Will eyed the dark wood box in the corner warily. He was impressed by its size and elaborate design; the ornate bronze fittings on a polished ebony base. It reminded him of an old teak storage chest he’d discovered in his grandma’s attic as a boy. Stuffed to the brim with old clothes and shoes, he’d rummaged excitedly through mildewed fabric, searching for hidden treasure. He could still recall how the fetid scent grew as he’d delved down, layer after layer. Then finally, his reward, pink and still: three baby mice, bloated and dead. The full stench had hit his younger self seconds later. Like rotten meat mixed with sodden earth, it had filled his head for days.

But this was not that box.

Tilda had, apparently single-handedly, hauled it up four flights of stairs and through the shared waiting area using only a folding hand trolley and several bungee cords. How, he couldn’t even fathom. They’d dumped it, without a word, next to his desk, and sat in the low-backed armchair opposite him. From that angle, only Will could see it clearly, and he wondered briefly if the placing was deliberate.

It perplexed and fascinated him, the way the size of it seemed to alter. When he looked straight at it, it filled the space like nothing else was in the room. And yet, if he caught it only out of the corner of his eye, it was suddenly much smaller and discrete. It was a remarkable item, Will thought, almost as if it knew when it was being perceived and adjusted its shape to suit. Of course, that kind of thinking was wildly illogical. A man of his profession must not indulge.

Almost a full twenty minutes into the session, Tilda still hadn’t said a word to explain or excuse it, and the curiosity was making Will itch. He nodded deliberately towards the corner. Forced himself to sound casual as he smiled.

“So, Tilda, do you maybe want to talk about that? I assume you brought it here today for a reason.”

Tilda’s gaze didn’t even flicker, but Will saw their body stiffen.

“You said wanted to see it. Last session, you said, ‘I’m keen to see what that’s about.’”

“I did? Oh, yes, I did.” Will tried to recall exactly what he’d said. He had no doubt written it in the session notes, but he didn’t want to make it obvious he had forgotten. 

“Yes. You mentioned this. This… ummm?” He trailed off, finally admitting defeat.

“Trauma box,” Tilda replied.

“Ah, yes!” the memory of the last session came flooding back. “Your ‘trauma box’. A place where all the bad things go.”

“A place for putting the bad things into,” Tilda corrected. “There’s a difference.”

Will cocked an eyebrow. “How so?”

“They don’t just go there, you have to put them in there. Physically. That’s how it works.”

“You physically put your trauma in these boxes.” Will parroted.

“One box. Singular.” Tilda tipped their head toward the box behind them but didn’t turn to look. “That one box for all of them. We talked about this. That’s why I brought it.”

“I know we have. But bear with me, please, because I’m curious and I’d just like to know a little more. How do you physically put a trauma in a box, Tilda? Can you maybe explain that to me?”

“No, I can’t. If you had your own box you’d understand, but you don’t, so I can’t tell you. That’s not how it works.”

Will sighed. It was barely imperceptible, and to anyone else it might have seemed like merely an exhale, but Tilda knew a sigh when they heard one. Exasperation papered under layers of fake patience. The faintest notes of boredom and irritation.

They watched as Will added something to the notepad on his knee. A south-paw, his left hand curled almost double around the ballpoint, its nib skittering and scratching as he wrote. Content for a moment to stay silent, Tilda let their body relax further into the chair as their eyes wandered slowly around Will’s office.

The room, square and full of beige, was so utterly devoid of joy. Even the framed picture of a pair of boats at sea was dull and lacking motion. A pristine box of tissues rested on the coffee table between them, freshly opened, with one tissue teased halfway out. Tilda wondered if someone put a new offering there before each session. Was it gauche to use the same box of tissues for every client? Maybe some people didn’t want to be reminded of how many others had come before them. How they’d sat in this chair and spilled their secrets in this place. Let the pale carpet soak up their sorrows.

There was a smell too, like artificial magnolia mixed with cheap cherry cola, emitting from the plug-in air freshener by the door. Sickly sweet and overpowering, it lodged in their throat like a cotton ball, and left a dull thumping headache in its wake. The grey blinds were half-drawn to block out the sun and a single fluorescent strip-light mounted on the ceiling threw out an unnatural peachy glow.

