Coffin Box Quotes

(P)eople’s good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

I told her why we are here. I told you wouldn't hurt Jack." "The coffin?" I smiled. I couldn't help it. He was a 'jack in a box.

I think the best shaped box ever on earth is a coffin which can be handmade to escort the forever numb-hands.

Tell the others,” Aelin breathed, trying to find the right words. “Tell the others that I am sorry. Tell Lysandra to remember her promise, and that I will never stop being grateful. Tell Aedion … Tell him it is not his fault, and that …” Her voice cracked. “I wish he’d been able to take the oath, but Terrasen will look to him now, and the lines must not break.” Elide nodded, tears sliding down her blood-splattered face. “And tell Rowan …” Aelin’s soul splintered as she saw the iron box the escorts now carried between them. An ancient, iron coffin. Big enough for one person. Crafted for her. “And tell Rowan,” Aelin said, fighting her own sob, “that I’m sorry I lied. But tell him it was all borrowed time anyway. Even before today, I knew it was all just borrowed time, but I still wish we’d had more of it.” She fought past her trembling mouth. “Tell him he has to fight. He must save Terrasen, and remember the vows he made to me. And tell him … tell him thank you—for walking that dark path with me back to the light.” They

The human life cycle no less than evolves around the box; from the open-topped box called a bassinet, to the pine box we call a coffin, the box is our past and, just as assuredly, our future. It should not surprise us then that the lowly box plays such a significant role in the first Christmas story. For Christmas began in a humble, hay-filled box of splintered wood. The Magi, wise men who had traveled far to see the infant king, laid treasure-filled boxes at the feet of that holy child. And in the end, when He had ransomed our sins with His blood, the Lord of Christmas was laid down in a box of stone. How fitting that each Christmas season brightly wrapped boxes skirt the pine boughs of Christmas trees around the world.

I still feel ghosts around me: the ghosts of the five Dalloway girls who defied the boxes and coffins the world tried to put them in. The ghosts of other women who attended or worked at this school, but whose legacies were forgotten instead of deified. The ghosts of every girl who came here and felt history beneath her feet. But I'm not haunted anymore. Maybe I never was.

Love is a gift. Mine comes in a box that’s shaped like a coffin.

She reached into an alabaster box and pulled out a violet cigarette that also exactly matched her eyes. Some people just don't know when to quit. She lit her colored coffin nail, set it into an ashtray, and promptly forgot about it. It smoldered into eternity silently begging for one more touch from her gorgeous lips.

She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When

The Hearse Song Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by, For you may be the next to die. They wrap you up in a big white sheet From your head down to your feet. They put you in a big black box And cover you up with dirt and rocks. All goes well for about a week, Then your coffin begins to leak. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, The worms play pinochle on your snout. They eat your eyes, they eat your nose, They eat the jelly between your toes. A big green worm with rolling eyes Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes. Your stomach turns a slimy green, And pus pours out like whipping cream. You spread it on a slice of bread, And that's what you eat when you're dead.

I got you a birthday present. The box is the exact same size as a coffin.

You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy. He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be. It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say. I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold. And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?

I met Jose Angelico the way I meet many of my customers. I have a workshop on the cemetery road, just past the coffin makers. I specialize in the small, simple stone. I am very aware that my clients have next to nothing, and renting the grave has often taken most of their money. So I modify and modify and get down to the very lowest cost. The dead, however, must have that stone: the reminder, the eternal reminder, that this man, this woman, this child---existed. On some of the graves the name is marked in paint, or even pen, and everyone knows how sad that is. Make something out of stone, I say, and noone touches the grave.The poor are not buried, you see. There is not enough ground here any more, so in the Naravo they build upwards. The graves of the poor are concrete boxes, each just big enough for the coffin. They go up and up---in some parts twenty boxes high. A funeral here is to slide the coffin in and watch the sealing of the compartment. Part of my service is that I cement the stone that I've made into place, and thus seal the chamber.

