Ragile Thissideup: A Christmas Tale

“You oaf!” a man barks. It hurts my ears. Sweet, jingly jangly noises and a different man’s jolly tone sound from someplace scratchy nearby. I peek and it’s too bright. Hard, white light blasts down on me from the packaging facility’s lights above. 

“Do you see this? Do you? This is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re sloppy, Jerome! You’re sloppy and you don’t listen. We want to look clean. You’ve smudged up, what is that, four boxes now? Keep your sleeves off the belt!” Every. Time. The man. Emphasizes. A biting. Word. I’m shaken. About. Violently. I’m slammed into another man.

“Package it up and change your shirt. You’re covered in red. Now we’ve got three ‘Fragils’ and a ‘Ragile.’ Just fantastic,” he grumbles. 

I’m dropped onto a table and filled with soft pellets. A larger object is placed inside as well and my four flaps are tucked tightly together followed by a loud ripping sound that seals me with a sticky strip. I’m carried a few paces away and with a heave and a ho I’m tossed into a metal room. 

One after another, boxes of all shapes and sizes are packed tightly against and on top of me. I’m shoved to the back and can no longer see the outside. Several minutes pass in silence. 

Without warning, a stifled purr. Then, a roar. It ignites beneath me and the chamber begins to rumble, sending several boxes tumbling. I’m scared and confused. The disorientation is incapacitating.

I awake to a soft, yellow light. The air is cold but the light is warm. Some of the boxes have since cleared and I see a figure come into view. It looks much like the man from the factory before. He casts a shadow over me and clicks a small stick onto a handheld wooden board. He brings the stick up to his mouth and pauses for a moment before rummaging through the room, sliding boxes left and right until he finds what he’s looking for. 

He quickly scribbles something onto the board and stacks three large boxes up taller than himself. He staggers backward and away as he first tries to lift them. 

I finally get a good look at the outside and see humongous objects lining the ground that look so similar to me, just with small clear cutouts scattered about them and pointed tops. They are surrounded by white, bumpy grounds. So much white!

The man instead leaves with one box and then comes back for the next one. He returns one final time for the third box. Wise choice. I wonder where he’s taken them. 

“Them’s are goners.” A defeated sound that could easily be mistaken for a cough or a grunt comes from in front of me. A dingy box that’s surely been taped and addressed at least three times over faces me. 

“See that?” I look out and spot a large blue receptacle sitting where the white mounds meet black in front of one of the giant boxes. 

“That’s what ends up happening to our brothers and sisters and eventually us and there ain’t a thing we can do about it,” the box scoffs. Beside the blue bin I see several flattened and discarded boxes that have been leaned up against it. I’m horrified. No stuffing, no tape, nothing but pelts. 

A loud scraping sound brings darkness as a large metal door slams over the picture of the outside. A few seconds of silence follow before the deafening rumbling begins again. 

I can feel the room moving beneath me: bouncing up and down and swerving wide and slow at points and I try to imagine how such a large chamber could possibly be moved at all. However it works, it does not matter. I cannot do anything to stop it.

The door opens once more and the man looms over the remaining few of us. The outside is now dark. It is very cold. He tosses the wooden board into an empty space in the room and clambers inside. He crawls over to my corner and pulls me and the scuffed-up box to the front. I hear the box whisper something to me, but I can’t hear him over the sound of my fear.

The man first hauls him to one of the large boxes in the distance. This area is much different than the one before. The black strip in the center of the large boxes is skinnier and there are clusters of tall, dead looking sticks as far as the eye can see. I can see tiny lights in the sky here, too. The man returns. 

He lifts me with ease and carries me to a large box lined with bright lights of all happy colors. I can make out the silhouette of the dingy box on the front step of the house directly across the black strip from the one the man trudges to. I can tell that the man is tired. 

He sets me in front of a tall brown door onto a scratchy mat and presses a button high above. A muted melody plays behind the door and he turns, leaving crunchy boot marks in the white as he goes. I hear the sputtering rumble of the horrible metal room in the distance and it gets quieter and quieter as I see light disappear from the black strip once and for all.

I wait. I hear a familiar jingle and jangle and the door swings open. A woman sighs with relief and carries me urgently to a separate room inside the human box. She shoves me beneath a metal frame lined with plush fabrics. She takes care to place random items around me, concealing me from the outside just as before. She leaves and closes the door and everything is quiet again. I’m too tired to worry about what is to come, so I allow myself to rest atop the soft floor beneath me and I settle into dreams of twinkling purple fairies and green, fresh-smelling needles lining the white outside. 

More jingly jangly music. I face a pink ceiling and four pink walls. Things look different now, but I can’t exactly figure how. A squeal and uneven, pounding footsteps approach me from wherever I lay.

A loud rip reveals a small human’s face beaming down on me. She lifts me, but the box stays behind and falls away beneath me. I don’t understand. I come face to face with a yellow-haired girl with ratty pigtails and a toothy smile and she hugs me tighter than when I was wedged in that metal room, but it’s not suffocating. I’m soft and I’m loved.

She props me up on the back of the couch as she moves onto other boxes wrapped in colorful papers and outside of the window I face I see a beautiful Tiffany lamp of even more beautiful colors sitting in the front window of the house just across the strip. I can’t explain exactly how I know, but somehow I can just tell from the way its light shines and sparkles that my-friend-the-dingy-box ended up more than okay.