock on the shed had broken and Mike had nailed up a thin board over the door. “Doesn’t matter,” I told her, “It shouldn’t be hard to take down. It’s only up for the night to keep us out, so it’s probably loose.”
“Okay, now what?” Sare asked. “We wait. Bingo starts at 4:30. Katie leaves at five. It gets dark at six. Our parents’ll be back at eight. We’ll meet by the shed at 6:30,” I replied. At the time, the entire thing had seemed quite simple and rational to me. After the brief exchange, Telli had returned across the yard to her own house where she intended to keep watch from an unsuspicious distance, Sare walked across the street to her house where she was to destroy our Plan Papers ( because at ten, we firmly believed the FBI would somehow find out), and I went to our own little hideout in my aunt’s garage where I finished gathering our supplies: two hammers to take down the board, a brick to place in the doorway to hold the door open, nails to nail the board back up when we left, several flashlights, and small bag with various basically useless items we had anticipated possibly needing in the case of uncontrollable incidents such as Kate’s sudden return, a random gang shootout, or an alien invasion. (Again, imagination runs rapid at that age. Believe it or not, there was even a needle and thread in that pack in case one of us was stabbed by a pirate with a sword and needed the wound sewn up.)
The only time before 6:30 that any of us went near the shed that day was at around 10, while Kate was still asleep to quickly sneak out to place the somewhat heavy load of supplies in the trees outside of the shed. By 6:25, we were all there, hiding in the trees. (Despite the fact that the only ones who could have caught us was the neighborhood boys our age that didn’t care, we acted as if we were breaking into the Pentagon.) Telli and I took the two hammers from the bag we’d borrowed from the garage, chosen for the fact that is was old and if we had to leave it, it couldn’t be identified as one of ours. (Yes, I know, silly.) As Telli and I set to work removing the four nails used to place the board diagonally across the door, Sare began a walkaround of the shed, for security purposes of course, until the sun finally sank below the horizon and we called her over to hold the flashlight.
It didn’t take long to remove the board and lower it silently into the hidyhole amongst the trees. We placed the napkin with the new nails wrapped in it on top of the board along with the two hammers. Telli shouldered the bag and the three of us prepared to open the door. But as Sare pulled on the handle, it opened only an inch or two. Peering into the crevice, I saw a chain at the top of the door.
“Ah, the unanticipated inner lock,” I hissed. “Telli, fish into that bag and grab a pencil. Sare, go and get me that crate up against the fence between Telli’s house and this one. Oh, take a flashlight.”
The plot was clear-cut, simple. I just had to stand on the crate and work the chain free with the pencil. It went quite smoothly and after a few minutes of poking and grumbling, the chain slipped off with a tiny clang. Climbing down, I moved the box aside and we prepared, once again, to enter the room. “First thing first girls, weapons,” we heard a voice say quite suddenly.
You’ve got to be kidding, we thought, caught before we even went inside.
I recognized the voice. It was my cousin, Greg. He was a few years older than Kate. Telli pointed him out, standing on the other side of the shed.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t care if you break into my sister’s getaway. I’m jus’ warning you to be careful.” That was all he said before walking off down the street. We stared after him. Streetlights made the road visible. Several of his highschool friends waited there, beers in hand.
“Okay,” I said, “ready?”
“What if he’s right?” Telli asked urgently.
“Jeez, Telli,” Sare griped, “you know he’s just a jerk.”
“What do you think’s in there anyway?” I laughed.
“The Boogie man?” Sare joined.
Arrogantly, she and I reached for the handle again, this time the door swinging open swiftly. The moment it opened, we looked into the dark room and a low, harsh-sounding growl rose as if from the floorboards and something lunged at us. We slammed the door , screamed and took off in three separate directions. (All of us ran for our own houses, I found out the next day when we all spoke.)
It’s safe to assume that Kate found out what we’d done, since we ran off without putting the board back and leaving not only the nails and hammers on the ground, but Telli went only a few feet before she dropped the bag to run faster. Laughing hysterically, Kate told us the next day that the “beast” inside the shed was a stray dog and it had only lunged at us because it was guarding a litter of four puppies.
Oh, btw. My life sucks right now. Thought I'd add that in somewhere. Like Hell in a Handbasket sucky too.