Oiled, with tube bones cut from bronze and sunk in gelatin, the robots lay. In coffins for the not dead and not alive, in planked boxes, the metronomes waited to be set in motion. There was a smell of lubrication and lathed brass. There was a silence of the tomb yard. Sexed but sexless, the robots. Named but unnamed, and borrowing from humans everything but humanity, the robots stared at the nailed lids of their labeled F.O.B. boxes, in a death that was not even a death, for there had never been a life.

He managed not to disturb too much of the flower bed as he tamped soil over the Jaffa Cake box that had taken on the role of hamster coffin so well.

They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

She sighed as she looked around. “Tell you what I don’t like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist . . . it’s the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. Ugh! If I lived here I would have to stay drunk all the time.

People where I live are born in cradles, then grow up in boxes, then die in coffins. From cradle to coffin--they exist in boxes. And they wish that I join them, sometimes they try, but then I bite their fingers off.

Tell you what I don’t like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist . . . it’s the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins.

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

And between them, the little shoe-box glistening with scarlet wallpaper and gilt like a fairy coffin. Inside it, there was the crabbed corpse of a still-born child wreathed in bloody newspaper. “I hated you so much,” she said softly.

I had a dream about you. You had no skin or muscle on your face, and to try to conceal your bare skull you liberally applied lipstick and makeup. Your birthday was coming up, and I knew you were probably sensitive about parties that emphasize the aging process, so I decided to box up your gift in a coffin and wrap it with black wrapping paper. I got you the best gift ever too—a hooker, who happened to be dead, because that enabled me to procure a sizeable discount.


The box room. No bigger than a coffin. It would be like being buried. Maybe she wouldn't keep her Barbies after all. She would make a huge bonfire in the back garden. She would burn her clothes. She would burn all her old toys (except for her old teddy bear Rasputin, obviously—he was more of a guru and personal trainer than a toy). She would burn her CDs and her CD player. She would burn all her makeup. She would shave all her hair off and burn that. She would wear only a pair of Oriental black pajamas. She would sleep in the box room on a small mat made out of rushes. The only item in the room would be a plain white saucer for her tears. Then they'd be sorry.

Tell you what I don’t like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist... it’s the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid.

You go in through the front door of the hospital and depending on how successful your treatment is determines whether you leave through the front door or in a box out of the back door.

High above, the rafters were made of old wood, and sturdy as the mountain the house had been built on, and across the way, sixteen coffins were stacked one upon the next, as if they were nothing but moving boxes from U-Haul. The

What’s the last thing you remember?” I ask instead. “Dancing.” “You were at a bar, a nightclub? In Boston?” It takes her a bit, but finally, “Y-y-yes.” “Did you drink too much?” A small hiccup I take to be yes. Kids, I think. We’re all so young and fearless once. Nightclubs are nothing but a source of adventure. And a fourth, fifth, sixth rum runner the best idea in the world. I hated myself for my own stupidity, waking up in a coffin-size box. Minute after minute, day after day, so much time to do nothing but repent. And

While at Colonel Niel's marquee I saw a detail of soldiers bring out a man by the name of Rowland, whom they were going to shoot to death with musketry, by order of a court-martial, for desertion. He was being hauled to the place of execution in a wagon, sitting on an old gun box, which was to be his coffin. When they got to the grave, which had been dug the day before, the water had risen in it, and a soldier was baling it out. Rowland spoke up and said, 'Please hand me a drink of that water, as I want to drink out of my own grave so the boys will talk about it when I am dead, and remember Rowland.

But now that he apparently made every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this; -at a critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, he averred. They asked him, then whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.

