The man watches the man who lives in the box through a hole that the man drilled with a steak knife, stabbed into the box and twisted so that the shredded cardboard rained down on the man, in the apartment he had made of his box. The cardboard littered the man’s living room, and could he have had a say in the hole’s placement, he would have chosen above the bed. For though he had just the one room–the box–he considered the place where he’d placed his bed his bedroom, and there he’d left the box’s cardboard flooring bare, so that it was not unlike hardwood flooring in a normal house, and sweeping up the shredded cardboard would have been a simple chore, but not here over the man’s rug where he would’ve prerfered to use a vacuum though a vacuum he had not. The man often watched the man in the box at times of exhausted solitude, say, after a full day’s work. And there the man pondered that he too could be a man in the much bigger box of his apartment. And though the man might not be aware of who might be looking, there were plenty of holes in the box of the man’s apartment. The man in the box meantime had changed into his exercise clothing (after picking up as much of the shredded cardboard as he could) and now he crunched crunches for there was little else to do for a man in a box with no cable television. The man also owned no television and instead watched the man in the box, and as he watched the man in his exercises, the man thought that there must be many boxes, multitudes of them, housed one inside the other, and an infinity of exponentially-growing men, so that even the planet itself fit inside a box, and the enormous man who watched it watched it thicken with life, verdant and sex-smelly, and it crusted and smogged, and all the boxes and all the men suffocated on each other, and they died, and this sole remaining man, this enormous one, took the box that had housed his world and set it afire for all that box had housed had gone putrid with decay.
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