There was nothing welcoming or peaceful in this space. No calm comforts for an unquiet mind.

Will stopped writing and looked up expectantly. Tilda plucked the tissue from its cardboard coffin and tore it into strips while they spoke.

“My mother gave me the trauma box the day I was born,” Tilda said. “On the same day, they gave me my old name. I didn’t want either, but I had no choice. That was just the way things were done in my family. The way they’d always been done. Just as my grandmother had given my mother a box, like her mother had done before her. And so on, and so on, for who knows how far back. Every daughter receives a trauma box. And no, before you ask, I can’t tell you why, or even where they come from. I can only tell you what I know about it myself. All families have their secrets, as I’m sure someone like you is aware.”

Will sighed again, and caught himself. Turned the exhale into an awkward cough.

Tilda swallowed and tried to ignore his unprofessionalism.

“Each trauma box starts out smaller than our newborn selves, growing and changing as we do. It expands over time to fit each trauma we put into it, devouring each one whole. We keep it with us our whole lives. It goes with us wherever we go. When we die, we burn it with our flesh and bone, and we throw our combined ashes to the wind.”

Will looked up as Tilda fell quiet, his pen poised over the page. From the corner, he thought he heard a faint echoing thump, like the sound of bare knuckles on a board. Most likely someone in the office next door.  

“You know, Tilda, a lot of my clients talk about these kinds of boxes. The act of packing awful things away or tidying them up somehow. It’s quite a common metaphor. When something terrible happens, it’s often much easier for us to not face it. To bury it. The problem is, this means we never fully deal with the issue. The trauma stays in the box, so to speak, and we carry it around with us.”

“Yes,” Tilda said. “That’s exactly what happens. All our lives.”

 “The trauma stays in the box and you carry it around with you?”

“Of course. Everywhere. Well, not literally everywhere. You keep it somewhere; usually underneath your bed or at the very back of your wardrobe. Why else would you have the box?”

“But,” Will replied, tapping his index finger to his top lip, “that trauma can, and often does, escape. Especially when you least expect it.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Tilda replied. “It can’t. That’s the whole point of the box. Look,” they said, talking slowly as if to a small child. “You put the trauma in the box. You close the lid on the trauma. The box grows to fit around the trauma. You do not ever, under any circumstances, look inside the box or go poking around for that trauma to revisit or release it. Once it’s in the box, it’s done and it’s gone. It cannot hurt you anymore.” Tilda crossed their arms and hugged themselves.

Outside, a cloud moved across the sun and the shadows in the room slid with it. The box in the corner seemed to flicker and jump like static on an old TV. A door slammed somewhere further down the corridor and Will flinched without really knowing why. There was an odour, he noticed, that he couldn’t quite place. Something stale like a week-old dish cloth.  

“And does it work?” Will asked finally.

Tilda shrugged. “Not as well as it used to. I think, maybe…” They stared blankly at the dull beige walls. “Maybe I’ve fed too many bad things to my box. Maybe it can’t grow any bigger.”

“Do you have a lot of traumas put away?” Will asked.

“Too many.”

“Tell me about them.”

Tilda groaned in frustration. “Don’t you like, have all this information? I’ve filled in enough forms. Surely you must know already?”

Will flipped through his notes again. “Well, shall we have a look together? Take a pulse check on where you are right now?”

Tilda shrugged. “If you want.”

“In the past three weeks, you’ve shown high numbers on the DSM-5 and GAD-7 forms. That’s PTSD and general anxiety. You’ve had multiple prior diagnosis’ of depression and low mood and two separate incidents of being admitted to hospital because of being in mental crisis. You said in the past you’ve self-harmed and self-medicated, and used illegal and prescription drugs. You sought this specialist support via your GP after a very serious car accident, which I know you’re still healing from almost nine months later.”

“It’s a permanent injury. I won’t ever heal.”

“You mentioned that in our last session.”

“And you don’t believe me.”

“No, that’s not true at all. What I believe is that over time, the way you feel about your injury will change.”

“With all due respect, doc, there’s a metal plate holding my skull together. Those bones aren’t going to grow back, are they?”

“I think you know that’s not what I mean. Shall I continue?”