Why do we bury our dead?” His nose was dented in at the bridge like a sphinx; the cause of which I could only imagine had been a freak archaeological accident. I thought about my parents. They had requested in their will that they be buried side by side in a tiny cemetery a few miles from our house. “Because it’s respectful?” He shook his head. “That’s true, but that’s not the reason we do it.” But that was the reason we buried people, wasn’t it? After gazing at him in confusion, I raised my hand, determined to get the right answer. “Because leaving people out in the open is unsanitary.” Mr. B. shook his head and scratched the stubble on his neck. I glared at him, annoyed at his ignorance and certain that my responses were correct. “Because it’s the best way to dispose of a body?” Mr. B. laughed. “Oh, but that’s not true. Think of all the creative ways mass murderers have dealt with body disposal. Surely eating someone would be more practical than the coffin, the ceremony, the tombstone.” Eleanor grimaced at the morbid image, and the mention of mass murderers seemed to wake the rest of the class up. Still, no one had an answer. I’d heard Mr. B. was a quack, but this was just insulting. How dare he presume that I didn’t know what burials meant? I’d watched them bury my parents, hadn’t I? “Because that’s just what we do,” I blurted out. “We bury people when they die. Why does there have to be a reason for everything?” “Exactly!” Mr. B. grabbed the pencil from behind his ear and began gesticulating with it. “We’ve forgotten why we bury people. “Imagine you’re living in ancient times. Your father dies. Would you randomly decide to put him inside a six-sided wooden box, nail it shut, then bury it six feet below the earth? These decisions aren’t arbitrary, people. Why a six-sided box? And why six feet below the earth? And why a box in the first place? And why did every society throughout history create a specific, ritualistic way of disposing of their dead?” No one answered. But just as Mr. B. was about to continue, there was a knock on the door. Everyone turned to see Mrs. Lynch poke her head in. “Professor Bliss, the headmistress would like to see Brett Steyers in her office. As a matter of urgency.” Professor Bliss nodded, and Brett grabbed his bag and stood up, his chair scraping against the floor as he left. After the door closed, Mr. B. drew a terrible picture of a mummy on the board, which looked more like a hairy stick figure. “The Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead before mummification. Now, why on earth would they do that?” There was a vacant silence. “Think, people! There must be a reason. Why the brain? What were they trying to preserve?” When no one answered, he answered his own question. “The mind!” he said, exasperated. “The soul!” As much as I had planned on paying attention and participating in class, I spent the majority of the period passing notes with Eleanor. For all of his enthusiasm, Professor Bliss was repetitive and obsessed with death and immortality. When he faced the board to draw the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, I read the note Eleanor had written me. Who is cuter? A. Professor Bliss B. Brett Steyers C. Dante Berlin D. The mummy I laughed. My hand wavered between B and C for the briefest moment. I wasn’t sure if you could really call Dante cute. Devastatingly handsome and mysterious would be the more appropriate description. Instead I circled option D. Next to it I wrote Obviously! and tossed it onto her desk when no one was looking.

The other evening, in that cafe-cabaret in the Rue de la Fontaine, where I had run aground with Tramsel and Jocard, who had taken me there to see that supposedly-fashionable singer... how could they fail to see that she was nothing but a corpse? Yes, beneath the sumptuous and heavy ballgown, which swaddled her and held her upright like a sentry-box of pink velvet trimmed and embroidered with gold - a coffin befitting the queen of Spain - there was a corpse! But the others, amused by her wan voice and her emaciated frame, found her quaint - more than that, quite 'droll'... Droll! that drab, soft and inconsistent epithet that everyone uses nowadays! The woman had, to be sure, a tiny carven head, and a kind of macabre prettiness within the furry heap of her opera-cloak. They studied her minutely, interested by the romance of her story: a petite bourgeoise thrown into the high life following the fad which had caught her up - and neither of them, nor anyone else besides in the whole of that room, had perceived what was immediately evident to my eyes. Placed flat on the white satin of her dress, the two hands of that singer were the two hands of a skeleton: two sets of knuckle-bones gloved in white suede. They might have been drawn by Albrecht Durer: the ten fingers of an evil dead woman, fitted at the ends of the two overlong and excessively thin arms of a mannequin... And while that room convulsed with laughter and thrilled with pleasure, greeting her buffoonery and her animal cries with a dolorous ovation, I became convinced that her hands no more belonged to her body than her body, with its excessively high shoulders, belonged to her head... The conviction filled me with such fear and sickness that I did not hear the singing of a living woman, but of some automaton pieced together from disparate odds and ends - or perhaps even worse, some dead woman hastily reconstructed from hospital remains: the macabre fantasy of some medical student, dreamed up on the benches of the lecture-hall... and that evening began, like some tale of Hoffmann, to turn into a vision of the lunatic asylum. Oh, how that Olympia of the concert-hall has hastened the progress of my malady!

Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her--ah, how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that's why the coffin's closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces, It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there on the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers' house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers' barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.

Josephson had died just north of Abd al-Kuri Island, an uninhabited, mountainous desert with, on its eastern side, perhaps the world’s wildest and finest beach. To mollify Holworthy, in a moment of weakness not long after they had departed Lemonnier, Rensselaer had considered leaving a few SEALs there on the way south, to observe traffic, as on occasion irregular forces were ordered to do. But he had decided then that rather than mollify Holworthy, he would keep him down. The rendezvous point with the Puller wasn’t far, and, arriving first, Athena waited. The Puller was out of sight but in radio contact. Eventually they saw her to the west, and she came even with Athena at dusk, although in that latitude, as Josephson had learned, dusk is so short it hardly exists. With the lights of the Puller blazing despite wartime conditions, her vast superstructure, hollow and beamed like a box-girder bridge, was cast in flares and shadows. A brow was extended from a door in the side and fixed to Athena’s main deck. As a gentle swell moved the two ships up and down at different rates, the hinged brow tilted slightly one way and then another. The Iranian prisoners were escorted over the brow and to the brig in the Puller, which would take them very close to their own country, but then to the United States. They were bitter and depressed. The huge ship into the darkness of which they were swallowed seemed like an alien craft from another civilization, which, for them, it was. A gray metal coffin was carried to Athena by a detail from the Puller. This was a sad thing to see, sadder than struggle, sadder than blood. It disappeared below. Josephson’s body was placed inside it and the flag draped over it. Six of Athena’s crew in dress uniform carried it slowly to the brow and set it on deck. After a long silence, Rensselaer spoke a few words. “Our shipmates Speight and Josephson are no longer with us—Speight committed to the deep, lost except to God. And Josephson, who will go home. Neither of these men is unique in death. They are still very much like us, and we are like them: it’s only a matter of time—however long, however short. If upon gazing at this coffin you feel a gulf between you, the living, and him, one of the dead, remember that our fates are the same, and he isn’t as far from us as we may imagine. “At times like this I question our profession. I question the enterprise of war. And then I go on, as we shall, and as we must. In this spirit we bid goodbye to Ensign Josephson, to whom you might have been brothers, and I and the chiefs, perhaps, fathers. May God bless and keep him.” Then the captain read the 23rd Psalm, a salute was fired, and Josephson’s coffin was lifted to the shoulders of its bearers and slowly carried into the depths of the Puller. When he died, he was very young.

Her eyes were closed so tightly that you could see her long-curled eyelashes pointed skyward, in her baby blue coffin. She was an angel to look at even at that moment. I knew that she was looking over all of us! In addition to that, she was most likely looking at him and holding his hands with her spiritual touch, I could just feel it. He said that he felt the breeze of her presents. He was crying hysterically from his hazel almost jade green eyes! I remember he said that he was secretly in love with Jaylynn back to when she was a little girl. That he never got the chance to say that to her in person. I remember him placing one pink daisy in her box on top of her small, yet perky upward-facing breasts next to her motionless heart; with the bloom under her chin and her slight smile. Along with that, then he slid an engraved promise ring on her finger as well; at that moment… one of his teardrops fell from his eyes on her petite hand, as he was holding it… not wanting to ever let go of her. That is love… if I ever did see it. Greg also whispered to me, that he never even got to kiss her as he always hoped to do, and that she was everything that he was looking for in a girl. Furthermore, he would never look for anyone else. That she was the one, and the only! The only thing I could say was; I thank you and follow your heart, and she will be watching over you. Then he walked away… I never saw him again after that. You know I don't even know his last name. Still, I will always remember his face, and the look that was upon it that day, he was devastated. So, someone did care about her, someone truly loved her, and adored her, and it was taken away from him too. Why! Why oh God, why? Why didn’t she see this when she was alive? ‘Why is a question that has no answers, only just more unanswered questions?

