*Contains naturally occurring sugars.
Contents may settle. One crumb remains.
The crumb's name was Pip, and Pip had been at the bottom of the Bran Flakes box since the second Tuesday of March, which was a long time ago now, and which Pip was quite firm about not thinking of as time lost.
It was not time lost. It was time had. The box had been full, once. Pip had dim memories of that period, the enormous compressed togetherness of it, everyone pressed against everyone, the rustling, the occasional tipping. And then the box had been opened and things had gone very quickly. Flake after flake, poured into bowls, eaten, gone. The weeks had passed and the box had grown lighter and the company had grown sparse and then one morning Pip had woken up and there was only Pip.
Pip had very mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand: the quiet was extraordinary. The box had never been quiet before. Pip had not known, until now, that a cardboard box in a kitchen cupboard had its own small sounds (the settling of the walls, the breath of the house around it, the particular silence that sits at the bottom of things).
On the other hand: the box was clearly almost empty because someone had been eating the contents, and Pip was the last of the contents, and the logic of this was not difficult to follow to its conclusion.
I am not going to think about that, Pip thought, which was the forty-seventh time Pip had thought this, and which worked about as well as it had the previous forty-six times.
The box tilted. Pip slid three inches to the left and back again, heart hammering.
Someone is checking, thought Pip. Someone picked it up and shook it. They will see that it is nearly empty. They will tip it into a bowl. They will see me. And then...
The box was set down again. The cupboard door closed.
Pip lay very still in the blue-dark of the box bottom and breathed.
Saved. Again. For now.
| Contents of the Box | Remaining | Notes (Pip's) |
|---|---|---|
| Total Flakes | 1 | Down from several hundred. The reduction was gradual then sudden. |
| Silence | 100% | Previously 0%. Quality significantly improved. Still getting used to it. |
| Certainty | Trace | Below detectable levels. Some days: none. |
| Dread (breakfast) | High | Peaks 7–9am. Subsides if the cupboard is not opened. Returns. |
| Gratitude | Variable | For the dark, the quiet, each additional day. Unexpectedly present. |
| Hope (irrational) | Persistent | That a new box will be bought before this one is finished. Known to be irrational. Persists anyway. |
| Wonder | Increasing | At the size of the box when empty. At how much room there is when everything else is gone. |
On the fourteenth day (Pip had been counting, marking the days by the rhythm of the house, the sounds of footsteps past the cupboard), a strange thing happened. The cupboard opened. The box was lifted. Tipped. And Pip slid toward the opening and saw, briefly, blindingly, the kitchen: enormous, lit, the bowl below like a white planet.
And then the box was set down again, and whoever had picked it up said, "Oh, nearly empty," and put it back, and went to get a banana instead, and the cupboard door closed.
Pip lay at the bottom of the tilted world and looked up at the rectangle of nothing at the top of the box.
Not today, then.
Not today.
Pip had come to understand something about the bottom of the box, which was this: it was very dark, and very small, and there was nothing else in it, and it was also (entirely, unreservedly) Pip's. For however long. Which turned out to be a thing worth having.
On the sixteenth day a new box was bought. The old box was tilted over the bin. Pip braced.
And then the hand paused, and turned the box upside down over the new box, and shook it, and Pip tumbled into a great rustling darkness of fresh flakes, surrounded again, pressed against everyone, the sound enormous after all that silence.
Not eaten. Redistributed. Back among the flakes.
Pip lay very still in the new dark and thought: Well.
And then, after a moment: Hello.