The Yum Box

We all have secrets we secretly want to be discovered | Fiction

**Listen to this story read by the author**

I let the last bite of cereal settle into my stomach. A small pool of remaining skim milk covers the tip of the spoon resting in the bowl. It’s a normal morning. It’s good.

I hear some rumblings in the distance. Chatter.  My wife and daughter doing something in the garage.

Pale sunlight streams in through the window. A stale, safe kind of beauty.  Sterile. The perfect boring kitchen moment to do nothing in. I love it. But what’s going on in the garage?

Don’t go, I think.

There’s quiet yanking on my jaw. A foreign but familiar pull. A sacred impulse, all but forgotten. The clinking and clanking in the garage gets louder, contaminates the stillness of the kitchen. What are they doing in there? My entire mouth buzzes with primal anticipation.

When I stand, I bang my knee on the corner of the table. The metal spoon jumps off the rim and clashes onto the ceramic bowl. The tinny screech reverberates up through my body and into my teeth. I just about have an erection.

I open the door to the garage to find my wife reaching to the back of the large shelving unit that holds the tools and old bike parts and discarded papers and everything else we decided to neglect but keep, and as she brings her body back to the front, she holds in her hand my old lunch box.  Metal. Purple. Covered in dinosaur stickers.  I feel a sudden pain in the center of my chest—something being twisted. I remember burying this feeling.

My daughter's curious little face illuminates the room and twists the pain in my chest even tighter. It feels weird seeing them together—her brightness next to that godforsaken lunch box. Why did I fucking save it?! My wife sees me.

"Lucy saw this behind the shelf. Is it yours?" she says to me.

Of course it’s mine. Who the fuck else is putting a lunchbox behind the tools?

"I don't remember it. Vaguely maybe. From a long long time ago." My jaw tightens and my teeth begin to rattle.

"It's heavy!" She says.

"What's in it, Dad?!"  Lucy squeaks out with innocent eyes fixed on the box. A weathered sticker slapped on the center of the box begs to spoken aloud.

My wife squints to read the beat up old letters. "Yyyyyum Box?" she says.

Yes. The Yum Box.  A dear old friend.  A friend that should have been buried years ago. Buried and discarded.  Burned without a trace, without the possibility of conjuring and reigniting.

The latches are rusted over. Perhaps, I hope, without the possibility of opening.  My wife brings both hands under the box, holds it like a loaf of bread, slides her thumb under one of the latches and flicks.  The latch springs upward, tightening the knot in my gut, the buzz in my jaw. She flicks her other thumb.  A tear pools in the corner of my eye.  I feel it spreading through my middle-aged wrinkles, dissipating into skin that hasn't felt tears since the box was closed decades earlier. Before Lucy. Before my wife. Before all of these new teeth.

Like a creaky old door, the yum box squeaks as its hinges flex open and reveal its contents to my family.

"Rocks." My wife says. Curious. Confused.

"Rocks?" Lucy says.  "What kind?"

"Normal ones, I think," my wife says. Lucy leans over to take a look.

They turn to me looking for some answers. My jaw is so tight my teeth are just about bursting out of their sockets. Yes. Rocks, I think. Normal fucking rocks.

"Oh yeah,” I say, feigning cluelessness, “I must have saved them.  Just an old collection from when I was young."

When I was young.  When I would go in the forrest behind the house and dig up old rocks and sit back there hidden from the world, from my mother, from any judging eyes, and chew on them. I would scrape my teeth against their edges, and feel the contours—looking with my mouth, with my tongue for the perfect lines, the perfect edges, the perfect folds of earth. I would spend hours and days and years back there, digging and chewing, grinding my newly formed adult teeth down to sharp little nubs.

And I would save the best rocks. The ones that fit perfectly in between my cheek and my teeth or under my tongue or just right in the middle pressed between the top and bottom rows. I could sense a particular roughness of the rock, a bumpiness. I enjoyed a quartzite if I stumbled upon it, but nothing felt so pure like a good piece of classic limestone.

Eleven rocks of various shapes and sizes rest idle in the yum box.  Rocks for when I needed something small, rocks for when I needed to fill my entire mouth.  Rough and smooth and everything in between, there were rocks to satisfy every occasion, every compulsory urge.

My wife explores the collection and grabs the largest of the rocks and holds it in her hand. I watch her fingers tickle the specimen like a mandible extension of my own mouth rolling around against my porcelain crowns.  Her index finger, my tongue, caresses the jagged peaks.  My jaw releases, melting into the warm milk of perfect sync.

"It's a nice rock," she says. "Good weight. good feel." You’re damn right it’s a good rock.

She hands it to Lucy who's hands are too small to hold the entire thing. Using both of her soft, innocent paws, she takes the stone from my wife and cups it gently like a precious gem.  She examines it closely, turns it over, exploring its dimensions, and then looks up at her mother and shrugs, unimpressed. And then she looks at me, a little scared, a little curious, "Why are they in a lunch box?"

Well, honey, I had a problem when I was a kid where I would find rocks that fit into my mouth perfectly and I would chew on them.

It was a disgusting, repulsive habit that left me friendless for many years, but I felt strong when I had rocks in my mouth. I couldn't stop looking for the perfect one.

Then this one day I was out in the woods and my mother, grandma, came looking for me.  I had the yum box open, splayed out on the ground and I was working on digging up a new find.  Grandma must have been watching me for a while, watching her son playing with the earth, exploring the natural world; a primal vision every mother dreams of.  And then I removed the rock from the earth and held it up to the sky.  A symbol of treasure. The rock to me. Me to Grandma. How the elegance of the young ripples deep into the hearts of the aged.

And then I shoved the rock into the back my mouth.  Grandma screamed and ran at me through the trees. I knew I was doing something I shouldn't have been doing, something embarrassing, but it wasn't until then that I felt scared about it.  She found me on the ground with the rock in my mouth and reached in like she was extracting time sensitive poison.  "Spit it out! Spit it out!" She yelled.  And I knew at that point that whatever I was doing was over.  She yanked it out of me.  The rock. A sense of innocence. My childhood.

Those rocks, darling, right there in the yum box, that's what's left of my childhood.  That's what's left of the greatest thing I've ever discovered in life.

But Lucy was six.

"Oh,” I finally mutter after standing there for a few seconds having been transported to my long forgotten innocence. “I just thought they were cool," I say.

Lucy puts the big rock back in the box and fingers around the others. My jaw wishes desperately to be her little digits, to shove every one of those rocks deep into the crevices of my mouth.

My wife stands over our child, eagerly supporting the exploration of her father's deepest, most vile secret.

Her little fingers turn the rocks over, searching and looking as children do, purely, ignorantly.  And then she stops. She sees something.  She looks up to her mother and then over to me, and then back down to the box.  She reaches in and turns over a large, jagged specimen and uncovers a smaller fellow beneath it. She excavates it. Removes it from it’s slumber.  Smooth from the look of it.

She turns it over in her hand, examines her find, and then without hesitation, places it into the back of her mouth.