Green-Wood Cemetery was an expanse of nearly five-hundred acres, and Jesse wandered under portentous clouds for nearly an hour before heading to the office for proper directions. Trudging through Lot 106 with a visitors’ map in his trembling hands, Jesse wondered whether things might have been easier had graveyards been organized in a similar way to comic book collections. He imagined that if the dead could be slid into coffins of polypropylene storage bags with acid free backing boards, and then filed alphabetically first and numerically second into corrugated cardboard or plastic boxes, finding the appropriate marker would be a much easier task.

Panic is a coffin nail,” was a saying Rothar had heard often as a youth in the wild, and presently, Harwin was supplying enough nails to seal all of Witherington in their boxes.

What was the pastor’s most profound regret in life? They carry the wooden box across the graveyard. It’s the weight of regrets that weighs a coffin down. And I hear the answer of the pastor ring. Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing…. Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.

She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.

They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next. After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita's remains as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair, and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of the legs ans arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognizable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita's calcined skeleton. As the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn. "Rob couldn't handle it at all," Nigel said. "He thought we were monsters even to think of it. But perhaps it's because we were the parents, and she was our daughter... It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn't feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita." Nigel, Annette and Sam picked up the bigger bones and placed them in the urn with the ashes. The bigger pieces of the skull went on the top.

He didn’t know how he got in the box.  Everything was foggy and numb like the bad end of a heavy dose.  He tried to blink himself clear, but couldn’t focus his mind.  This wasn’t heroin. He knew the difference.  His throat folded over on itself as he tried to swallow. When was the last time he drank something? When was the last time he remembered doing anything? And why the hell was he in a box? His hands were bound and he could feel the roughly cut end of a zip-tie digging into the skin on his leg where his wrists had been resting.  It felt like wood under his fingernails in the dark and he could feel the corners around him — he was hunched over, his knees to his chest. There were air holes the size of his fingers drilled through the plywood. He remembered the feeling of the layers from that time he’d been made to help his dad build that bookcase that fit in the nook under the stairs.  Mum had wanted to have one made, but dad had said it was way too expensive, and that he would build one — with Ollie’s help.  Why the hell was he in this box?  His arm was itching, the track marks enraged and fresh.  Ollie kicked out, his bare heels catching splinters as he thumped against the sides, listening to the noise ring in the room around him. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything except his own heart in his ears. He could smell fresh sawdust, damp earth, something sharp and synthetic, like bleach, and his own breath, hot against his cheeks as he pressed his eye to the hole above him. He tried to calm himself, replaying the last things he remembered over and over in his head. It was all fog. There were streets, people he knew but whose faces he couldn’t see, then there was someone he didn’t recognise, someone alien to him, and then nothing.  His fingers traced the seams, looking for a gap. There wasn’t one.  Tears burned hot on his face, his eyes stinging in the dust.  He kept searching, the rough skin under his chewed nails discovering the hard protrusion of an angled nail. The tip was sticking out through the wood on his right side — hammered through the lid at an odd angle. God, how couldn’t he remember being nailed inside a damn coffin?  He pulled at it, hands still bound, and felt his fingernails pull back.  He wept more, digging into the wood around it, focused solely on it. The only weak point in the box. His only chance. There was no one else around and he had to escape. That was all he knew.

