Creative Non-fiction By MaxieJane Frazier
Blindfolded. Hands laced on top of my head. Squatting on my heels. I wait.
“Move ahead.” The low voice commands.
I waddle in my combat boots and green utility uniform, elbows flapping like wings. The rumors are true, then. We duck walk ourselves into the side of a wooden box. How small?
“Make yourself big, hit your head on the way in,” a junior advised us before the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape summer program began for us Air Force Academy rising sophomores. “They adjust the box. You want to be as large as possible, so you have some room when they shut it.”
My fingers scrape on the underside of the box top. I bang my head harder. It’s so small. Too small.
One side of the box presses in, clicks shut. I’m squatted so deep my knees are beside my ears. My muscles strain to straighten. I’ve been in the “hot box” for 10 seconds, give or take a few seconds. Panic flutters, wingbeats in my chest. How can I do this?
I gulp at air, unable to expand my chest, then force the partial breath in a hiss through my pursed lips. You are not suffocating. You are not suffocating.
Around me, panicked voices rise and fall muffled inside other boxes. The words aren’t clear, but I take a cruel comfort in knowing I’m freaking out less than at least one person.
Though this training is a secret, we know things like there is an adjustable box and we have to control our breathing.
No one knows for how long.
“It’s at least an hour,” one junior said.
Another laughed, “It’s fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.”
The common denominator? It’s too long.
I’m afraid to move my arms. Afraid to learn they can’t move from the top of my head. Afraid that my body will become its own wild thing when it learns just how trapped we are.
Fingers tingling, I breathe in my own sour fear laced with the stench of three unshowered days here in the training camp. What did you do for your college summer break? I cut off the bit of hysterical laughter bubbling up. Keep it together. Another breath, in through my nose this time. My lungs cannot fully expand, my own body and clothes a corset. I can’t breathe, I can’t . . .
Voices outside. Someone is banging, yelling.
Voice inside me, distinct and firm: It’s training. Controlled. Death is— the voice falters for a second, surely aware that the “enemy” is upperclass cadets barely trained to play their own roles, Death is unlikely. How many trained sergeants ensure our safety?
“I can’t breathe!” The voice shrieks, maybe sobs. Disembodied terror.
No one lets them out.
Something new rises in me, invisible and strong. It presses down on the feathery panic.
I start at one hundred and count backward. Too easy. I’m at zero in too few seconds. Maybe another language? French will slow me down.
Cent. Quatre-vingt dix-neuf. Quatre-vingt dix-huit.
Somewhere around soixante-huit, the year I was born, I drift off to sleep. Curled tight, pressed in by the wooden sides, the strong thing inside me pushes back. No longer in a straitjacket, I’m a chrysalis in a cocoon.
When they unhinge the side and let me unfold into cold air, I’m wishing for just five more minutes of safety and quiet. My wet wings unfold from the cocoon. Strong, but not flight ready. My brilliant new colors hide in plain sight.
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MaxieJane Frazier wrangles a stubborn pen from the rural reaches of the American west. Her work is published or forthcoming in Waxwing, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, Cleaver Magazine, Booth, Collateral Journal, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology, and elsewhere. MaxieJane holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and founded Mighty Mule Editing. Learn more at maxiejanefrazier.com