Tilda sighed and rolled their eyes. “Whatever.”

 “You identify as non-binary, but you were born a girl…”

“Which is irrelevant,” Tilda interjected. “I don’t identify as, I am nonbinary, but keep going.”

“You made your own gender marker on the intake form, as I recall.”

Tilda shrugged and gave a wry grin. “My identity, as you put it, is very important to me. I don’t think what I did was unreasonable.”

Will clicked the ballpoint and set both hands in his lap.

“Let me ask you something, Tilda. Why do you come to these sessions? I’m not the bad guy here, but you always seem so furious with me. Like you’ve come here just to fight. No one is forcing you to attend. In fact, your GP said in their referral you asked specifically for this kind of support.”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, please. Honestly.”

“No, I don’t want to be here. Mostly, I’m here because the drugs I was taking suddenly stopped working and my previous therapist gave up on me. I heard about you, through other people you’ve seen. I was hoping you might be different.”

“Am I?”

“No. You’re just the same as every other psyche. I’ve seen countless people like you in my life. More than I can count on both hands. You all say the same things and diagnose the same problems. And none of you, not one of you, is ever right.

“It’s my gender. My queerness. My multiple disabilities. It’s my best friend dying of suicide in front of me when I was only seventeen years old. It’s being bullied, gaslit, treated like shit, in a job I was, frankly, fucking brilliant at. It’s the loss of my father and my broken home. It’s all the pain I’ve suffered, physically and mentally. It’s the many masks I’ve had to wear and roles I’ve had to play, to be treated with even the bare minimum of respect because, and I quote another from your esteemed profession, my ‘womb is sad.’

“It’s a deep, dark, repressed part of myself that I don’t even know about that causes me such terrible mental anguish. A black dog on my shoulders, its claws in my back. Some great, evil, slavering, Hell-bound beast that drags me down into the dark.

“All of you think you know me better than I know myself, and you’re obsessed with telling me who I really am.”

Will opened his mouth to interject. Tilda threw up a palm to silence him.

“No. You listen for once in your goddamn life. Listen to this. To me. Because it’s all these things, and a whole life’s worth more. It’s a heavy, writhing smorgasbord of traumas and lived experiences and of just fucking existing in an unforgiving and unkind world. I’ve been medicated for half my life and in therapy for much longer. None of you ‘specialists’ ever truly believe in the box. You all think it’s a part of an elaborate coping mechanism. A tidy, trope-y, metaphor I’ve made up to help me deal. But all of you are wrong. The box–my box–is real.” Tilda pointed angrily to the corner. “You can see my fucking box right there!”

Will felt a sharp pop deep in his ear, followed by a high-pitched ring. He yelped and put his hand to his head. Almost immediately, the noise stopped. Tilda didn’t seem to have noticed his reaction. And there was that stench again. Surely they could smell it too? He wanted to ask them, but it didn’t seem appropriate. He felt exhausted and off-kilter and… Tilde was still talking. He had no idea how much he’d missed.

“… why I come here. I’m here because you are the final gatekeeper. You’re the video-game Big Boss I have to defeat and convince you to give what I need. You’ll ask the same damn questions and tick same damn the boxes, and no doubt you’ll slap me with yet another fancy diagnosis, dreamed up by other Big Brains like yourself. And I, like Alice trapped in Wonderland, will ‘eat-me drink-me’ anything you offer me, in the hope it might help ease the ever-constant bottomless and smothering despair I feel gnawing at my soul every day, even if it’s just a miniscule amount, because my trauma box can only carry so much of me and I am tired of carrying the weight.”

Will, hand on chin and eyebrows furrowed, let their words drift and hang in the room for a while as he pondered how best to reply. His eyeballs stung and he longed to rub them. It must be allergies, he thought. That would explain his strange tiredness.  

“You’re a writer, aren’t you Tilda?” He asked at last. “That’s what you listed as your occupation.”

“Oh, my God… What… ?” Tilda breathed deeply and closed their eyes. “Yes. I am. I’m a writer. I am a tortured artist painting pictures with my words, the scars of my stories on my wrists. As if that makes any difference to anything I’ve just told you?”

