Gwendy's Button Box

27

The next morning, Gwendy wakes up on the floor of her closet.

She’s cradling the button box in her arms like a faithful lover and her right thumb is resting a half-inch from the black button.

She stifles a scream and jerks her hand away, scrambling like a crab out of the closet. A safe distance away, she gets to her feet and notices something that makes her head swim: the narrow wooden shelf on the button box is standing open. On it is a tiny chocolate treat: a parrot, every feather perfect.

Gwendy wants more than anything to run from the room, slam the door behind her, and never return—but she knows she can’t do that. So what can she do?

She approaches the button box with as much stealth as she can muster. When she’s within a few feet of it, the image of a wild animal asleep in its lair flashes in her head, and she thinks: The button box doesn’t just give power; it is power.

“But I won’t,” she mutters. Won’t what? “Won’t give in.”

Before she can chicken out, she lunges and snatches the piece of chocolate from the little shelf. She backs out of the bedroom, afraid to turn her back on the button box, hurries down the hall into the bathroom, where she hurls the chocolate parrot into the toilet and flushes it away.

And for a while, everything is all right. She thinks the button box goes to sleep, but she doesn’t trust that, not a bit. Because even if it does, it sleeps with one eye open.