In an attempt to reinvigorate my novel (it's beached at the moment, gasping for air...), I'm taking a creative writing evening class. This is, by turns, fun, informative, frustrating, depressing, and satisfying. Mostly it's interesting and rewarding, though, and I always get home and feel mentally inspired to write. But it's late, it's Monday, and I've had a day full of meetings at work. So I sit and eat crunchy nut cornflakes and swear that I *will* write tomorrow night. It *does* happen occasionally, but not often enough.

Below is one of the pieces I wrote for my homework a couple of weeks back. The exercise title we were set was "box".

Box

Nan’s dead, and we’re clearing her house. The council gave us a week.

The last cardboard box is wobbly, soft with age. It’s dusty, too, and the top flaps sag into a central hollow. When I lift it out of the car it feels too light for its size: it comes up quickly, and the parched cardboard scratches against my chin.

The other boxes are stacked in my living room. Hemmed in on the settee, I imagine that the blank cardboard harbours the faint, accumulated odours of nan’s house: boiled bacon, carbolic soap, cat food, embrocation, coal, and burned fat from last year’s chip pan fire.

That fire was the first sign of the end coming: after her panicky phone call, we’d driven over to find her sitting on the stairs weeping, hunched and vulnerable, a shivering, diminished imitation of the foul-mouthed, vitriolic dynamo we’d all been afraid of. In the kitchen, there was a sodden, burned tea towel on the cooker, and flakes of ash floated in the air, circling each other like black gnats.

I open the last box, and there, in a nest of desiccated receipts and utility bills, is the musical box. It’s shaped like a Swiss chalet, with a canted roof and a square chimney. When I was a child, I would nervously unearth it from the cupboard in nan and granddad’s bedroom, feeling blindly for its angles with my fingers while I looked over my shoulder, listening for anyone coming upstairs.

My fingers remember the musical box’s weight and shape, the knobbly carving of the roof tiles, the dry wooden underside. The mechanism never worked, but I know that if I open the roof I can draw my fingernail across the tuned strips of metal and make the old plucked music come.
I weigh it in my hands, staring at the past. Nan’s sitting on the stairs, weeping. I put the musical box back into the cardboard box, and fold over the flaps.