Box By Luke Rolfes

Pierro CC



Box

In the three-box process, start with box 4. It’s an anti-box, impossible to imagine. It’s expandable, they say. So you can fit everything inside. All the clothes you’ve worn in your life. But since it is an anti-box, it fits nothing. Box 4 inhabits negative space, the sickos at H&R Block joke when you ask if you should check it on your form. They wear their ties loosely, and their clothes are always stained. They say stupid things. You need to give the numbers a nice massage. A loosey-goosey process if you want my two cents. Move on over and let the master take a looksie.

Box one says write your fucking name you fucking moron fucker. A real attitude box. Box two is slightly better. It wants you to write your life story and provide real-life examples of how you would define your political persona. It advises you to avoid words like edgy and undecided and higher education. Pretend there is no such thing as polarization, the directions say. The box is presented on the sheet as a drawing of an airport terminal, and a person you disagree with politically is sitting in a row of chairs, reading their phone and wearing a cloth mask. The figure in the drawing is blurry, and you are supposed to use your imagination.

There is a secondary box as part of box two. One of those sneaky subsidiary boxes (like if you answered YES please fill out this box, as well). The directions on the secondary box say to remember a time when you were nineteen years old. How you came home to be with the family dog which was getting put to sleep the next morning, and how the front door inexplicably flung itself open in the middle of the night when you were sitting on the couch petting the frail animal. Capture that moment. Relive it. And then, in the secondary box, write what was outside the door. It’s a trick box, though, because the answer you are supposed to write is nothing, or to simply leave the box blank. You might be tempted to say that you thought for a split-second that you were the one who was about to die, so, really, it was your fear waiting outside the door. But that answer won’t be accepted, and it renders the entire form null and void.

Box three has tons of qualifiers. The directions are pages long and written in legalese, and nobody reads them. Most people, in the end, leave box three blank, or they write a random word or number in the box and call it good. There is a footnote on page six that tells you exactly what to write in box three, but nobody finds it, and that’s why so many people take their form to the sickos at H&R Block. You’re a box, after all. Not a person, the sickos joke, though they couldn’t be more serious. It’s a waste of money. A lesson in inefficiency. The so-called experts fumble around the office and spill things on their slacks and ties. The bad people of the world fill out the form, and they almost always get it wrong, but nonetheless they rake it in, hand over fist. And the bad people of the world never go to jail. They careen around, outside of the box, smashing into mailboxes and parked cars. Their freedom extends from horizon to horizon.   




​Luke Rolfes is the author of the novel SLEEP LAKE (Braddock Avenue Books), IMPOSSIBLE NAKED LIFE (Kallisto Gaia Press), and FLYOVER COUNTRY (Georgetown Review Press). He teaches creative writing at Northwest Missouri State University and edits LAUREL REVIEW.
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