(Which was probably just an empty casing. Probably.) Mellie stood next to him, supervising. When she saw us, she waved and gave us a sad smile, but she pointed toward the plane, where Piper stood at the base of the steps, talking with the pilot. In her hands, Piper held something large and flat—a display board. She had a couple of books under her arm, too. To her right, near the tail of the aircraft, the luggage compartment stood open. Ground-crew members were carefully strapping down a large wooden box with brass fixtures. A coffin. As Meg and I walked up, the captain shook Piper’s hand. His face was tight with

Bing Crosby is said to have told a story about one of his sons at the age of six or so who was inconsolable when his pet turtle died. To distract the boy, Bing suggested that they have a funeral, and his son, seeming only slightly consoled, agreed. The two took a cigar box, lined it carefully with silk, painted the outside black, and then dug a hole in the back yard. Bing carefully lowered the “coffin” into the grave, said a long, heartfelt prayer, and sang a hymn. At the end of the service, the boy’s eyes were shining with sorrow and excitement. Then Bing asked if he would like to have one last look at his pet before they covered the coffin with earth. The boy said he would, and Bing raised the cigar-box lid. The two gazed down reverently, and suddenly the turtle moved. The boy stared at it for a long time, then looked up at his father and said, “Let’s kill it.”15

I Ask That I Do Not Die —but if I do I want an open coffin I am an American poet and therefore open for business Owls peck the windows of the 21st century as if looking for the board members of Exxon Mobil who who who who who Listen my beloved nothings your seriousness will kill you! But before you die my doctors have prescribed happiness God is a warm brick or a claw or the silence that survives empires An old woman in the rain with a pot of mushroom soup is one of God’s disguises. Her dog lifts its leg another one of God’s shenanigans and pushes its nose into morning’s ribcage I point my hand God this and God that and when God has nothing I still have my hairy hand for a pillow Put me in an open box so when God reaches inside my holes I can still see how a taxi makes a city more a city slippers on my feet, and only half covered by a sheet, in a yellow taxi so as not to seem laid out in state but in transit

Aha!” He turned to her, holding up a small wooden box. “I knew it,” he said, almost savagely. “There’s a false bottom in the coffin, under the lining. Where else would my mother hide something than with her most precious possession?” “You were not her possession,” Lucie said. “You never belonged to her.” “That’s not what she believed.

But my arms don’t move. Tears don’t come. I stand still as a statue, freezing because I forgot my jacket, staring at the coffin. Wondering how someone who filled up a room could fit into a box so small.

The lantern held aloft; brief flashes of our surroundings were all we were privy to. The masses of bones were brown now, jaws collapsed mid-scream and crammed into boxes three at a time. Wooden coffins crumbled effortlessly to time, exposing ancient, dusty remains, some crushed by metal plate armour. They nested bugs and creatures that need never know the light of day, that probed in the darkest reaches of the world, far away from human sights and sensibilities. The loose stone floor was looser than ever, the path narrower, threatening to roll ankles and cast curious wanderers into a pit of forgotten despair. Everything felt tighter around me as if the walls of skulls were closing in, but also supernaturally colder. ~ Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, The Ripper Lives, Into the Black (4/10)

Here's the box Pandora held and the bottles the genies were released from; they look like prisons and coffins now. People die in this war, but the ideas cannot be erased.

Sir, they're here to take Mr. Vice President. I'm clearing out the room to give you a moment alone. They won't wait long," a younger sounding guard said. Kane never saw him. The man spoke from behind Kane's back, and then immediately turned and left the room again, drawing the doors closed behind him with a soft click. Kane stared at the casket. This was it, his last time with Avery. He stood; his tired gritty eyes roamed the top of the closed mahogany box. He wished he had one last look at Avery before they took him away. Kane placed both hands on top of the coffin, his eyes filled with tears. Tears that just wouldn't stop flowing. He leaned in, placing his forehead close to where he thought Avery's would be, and he softly whispered, hoping Avery could hear his words, "I have to leave you now. I know you would fight this, but you have to do this part alone. They have so much planned to honor you today. It's exactly the way you would have wanted it. It's what you deserve…" Kane closed his eyes tighter, saying goodbye to Avery was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do. He took a deep breath, trying to get through everything he wanted to say. "I love you, Avery. Always. You completed my life. You made me whole, gave me hope, made me a better man. For me, you were everything right in my life. And I know you're in heaven smiling down on us. You're too good a man to be kept out because of me. I know you have to be one of God's special angels. I know you're there, and I'm happy for you. I just miss you so much already. I'm trying to pull myself together here, but I'm failing, and I'm sorry. I'm just lost without you.

