FLASH FICTION
Short story about a couple who drown in their own belongings and escape into a white cube that becomes their final resting place.
The White Cube
They bought a large house once, back when the children were small and the furniture was smaller. Life filled the rooms quickly — inheritance, gifts, memories, things too sentimental to throw away. The piles grew quietly at first, then loudly, then everywhere. When the children left, the piles stayed. They multiplied. They learned to move around them like furniture.
When the house filled, the garden took the overflow. When the garden filled, the shed became the last frontier — a huge shed with running water and electricity, a blank space begging to be filled. And so they filled it too.
Visitors stopped coming. The children didn’t return. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to stand, nowhere to breathe. The house pressed against its own walls.
One day, exhausted by the weight of it all, one of them said, “Let’s take the bed and a few pots and pans.”
So they emptied the shed — the only space left untouched — and painted it white. A cube. A studio. A room with one bed, one plate each, one fire. They named it Never Never because it felt like a place outside time.
The garden grew wild around them, swallowing the shed in green. The house behind them sagged under fifty years of accumulation, bursting at the seams, collapsing under its own history. Neighbours forgot the couple who once lived there. No one thought to check the white cube hidden in the overgrowth.
Inside, the couple lived lightly — empty shelves, empty air, empty space. They could have been anywhere in the world. They were finally free of the weight of their belongings, free of the mansion that had become a burden, free of the clutter that had pushed them out of their own lives.
Eventually the garden consumed the shed too.
The house rotted into itself.
And the white cube — their sanctuary, their escape —
became a coffin for two.
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