Ms Fletcher paced back and forth in the hall of Edison Elementary just outside the administrative offices. What was she going to do? What was she going to say? She couldn’t very well just go back to her classroom. Not with little Jonathon and that…that thing he’d brought for show-and-tell. She’d been teaching for over thirty years, and in all that time she’d seen spiders and snakes and dead things from the side of the road. But the thingJonathon had brought was…well she didn’t know what it was. She’d only caught a slight glimpse of it in fact, but just that glimpse was enough to explain why her class had erupted in screams the moment Jonathon had opened his box to show everyone what he’d brought. Just the brief look she’d had was enough. Her head still ached and parts of her brain were buzzing as it tried to make sense of what it had seen. She felt like she was going to have a powerful headache if it didn’t calm down soon.

“Vera?” a concerned voice spoke and Ms Fletcher came to herself.

She was surprised to find that she was no longer pacing, but sitting in the middle of the hallway, her hands wrapped around her head as though trying to contain the memory of what she’d seen. Ms Fletcher looked around and felt both relief and shame when she saw Principle Shaw standing over her, her faced lined with concern.

“Vera what’s wrong?” Principle Shaw asked and she knelt down beside Ms Fletcher. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost! Are your students alright?”

Ms Fletcher’s classroom was in one of the so-called temporary buildings that had been erected some fifteen years previous when the school building proved too small for the growing community. If she strained her ears, she thought she could just make out the screaming voices of her students.

“Vera!” Principle Shaw grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “What’s wrong?”

Ms Fletcher struggled to form words, mouthing silently at first, before she finally found her voice.

“The…inside the box,” she began in hushed and terrified tones. “Jonathon brought with him–

Images of what she’d seen burst into her mind unbidden and she cried out, clamping her hands over her eyes in a vain attempt to blot out the vision before her. She began to twitch and convulse as the strain on her mind began to grow too much for her, even as it continued to struggle in vain to comprehend what was inside of Jonathon’s box.

“What did he bring, Vera?” Principle Shaw asked and she was obviously struggling to keep her own voice under control. “Did he bring a weapon to school? Are your students okay?”

“Can’t…can’t you hear them?” Ms Fletcher managed to gasp out between her fits.

Principle Shaw quieted for a moment and listened. After a moment her eyes widened and she looked towards the source of the faint cries she just became aware of.

“Oh my,” she said in a choked voice.

In a flash she was on her feet and dashing away from Ms Fletcher and back towards the administrative offices.

“Michael!” She shouted and the Assistant Principle poked his head out his door, worry on his face at Principle Shaw’s tone. “Something’s happened in Vera’s class. She’s having a fit in the hallway and I think her students are in danger. Call the police and initiate a lock down.”

With that she turned and hurried back out down the hallway towards the exit nearest Ms Fletcher’s classroom.

“Don’t,” Ms Fletcher muttered, though no one was around to hear her. She was lying on the floor now, her hands were numb and she couldn’t seem to get her vision to focus. “Don’t look…inside the box…it’s too big…too big for the box…

The school faded from her view and all that was left was the thing in little Jonathon’s box. It writhed and squirmed and was too large, maddeningly too large to be able to fit into such a small box. And the way it moved, into and out of itself without ever seeming to actually run into itself. Everything about it was a paradox and contradiction and yet she’d seen it, they all had, and their minds couldn’t seem to make sense of it. Yet try as she might, she couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop trying to make it make sense.

Finally, even the vision of the contents of Jonathon’s box began to fade. Just before everything went dark, Ms Fletcher thought she heard the voice of Principle Shaw added to the screams of her students.

“I told you,” Ms Fletcher mouthed silently, “not to look.”

Ms Fletcher stopped twitching.