Daddy, they need to take the casket." Robert's voice came from somewhere behind him. "I love you, baby. Forever and always." Kane pressed his lips against the top of the casket, his tears falling freely on the polished mahogany box. This was it, they were taking Avery. It felt so wrong to leave his side, so final. How would he find the strength to go on without him? Kane kissed the coffin again before he forced himself away. Robert materialized beside him, handing him a handkerchief—one of Avery's—and he cried a little harder when the scent of his favorite cologne wafted from the soft fabric. Kane stood, watching the guards, Robert's arm wrapped around his shoulders, holding him up, as Avery was taken from the room. Kane followed closely behind the casket, waiting until they loaded Avery inside the hearse to transport him to the funeral events of the day.

four men carrying a large box, like an oversize coffin with long handles sticking out at both ends. The box was covered with a black shroud and looked big enough for at least two bodies. The four men wore only kilts and sandals. Their coppery skin glinted in the sun as if made of metal.

because she had no clue how to cope with the present or the future. ‘He lived in a fantasy world at times ‒ “always looking for excitement”, I used to say. More exciting things than we could give him. No surprise to me that he became a policeman.’ She managed a laugh. ‘He could be a little fibber, though. For the first two weeks he was with you, he told us he’d got shift work in a local pub.’ Penny could see that Maggie had taken this the wrong way. ‘Oh – he was never ashamed of you! He wanted to keep you all to himself, Maggie. That’s what it was . . . Look at him now. My beautiful boy walking beside my beautiful man one last time.’ Music began to play from inside the chapel and Penny’s grip on Maggie’s arm tightened. The five burly men and Ridley stepped up to the back doors of the hearse and formed two lines of three, opposite each other. The funeral director pulled the coffin far enough out for everyone to take up position on either side. Manoeuvring the weighty box up onto everyone’s shoulders was a jittery affair, but they all soon settled. The funeral director then led the way inside. Jack walked directly behind his dad. It took twenty minutes for everyone to file into the crematorium and find their seats.

Vietnamese men, women, and children were dying, starving, being shot, bombed, burned, and napalmed. American soldiers were being shipped home in boxes, coffins, and bags. And the U.S. government was paying an Upper West Side Freudian analyst to explain that the Vietnamese, as a people, had Oedipal issues.

The bold colors of the American flag stood out over her husband’s coffin. Colors of honor. Colors of freedom. Colors of sacrifice. She’d never thought they’d be the colors of death.

We couldn’t stop following the news. Every ten seconds we refreshed our browsers and gawked at the headlines. Dully we read blogs of friends of friends of friends who had started an organic farm out on the Wichita River. They were out there pickling and canning and brewing things in the goodness of nature. And soon we’d worry it was time for us to leave the city and go. Go! To Uruguay or Morocco or Connecticut? To the Plains or the Mountains or the Bay? But we’d bide our time and after some months or years, our farmer friends would give up the farm and begin studying for the LSATs. We felt lousy about this, and wonderful. We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us— or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came— somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone. Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wodnered how they managed it. Did they work form home?Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always. But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections— if we were all slowly dying — then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.

Я знаю силу слов я знаю слов набат Они не те которым рукоплещут ложи От слов таких срываются гроба шагать четверкою своих дубовых ножек. I know the sway of words, I know their warnings They’re not those applauded from the boxes From words such as these coffins break free Striding forth on their four oaken legs.

Dax shuffled to the next photos. They’d been taken off-scene: the inside lid of the box had claw marks on it, showing how desperately the woman had fought for her life, the inside of the coffin, the picture taken after the woman’s body had been removed, showing body-fluid stains and an empty water bottle.

