Richard Chizmar: Gwendy's Magic Feather

Gwendy gasps and she’s back in Washington D.C.—and without a moment to spare. She scrambles across her office floor on all fours and vomits into the wastebasket next to her desk.

DUE TO THE EXORBITANT cost of maintaining two residences in separate states, many first-year congressional representatives are forced to rent overpriced apartments (a large number of them located in leaky, unventilated basements) or share rented townhouses or condos with multiple roommates. Most do so without complaint. The hours are long, and they rarely find themselves at home anyway except to shower and sleep, or, if they’re lucky, eat the occasional unrushed meal.

Gwendy Peterson suffers from no such financial dilemma—thanks to the success of her novels and the resulting movie adaptations—and lives alone in a three-story townhouse located two blocks east of the Capitol Building. Nevertheless, on a near daily basis, she feels no small amount of guilt because of her living situation, and is always quick to offer a spare bedroom should anyone need a place to stay.

Tonight, however, as she sits in the middle of her sofa with her legs curled beneath her, picking at a carton of shrimp lo mein and staring blindly at the television, she is over-the-moon grateful for her solo living arrangements and even more appreciative that she has no overnight guests.

The button box sits on the sofa next to her, looking out of place, almost like a child’s toy in the sterile environment of the townhouse. It took Gwendy the better part of the afternoon to figure out how to smuggle the box out of her office. After several failed attempts, she finally settled on dumping her new boots onto the floor of the closet and using the large cardboard box they came in to conceal it under her arm. Fortunately, the security checkpoints set up throughout the building were put in place for arriving personnel only and not for those departing.

A commercial for the new Tom Hanks movie blares on the television, but Gwendy doesn’t notice. She hasn’t moved from the sofa in the past two hours except to answer the door when the deliveryman rang the bell. Dozens of questions sift through her mind, one after the other in rapid-fire succession, with a dozen more waiting in the shadows to take their place.

Two questions reoccur most frequently as if on a continuous loop:

Why is the box back?

And why now?

GWENDY HAS NEVER TOLD a soul about the button box. Not her husband, not her parents, not even Johnathon or the therapist she saw twice a week for six months back in her mid-twenties.

There was a time when the box filled her every waking thought, when she was obsessed with the mystery and the power contained within, but that was a lifetime ago. Now, for the most part, her memories of the box feel like scattered remnants of a recurring dream she once had during childhood, but whose details have long since been lost in the never-ending maze of adulthood. There’s a lot of truth to the old adage: out of sight, out of mind.

She has, of course, thought about the box in the fifteen years since it vanished from her life, but—and she’s just come to terms with this revelation in the last sixty minutes or so—not nearly as much as she probably should have, considering the immense role the button box played for much of her adolescence.

Looking back, there were weeks, perhaps even months, when it never once crossed her mind and then, boom, she would watch a news report about a mysterious, seemingly natural, disaster that occurred in some faraway state or country, and she would immediately picture someone sitting in a car or at a kitchen table with their finger resting on a shiny red button.

Or she would stumble upon a news teaser online about a man discovering buried treasure in the back yard of his suburban home and would click the link to see if any 1891 Morgan silver dollars were involved.

There were also those dark instances—thankfully rare—when she would catch a glimpse of old grainy video footage on television or hear a snippet of a radio discussion about the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. When that happened, her heart would skip a beat and set to aching, and she would tumble into a deep black hole of depression for days.

And finally there were those times when she would spot a neat black bowler’s hat bobbing up and down amidst a crowd on a busy sidewalk or glance over at an outdoor café table and spy the shiny dome of that black hat resting next to a mug of steaming coffee or a frosty glass of iced tea and, of course, her thoughts would rush back to the man in the black coat. She thought about Richard Farris and that hat of his more than all the rest of it. It was always the mysterious Mr. Farris that swam closest to the surface of her conscious mind. It was his voice she’d heard back in her office, and it is his voice she hears again now, as she sits on the sofa with her bare legs tucked beneath her: “Take care of the box, Gwendy. It gives gifts, but they’re small recompense for the responsibility. And be careful…”

AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE gifts the box so willingly dispenses?

Although she didn’t actually witness the narrow wooden shelf slide out from the center of the box with a silver dollar on it, she believes that’s where the coin on her desk came from. Coin, box; box, coin; it all made perfect sense.

Does that mean pulling the other lever— the one on the left side by the red button , she remembers as if it were yesterday—will deliver a tiny chocolate treat? Maybe. And maybe not. You can never tell with the button box. She believed it had a lot more tricks up its sleeve fifteen years ago, and she believes it even more now.

She brushes her fingertip against the small lever, thinking about the animal-shaped chocolates, no two ever the same, each exotically sweet and no bigger than a jellybean. She remembers the first time she ever laid eyes on one of the chocolates—standing next to Richard Farris in front of the park bench. It was in the shape of a rabbit, and the degree of detail was astounding—the fur, the ears, the cute little eyes! After that, there was a kitty and a squirrel and a giraffe. Her memory grows hazy then, but she remembers enough: eat one chocolate and you were never hungry for seconds; eat a bunch of chocolates over a period of time and you changed —you got faster and stronger and smarter. You had more energy and always seemed to be on the winning side of a coin flip or a board game. The chocolates also improved your eyesight and erased your acne. Or had puberty taken care of that last one? Sometimes it was hard to tell.

Gwendy looks down and is horrified to see that her finger has strayed from the small lever on the side of the box to the rows of colored buttons. She jerks her hand back as if it’s wrist-deep in a hornet’s nest.

But it’s too late—and the voice comes again:

“Light green: Asia. Dark green: Africa. Orange: Europe. Yellow: Australia. Blue: North America. Violet: South America.”

“And the red one?” Gwendy asks aloud.

“Whatever you want,” the voice answers, “and you will want it, the owner of the box always does.”

She gives her head a shake, trying to silence the voice, but it isn’t finished yet.

“The buttons are hard to push,” Farris tells her. “You have to use your thumb and put some real muscle into it. Which is a good thing, believe me. Wouldn’t want to make any mistakes with those, oh no. Especially not with the black one.”

The black one… back then she called it the Cancer Button. She shudders at the memory.