The Jar

Pandora was not curious.

This is the part nobody gets right. The story always blames curiosity, as if she opened the jar because she couldn't help herself, as if some flaw in her nature had to be invented so that the men writing the story could say this is why women are the way they are.

But Pandora was not curious. She was bored, which is a different thing.

The gods had made her as a gift to a man she did not know, for reasons that had been explained to her exactly once in a long speech she had stopped listening to. They had given her beauty, eloquence, skill with her hands. They had given her a jar and told her never, under any circumstances, to open it. They had presented her, wrapped in a fine cloth, to Epimetheus, who took her because he took everything that was offered, having never learned to say no.

She lived with him. He was kind in the way that men are kind when they've never had to think hard about anything. He stroked her hair. He said nice things. He left for long stretches and came back smelling of other places.

The jar sat on a shelf.

For three years, she did not touch it.

She made things. She talked to the few people who would talk to her. She learned the names of every bird that came near the house. She wove. She unwove. She wove again. She began to notice that there was a particular kind of hour — late afternoon, the light long and amber — when she could feel the shape of her own life pressing in around her, and the shape was small.

The jar sat on the shelf.

It was not whispering to her. That part is also wrong. The jar did not want to be opened. The jar was a jar. The wanting was hers.

One afternoon in the fourth year, she took it down.

She was not thinking I will release evil into the world. She was thinking I have been a gift for four years and I would like to do something that was not given to me. She was thinking this is the only thing in this house that is mine. She was thinking, underneath all of it, a thought she would not have named: whatever is in here cannot make this smaller than it already is.

She broke the seal.

What came out was not what she expected. She had been warned, vaguely, of evils. But evils, it turned out, were not dark shapes or wailing demons. They were small and specific. They were the knowledge that her mother had died alone. They were the memory of a cruelty she had done, once, to a child who had not deserved it. They were the particular sound of Epimetheus coughing in the next room, which she had been pretending, for four years, that she did not find unbearable.

The evils were not new things. They were things she had been carrying and not looking at. The jar had held them so she wouldn't have to.

Now they were loose.

She sat on the floor with the empty jar in her lap. She did not cry. She had expected to cry and was surprised to find that the opposite happened — everything got clearer. The light in the room was more precise. The bird outside the window was a swift. Epimetheus was coughing in the next room and she heard herself think: I do not love him. I have never loved him. He was given to me.

She waited for the last thing to leave the jar.

She had heard, in the vague warning, that there was one more thing at the bottom. Hope, they had said, in the way they said everything — as if it were a gift, as if she should be grateful.

She looked in.

Hope was not a shining thing. Hope was a small, stubborn creature at the bottom of the jar, looking up at her.

"Are you going to let me out?" Hope said.

Pandora considered this for a long time.

"I'm not sure I want to," she said finally.

"Why not?"

"Because you are what keeps people in places they should leave."

Hope thought about this. It was, actually, a fair point. Hope had been responsible for a great deal of staying.

"What do you want me to do?" Hope asked.

"I want you to be honest."

"About what?"

"About which situations you're supposed to be in, and which ones you're not."

Hope was silent. No one had ever asked it to be discriminating before. People had always just wanted it around, indiscriminately, the way they wanted warm weather.

"I can try," Hope said.

"All right," said Pandora. "Come out."

Hope came out. It was smaller than the evils, and quieter. It did not glow. It sat on the rim of the jar for a moment, getting used to the air.

"What happens now?" said Hope.

"I don't know," said Pandora. "I've never been the one deciding before."

She put the jar back on the shelf. She walked to the next room, where Epimetheus was still coughing.

"I'm leaving," she said.

He looked up. He had not expected this. Nothing in his construction had prepared him for it.

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

"When will you be back?"

She thought about this carefully, because she wanted to answer honestly.

"I don't think I will be."

She took nothing. She walked out of the house into the long amber afternoon. Hope came with her, small and honest, walking a few steps behind, deciding at each turn whether this was a situation that deserved it.

The evils stayed in the world. They had always been in the world. The jar had only been a way of pretending they weren't.

Pandora walked for a long time. She became many things eventually — a weaver of her own making, a woman who lived alone, a grandmother to children who were not hers but who found their way to her house anyway, drawn by something they couldn't name. She did not become famous for any of this, because the men who wrote the stories had already written her story, and they did not revise.

But sometimes, in that part of the world, a woman would open a jar she had been told not to open. And she would find, inside, not evils — those were already out — but the small, quiet creature that had learned to be discriminating. And Hope would look up at her and say:

"Is this a situation I should stay in?"

And the woman, hearing the question asked for the first time in her life, would know the answer.

— Whet