The Box

To the condemned it begins with the distant scent of lavender flower.

The old writer lay dying amongst his three daughters, his remaining words decrypted and born into soft leather notebooks. Within the box, his failing fingers curled over the surfaces of accidental objects. They continued their undertaking into the night, three different versions in three different languages, the cyphers manifesting themselves like blood through a tourniquet. Death is precursed by warnings they say. The soon to be deceased can discern the heady sweetness of orange fruit, the pungent calling of jasmine or the finality of burning bread. The book is his last. A brilliant discourse on texture and grain. His eyes and ears now dead organs within a fading body, he could only mark the transience of fragrance and the tonal geographies under his decaying fingertips. However, unknown to him, his wishes were not those of his daughters. What was to be a final conquest over adversity and a rapture of the human spirit, by others' design, was to become irrevocably twisted and reconfigured into its opposite.

Three daughters. Three adversaries. Three translations. Three death kits.

Centuries pass and the box is found. Against the wishes of many it is finally placed in the vaults of a museum after demands for its immediate destruction. It was rumoured that before death, those who opened the box forfeited the use of their eyes, their ears and sanity, save only to suffer the myriad textures birthing beneath their dying fingertips and the faint calling of lavender flower.