Nina
Nina did not want to open the box.
She read the news every day, as she always had. She pored through Twitter for updates. She told herself it was work as usual. But she wasn’t just looking for stories.
She was looking for answers.
Online, competing theories seeking to explain the strings’ inexplicable origins ranged from a messenger of God to a clandestine government agency to an alien invasion. Some of the most avowed skeptics found themselves turning to the spiritual or the supernatural to justify the sudden arrival of these tiny boxes, just six inches wide and three inches deep, on every doorstep around the world. Even those currently houseless, erecting their dwellings in the streets, even the nomads and the hitchhikers, all had awoken, that morning, to chests of their own, waiting wherever they had laid their heads the night before.
But very few people, at first, would admit to believing that the strings could actually represent the length of one’s life. It was too frightening to imagine any external entity with such unnatural omniscience, and even those who professed faith in an all-knowing God had difficulty understanding why His behavior, after thousands of years, would suddenly alter so radically.
But the boxes kept coming.
After the first wave covered every living adult twenty-two years and older, each new sunrise brought a box and a string for anyone who turned twenty-two that day, marking a new entrance into adulthood.
And then, near the end of March, stories started to spread. News circulated whenever the prediction of a string came true, particularly when people with shorter strings died unexpectedly. Talk shows featured the grieving families of perfectly healthy twenty-somethings with short strings who had passed away in freak accidents, and radio programs ran interviews with hospital patients who had abandoned all hope, before receiving their long strings and suddenly finding themselves candidates for new trials and treatments.
And yet no one could find concrete evidence to trust that these strings were anything more than strands of ordinary thread.
Despite the nagging rumors, the mounting testimonials, Nina still refused to look at her string. She thought that she and Maura should keep their boxes closed until they knew more about them. She didn’t even want them in the apartment.
But Maura was more adventurous and impetuous than Nina.
“Come on,” Maura groaned. “Are you worried they’re gonna catch fire? Or blow up?”
“I know you’re making fun of me, but nobody really knows what the hell could happen,” Nina said. “What if this is like those anthrax mailings on a massive scale?”
“I haven’t heard of anyone getting sick from opening them,” Maura said.
“Maybe we could just leave them out on the fire escape for now?”
“Then somebody might steal them!” Maura warned. “At the very least, they’ll be covered in pigeon crap.”
So they settled on storing them under the bed and waiting for more information.
But it was the waiting part that riled Maura.
“What if it’s real?” Maura asked Nina. “The whole ‘measure of your life’ thing?”
“It just can’t be,” Nina insisted. “There’s no scientific way for some piece of string to know the future.”
Maura looked at Nina solemnly. “Aren’t there just some things in this world that can’t be explained by facts or science?”
Nina didn’t know what to say to that.
“And what if this box can really tell you how long you’ll live? My god, Nina, isn’t the curiosity killing you?”
“Of course it is,” Nina conceded, “but being curious about something doesn’t mean we should rush into it blindly. Either it’s not real, and it’s not worth freaking ourselves out over nothing, or it is real, and we need to be absolutely certain what we want to do. There could be a lot of pain waiting inside that box, too.”
When Nina convened with her fellow editors and a few reporters at the conference room table to discuss the upcoming magazine issue, the chief political correspondent said what everyone was thinking. “I guess we have to scrap everything and start over now.”
The issue had initially been planned as a series of interviews with the new presidential candidates, after most had announced their campaigns that winter. But the events of March had far eclipsed any interest in a presidential race that suddenly seemed eons away.
“I mean, it’s gotta be these strings, right?” the correspondent asked. “That’s all anyone’s talking about, so it has to be our lead story. The election’s still a year and a half away. Who knows what the world will even look like by then?”