How Much Is It Worth?
There's nothing as good as a magic box
Fiction by Bill Adler brings you a story every Sunday, except for these first newsletters, which I will be sending out once a day to get the proverbial ball rolling.
I hope you enjoy my stories—some microfiction, some long reads, some in between—as much as I like writing them.
“It’s not plagiarism; it’s not stealing.” The shopkeeper lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper and lifted the red velvet cloth covering the rosewood box. The box was about twenty centimeters square. Other than the unrelated carvings on its sides—a giraffe, hourglass, crescent moon, two kids on a seesaw, and Mt. Fuji—there was nothing remarkable about it.
His eyes darted from side to side. “Ten thousand dollars, a bargain. What do you say?” Lines like Sanskrit rippled across his brow.
“I don’t know. That’s a lot of money. And I’m not sure it’s ethical or legal.”
He removed the box’s top. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of words swirled within as if caught in a hurricane, a blur of consonants and vowels. He stuck a finger inside and poked one of the flying words. That word, which slowed enough so I could read it—snickerdoodle—crashed into another word, then another and another, until forming a complete sentence.
“Wow.” Goosebumps popped up all over my arms.
“This box collects ideas forgotten by famous authors because they didn’t write them down.”
I know that miserable feeling.
His mouth curved into a wry smile. “The writers abandoned those ideas, so they belong to no one. You’re just giving these ideas the life they should have had.”
“I’ll take it.”
A version of How Much Is It Worth? originally appeared in Paragraph Planet.
Brilliant!