The Magic Box

There was once a young carpenter who aspired to be among the best at his work.

He spent his mornings and evenings crafting and churning without any rest.

What had once taken him months of effort now took him only weeks.

He had found his craft and his way.

The final product never mattered; in spite of the calluses and abrasions his hands had accumulated, it was the euphoria of building that gave him such joy.

The demand for his work became high, and rise to the demand he did, chipping away at projects long into every night.

One day he stumbled upon a fairly large box.

It was quite the austere wooden box, hollow and strange.

Inside it was a letter with a cryptic phrase:

"Ask and you shall receive. What is enclosed shall be turned into what you desire."

For a while he paused and contemplated what it could mean.

He took the curious box back to his garage with him and put it off to the side, forgetting about it almost overnight.

Just before he tucked in for the night, he put away some unfinished works inside the box for safekeeping, making some use of this strange box he had come upon.

Weeks went by as he continued to churn out his product for his customers, but his work began to falter as he realized time was no longer his friend and his hours of sleep were a nonrenewable resource he could no longer exhaust.

Defeated, he sat in his garage staring at the mysterious box from weeks before and opened it to find something so shocking he could hardly believe it.

His unfinished projects from before were somehow fully carved, sculpted, and finished to perfection.

An unfamiliar touch had seemingly been applied to each and every piece, and while it was stylistically incongruent with his own work, it was remarkable all the same.

Perplexed, he took out the newly minted works, and the craziest thought entered his mind: to once again place some of his unfinished works inside the box to see if something magical could happen again.

Inside the box he placed the unfinished swan he had been carving for his neighbor's daughter, along with the delicate set of seven turtles he owed another customer.

He went to sleep, eager to check the box the following morning.

Morning came and he checked the box, and to his disappointment, nothing had happened.

The carpenter criticized himself for being so foolish and slammed the box shut, frustrated that he had deluded himself into thinking such absurd things, and he went back to work.

He worked until noon on some of his other projects, and realized he had a hard deadline on the swan he owed his neighbor, which was now well over a week late.

With a heavy sigh, he stopped his current work and went back to open the box, and to his complete astonishment, the swan and the turtles had been miraculously finished.

Sculpted into an almost uncanny replica of a mute swan, the work had a level of detail and symmetry he could hardly believe.

Excited, he rushed down the street to deliver the work to his neighbor, who was thoroughly satisfied and in awe of what the young carpenter had achieved.

"No wonder you took so long. This is just about the greatest piece of woodworking I've ever seen in my life. You have an exceptional talent, my young boy," he said with the wide grin of a father proud to give his daughter a thoughtful gift.

Customers came in droves, and the carpenter began to exploit his magical box to its fullest potential.

Long gone were the days in which he would collect splinters and dust in his eyes from dawn until dusk; now he would just idly wait for the box to do its work.

One odd thing about the box was that its produced works had no consistent sense of style. Almost everything was disparate in its aesthetic, bearing no commonality to the box's other works.

The time it took varied greatly too; sometimes it would produce results immediately, and other times it would take a few days, even longer than he might have managed if he had put his own mind to it.

He grew accustomed to his new way of working: he would walk around his backyard and do chores in the house, periodically checking the box for results and refilling it with materials as needed.

Initially he would put his unfinished projects in there, but he began to regress to putting in raw materials, just the wood, as he realized the prowess of the box was such that it intuitively knew what he needed it to make each time.

His hands became soft as he stopped doing any real work on the finished products, and his business started to boom as people raved about his work.

Quickly, he became the talk of the town and very materially wealthy as his business flourished.

Yet the mornings and evenings started to fly by, and he could no longer feel any of the joy he got from selling to new customers.

People would rave about his work and the words wouldn't land at all for him.

He started his own family, and even their words of affection and praise meant nothing to him, because deep down he felt a hole that could not quite be filled by the fruits of his labor.

One evening he decided to take out his old tools and try to make a swan for his daughter, who had begged him for a lamp with a mute swan as its centerpiece.

His initial temptation was to consult his box as he usually did, but this time he felt such a visceral revulsion to it that he decided he ought to do it himself for once.

It was hard.

His hands bled as his aged, softened palms dragged against the abrasive wood, and splinters caught under his skin as chips came off with every stroke of the saw.

He worked inefficiently, tirelessly, forgetting all the basics and style he once had, from dawn until dusk, and the final product, to him... was disappointing.

It was disfigured and asymmetrical, lacking in ways that would shock even an amateur carpenter.

Frustrated, he quickly gave in to his worst instincts and put the bird into the box, as it was now his daughter's birthday and he had to deliver like he always did.

For hours he waited for the box to deliver, but deliver it did not.

His unpolished and shoddy work remained unchanged as he impatiently opened and closed the box, hoping for the best.

His emotions got the best of him, and he began to cry as he wondered about all the years he had lost to this unadorned box sitting in front of him.

He could no longer recall the days in which his capabilities as a carpenter were his main way to express himself, and here he sat, powerless and at the mercy of something so insultingly plain and unaesthetic that he wondered how he could ever have given up his own gifts and talents in pursuit of such vanity.

Tears rolled down his face, and he lay in the fetal position for hours on end as it felt like his world was crumbling and everything was coming to an end.

He woke up to the joy and happy screams of his daughter hugging her mother as she ran around with an object in her hand.

With a sense of terror he looked to the box and found it open and empty for all to see, and he hoped that the box had done its magic one last time to make his daughter happy.

She ran up to hug him.

As she got close enough that he could see the swan in her hands, he saw his original creation, untouched and unkempt, just as it was when he last placed it there, but he also saw the smile on his wife's face.

He had never lost his touch.