The box and the beach.

At my writers' group this week we were iven a really interesting task to complete- There was a box on the table and it contained two objects. We didn't know what was in the box and weren't allowed to open it. We could lift it, shake it and pass it round, but never open it. We were then told to decide what was inside and write a descriptive passage about our relationship to it. It was actually very hard, but here's what I came up with-

A timely timepiece, it sits in cardboard dark, slithered with halogen lamplit roomlight sneaking in and through and dissipating. It fades. The light bends; it skews in sharp and gentle spirals and razor sheer lines. It settles or slips or doesn't exist at all. For inside that box - is there an inside? Pandora is nothing without the grand unveiling, the letting loose. The box is merely box. The inside is self-contained; a wormhole, a chink in dark and space and time. A vacuum. Empty as a whaling warehouse, a Svalbard glacial chamber- watery, lightless, darkless, shimmering, fastidious deep-down cavern. A lounge; sofas packed in crushed ice. The carpet is a pool of water, the walls clad in cold cold cardboard. The box is sealed and closed and there is something solid in its Tardis belly. A grand piano. An island. Two vases; Ming but chipped and bruised. The outside is nothing; inside is deep and vast and claustrophobic and cramped and overwhelmingly tepid. Not the ice chamber. Not the family lounge. Just a box, and, inside- who knows? I say a clock.

We then all shut our eyes. The box was opened and the items passed around though we never got to see them. They were then sealed back in the box and we wrote another piece, this time knowing vaguely what they were. Here's the second one-

The seaside is sandy at this time of year. Dry sand-blasting sand. Hot, parched by a dry-wood sun. Combustible, carbon, splintering, varnished, beaming, blooming sun. Eight-pointed. A compass. A sunflower. An angular spiderous dark white orb. Summer is unforgiving. In sunbleaches lemon-juiced fair skinned Northern European I-can't-tan-I'm-ginger boys and girls. Men play French cricket and stumble lumpishly through furrows. Anonymous women flip flop flip flop down the shoreline where the water is beige, silt whipped into clouds of micro-fossils and shards of mighty headlands, buffeted and battered to become merely the family two week holiday. They are but shades of ancient seahorses, the bones of plesiosaur, mammoth and man; an earlier man. And on grey November days (always grey, always dawn) the fishermen lost at far far sea juggle onto the rocks and pestle grind to match ancestors and cousins and the deepest furthest bedrock. The sea, voluble, liquidic, seamless- it smashes the pre-fragmenting, crumbling won't-be-long-now land. The planet is hot. The water rises. Tides are higher. We cool down the planet with freeze-pops and a Calipo or two. We save it, sunny side down.

In case you're wondering, inside the box was a conch shell and a candle-holder in the shape of a sun.