The box and everything inside it was black and white, grand and dusty. Nothing ever moved from its position, like the stars. The owner liked his cubed home that way; orderliness, silence and nothing new. He ate the same meals every morning, afternoon, and evening. He repeated the same house routines every day. This lifestyle was his bliss.
Some of his neighbors tried to seal their boxes just as he did, only to admire the screaming colors and chaos of the outside. Slowly folks increased in numbers in the outside. Some later married and got children of their own. The children did all they could to bring down the walls of the boxes, but couldn’t. Wrecking balls’ impact was akin to raindrops hitting a glass window.
The source of the walls’ strength emanated from the box dwellers themselves. The more they resolved to stand their ground, the more their boxes gained strength and grew.
As time passed, the boxes became fewer; the outside world became noisier and brighter. There were street lights and lighthouses everywhere outside the boxes. The oceans were blue, deep and endless. Butterflies made gardens to look like moving portraits. Music oozed out from parks and streets.
So odd and boring the boxes looked, that they became a tourist destination, without the owners’ knowledge. Every child fought for a space to be taken a photo with the boxes, as historians wrote speculated materials on how the box dwellers lived. The box dwellers on the other hand didn’t know that everyone outside thought they were all dead, their bones resting where they liked to stay often, within the four walls.
One day, the one owning the biggest box, accidentally cut himself on the right wrist in the kitchen garden, as he harvested carrots. It’s not the pain of the cut that shocked him, but the color of his blood; it was red! A sense of betrayal haunted him, when he recalled how his parents assured him that his entire body, both inside out was black and white.
Slowly he destroyed the walls of his box house with indifference, until they all fell down. Outsiders ran away and locked their doors, when they saw a man emerging from the fallen box. His black and white appearance looked ghostly. They thought that everyone had embraced the outside world; a world of colors, chaos and adventure.