When you're in a coffin it's hard to think out of the box. Jack Taylor

Jesse was moaning in her sleep. She was a delicate woman of thirty-five with long curly red hair. She lay deep in a shapeless feather mattress, cradled in a wooden bed which hung from the ceiling on four rusted chains. Somewhere in the big rambling house a clock chimed. She must wake up. Two hours until the Vampire Lestat’s concert. But she could not leave the twins now. This was new to her, this part unfolding so rapidly, and the dream was maddeningly dim as all the dreams of the twins had been. Yet she knew the twins were in the desert kingdom again. The mob surrounding the twins was dangerous. And the twins, how different they looked, how pale. Maybe it was an illusion, this phospherescent luster, but they appeared to glow in the semidarkness, and their movements were languid, almost as if they were caught in the rhythm of a dance. Torches were thrust at them as they embraced one another; but look, something was wrong, very wrong. One of them was now blind. Her eyelids were shut tight, the tender flesh wrinkled and sunken. Yes, they have plucked out her eyes. And the other one, why she make those terrible sounds? “Be still, don’t fight anymore,” said the blind one, in the ancient language which was always understandable in the dreams. And out of the other win came a horrid, gutteral moaning. She couldn’t speak. They’d cut out her tongue! I don’t want to see any more, I want to wake up. But the soldiers were pushing their way through the crowd, something dreadful was to happen, and the twins became suddenly very still. The soldiers took hold of them, dragged them apart. Don’t separate them! Don’t you know what this means to them? Get the torches away. Don’t set them on fire! Don’t burn their red hair. The blind twin reached out for her sister, screaming her name: “Mekare!” And Mekare, the mute one, who could not answer, roared like a wounded beast. The crowd was parting, making way for two immense stone coffins, each carried in a great heavy bier. Crude these sarcophagi, yet the lids had the roughened shape of human faces, limbs. What have the twins done to be put in these coffins? I can’t stand it, the biers being set down, the twins dragged towards the coffins, the crude stone lids being lifted. Don’t do it! The blind one is fighting as if she can see it, yet they are overpowering her, lifting her and putting her inside the stone box. In mute terror, Mekare is watching, though she herself is being dragged to the bier. Don’t lower the lid, or I will scream for Mekare! For both of them- Jesse sat up, her eyes opened. She had screamed. Alone in the house, with no one to hear her, she’d screamed and she could feel the echo still. Then nothing but the quiet settling around her, and the faint creaking of the bed as it moved on its chains. The song of the birds outside in the forest, the deep forest; and her own curious awareness that the clock had struck six.

The Panther and Tiger engines were of a similar design: a motor unit encased in a solid armoured steel box, with the radiators in separate steel boxes on either side. This was intended to give protection from water if the panzer had to ford a river, because few bridges could take the forty-eight tonne weight of the Panther or the almost seventy tonnes of the King Tiger. But this protective design caused the motor unit to overheat easily in its steel coffin, and engine fires were a common problem.

If you don't start thinking outside the box, it may eventually become your coffin.

I go home, empty out three large cardboard boxes and stick them together so they make a long thin coffin shape. I lie in the coffin – in the middle of the living room – every day. And every day, I draw a blanket closer and closer to my face, until by the third day I can stand it covering my face for five minutes. When I can lie in the box for half an hour, I go back and have the MRI. This time I’m fine. Some things you just can’t do without practice.

Got orders from headquarters. They makin' coffins fuh all de white folks. 'Tain't nothin' but cheap pine, but dat's better'n nothin'. Don't dump no white folks in de hole jus' so." "Whut tuh do 'bout de colored folks? Got boxes fuh dem too? “Nope. They cain't find enough of 'em tuh go 'round. Jus' sprinkle plenty quick-lime over 'em and cover 'em up." "Shucks! Nobody can't tell nothin' 'bout some uh dese bodies, de shape dey's in. Can't tell whether dey's white or black." The guards had a long conference over that. After a while they came back and told the men, "Look at they hair, when you cain't tell no other way. And don't lemme ketch none uh y'all dumpin' white folks, and don't be wastin' no boxes on colored. They's too hard tuh git holt of right now." "They's mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment," Tea Cake observed to the man working next to him. "Look lak dey think God don't know nothin' 'bout de Jim Crow law.