I am a ballot box. I was made of grey steel in a workshop on the edge of the capital, and I was very proud of my slot.
The slot is the most important part of a ballot box. It is narrow, so only one voice at a time can come in. It is smooth, so no voice is torn on its way inside. Before my first election, the workshop foreman ran his thumb along it and said, “Good. Honest.” I have thought about that word every day since.
On election morning they carried me to a primary school in a small town and set me on a table in a classroom that smelled of chalk and orange peel. Above me hung a hand-drawn map of the world, with a few countries coloured in by children who had clearly lost patience halfway through. Two officials sat beside me with lists and ink and flasks of tea. A police officer sat by the door and pretended to read a newspaper.
Then the people came.
I cannot describe what it is like to be filled with votes. It is like being filled with weather. Every paper that slides through the slot carries a little of the person who folded it — their hope, their doubt, the way their hand trembled or didn’t. An old farmer folded his vote four times, very small, as if it were a secret letter. A young woman pushed hers in with a kind of fierce delight, the way you might post a love letter you’ve been afraid to send. A man in a suit dropped his in without looking, already checking his phone. A grandmother stood in front of me for a whole minute, holding hers, whispering something I couldn’t hear, before she let it go.
By evening I was heavy and warm. I had seven hundred and twelve voices inside me, all talking at once, in that rustling paper language only boxes understand. I couldn’t wait to be opened. That is what we are for. Everyone thinks a ballot box’s job is to hold votes. It isn’t. Our job is to let them out — all at once, in the light, in front of witnesses — so they can be counted and become a single sentence that a whole country says together.
At seven o’clock the officials sealed my slot with red wax and a paper strip signed by three people. The police officer folded his newspaper. A truck came. I was lifted into the back with nine other boxes, all of us full and humming, and we drove through the dark toward the counting centre.
We never got there.
The truck stopped at a warehouse. Men I didn’t know carried us inside and stacked us against a wall behind crates of something marked AGRICULTURAL SUPPLIES. Then they turned off the lights.
“What’s happening?” whispered the box beside me. She was from a fishing village; her votes smelled faintly of salt.
“Maybe they’re counting the others first,” I said.
Through the high window, the warehouse guard’s small television flickered. And there, at nine o’clock — two hours before the counting was supposed to finish, before anyone had opened a single box anywhere — the results were announced. The Leader had won. A great victory. The people had spoken with one voice.
The fishing-village box was quiet for a long time.
“But they haven’t heard us yet,” she said.
I have been in this warehouse for three years now. I know this because the guard marks the days on a calendar with pictures of mountains, and he has finished three of them. Rats live under the crates. They are polite. Sometimes, when it rains, water drips through the roof onto my lid, and I feel the votes inside shiver.
They still talk, you know. Seven hundred and twelve voices, folded, waiting. The farmer’s tiny secret letter. The young woman’s love letter. The grandmother’s whisper, which I still cannot quite hear. They don’t fade. That is the thing nobody tells you about votes. You can lock them up, but you can’t make them change their minds.
Every so often the guard comes and sits near us and eats his lunch. He is a young man with a scar on his chin. One day he put his hand flat on my lid, the way you’d touch the flank of a horse, and said quietly, “I voted too, you know. Back home.” Then he looked around, as if someone might have heard, and went back to his chair.
I think about him a lot.
I think about the workshop foreman and his thumb on my slot. Good. Honest.
I don’t know if anyone will ever break my seal. Perhaps one day a new government will find us, or a curious journalist, or a child playing where she shouldn’t. Perhaps the warehouse will burn and our voices will go up as smoke, which would at least be a kind of being heard.
But I am a ballot box, and ballot boxes are patient. We are made to hold things until the right moment. And I have noticed that the guard has started leaving the side door unlocked when he goes for his tea.
Yesterday, he left it open for an hour.
Today, I could swear I heard footsteps.