“What I mean is, Tilda, you have an excellent imagination. It’s a huge part of what drives you and helps you make sense of the world. Don’t you think there could be even a small part of you that has embellished the story of the box just a little bit? To help you process all the traumatic things you’ve been through?”

“No.”

“No? You’re very quick to say that.”

“Because I know how it works. Doc, it’s right there!”

“A box is there, Tilda. Just a box. What you say it does is impossible, and I think, deep down, you know that. You cannot physically put traumas into a box. Boxes do not grow to fit their items. Think about what it is you’re saying, Tilda.”

“Open it then.”

“What?”

“If you’re so sure it can’t be what it is. That it doesn’t do what I’ve told you. Open it.”

Will gave a quiet chuckle. “Didn’t you say you weren’t allowed to do that?”

“I’m not. There are no rules that say you can’t. Go for it. Knock yourself out. Take a peek at all my lovely, delicious traumas, doc. All those things I’ve packed away and buried. I’d love for you to see them all for yourself. You sit here, judging me, gaslighting me, telling me yet again that what I know is my truth is not real. So do it.”

“I don’t…”

“OPEN THE FUCKING BOX, DOC!”

“Tilda,” Will began, his voice low and steady. “I can see you’re feeling very upset right now. Would you like to just take a moment and then maybe we can talk it through?”

Tilda bit their bottom lip and shook their head. “I don’t want to talk things through, doc. What I want right now is for you to humour me. Open the box. Look inside. And then we can talk about what is you find. Deal?”

“Does it mean that much to you that I believe you?”

“It really does.”

There were rules about this kind of thing, Will thought. For safeguarding and maintaining good practices. It was bad form to engage with patient fantasies, no matter how real they might seem. But the box was right there, and Tilda’s story was so ridiculous. Maybe he could use this as a breakthrough, a teachable moment? Show them there was nothing to be afraid of.

The room fell dark again; the light diffused. An unsettling, electro-charged thrum filled his head. A rapid change in air pressure and temperature. It made his face burn and his teeth throb, but in seconds, it was gone.

There would be nothing in the box, he felt sure of it. If anything, maybe some totem items, some curios or trinkets that Tilda felt represented their emotions. Photographs, letters, some jewellery perhaps.

He stood and walked purposefully to the box.

The shimmering, flickering, vibrating box.

Wait, no, that wasn’t possible. He needed to concentrate. He put his hands to the bronze clasp and thumbed it loose.

Like rotten meat mixed with sodden earth… That smell from his childhood, the disgust he’d felt, it filled his nose and turned his stomach. He felt panicked and unsettled by the unwanted memory, rising like a spectre from his past.

“Go on, doc. Open it,” Tilda urged. “Take a peek. You know you want to.”

The lid was heavy, heavier than he’d expected. He used both hands to push it back.

He wasn’t ready. Nothing could ever have made him ready. It wasn’t right.

What he was seeing. What was he seeing…

this impossible, writhing, oozing mess

like pink mice

black blood and pale flesh and so many teeth

three of them

pulsing and oozing and fighting for breath

bloated, but not quite dead

paws, claws, reaching, grasping, pulling you in and pulling you down

you killed them didn’t you, William?

screaming with a myriad tortured voices, the anguish of a thousand souls

you smothered them all while they slept…

Will fell to his knees and sobbed.

“My god, Tilda. What is this? What have you done?”

He was dimly aware of them standing behind him. Too close. Uncomfortably close.

“I told you, doc. This is where I put all the bad things. I’d say I’m sorry, but actually this comes as something of a relief. You can see it now? You can see I’m not making it up?”

White-knuckled, Will gripped the edges of the chest and vomited into the opening. His body heaved and buckled as he lost control of his bowels.

“Please… Tilda… I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I know, doc. But now you do. What you do, how you use the power you have, you’re not safe for people like me. And I can’t let that carry on. You’re a Bad Thing, doc. You do a lot of harm. People come to you hoping you will help them, but instead, you just give them more trauma.”

Will felt their hands wrap around his waist, his body lifted and bent. His fingernails scrabbled against the black wood as he tried to pull himself free.

“If it’s any consolation,” Tilda said, one hand clenched around the back of his neck, as they folded him into the hole. “I feel a lot better already.”