For my inheritance, I recieved a single Rubik's cube
A short story by Kajetan Kwiatkowski
No one wanted my uncle's gimmick heirloom.
It was some puzzle artifact passed down through my mom’s side for generations, wrapped in cryptic, superstitious lore — but at the end of the day, it still looked like a plastic toy.
Instead of inheriting any property or money like the rest of my family when my uncle passed, I drew the short straw … and I was bequeathed this piece of junk.
It looked like a typical Rubik’s cube.
For my bright young nephew. Keep dazzling us.
—Your Uncle Ike
It was a really mean-spirited note too. Like really mean-spirited.
You see, I dropped out of my engineering degree some twenty-odd years ago, and have since lived at home with my parents where I’ve barely worked a day in my life.
Everyone makes fun of me for it, and yes, you can judge me all you want (I really don’t care) but the fact that my uncle, in his last will and testament, decided to take a fucking jab at my socially stigmatized manboyhood felt like a really really low blow.
And so I decided to get back at him.
I visited the cemetery and left the stupid heirloom toy on his grave with my own note.
At least I’m not dead, bitch.
—Your Nephew Wallace.
I wasn’t going to let my dead uncle call me out as a loser. Just who did he think he was?
I spat on his tombstone before I left.
***
When I got home, my mom had already put my pizza pops in my room. I was about to settle in and watch some Twitch, when my mouse started acting up.
I opened my drawer to grab my wireless one, and that’s where I saw it again.
The Rubik’s cube.
My uncle’s joke gift sat in my eerily empty drawer. And right under it, a note:
Ah, so you want to play?
My heart jumped into my skull. I almost choked on a piece of spicy pepperoni. How did this get into my room?
An otherworldly coldness seeped out of the cube. But not through any kind of breeze or wind, it was more of a pulsating coldness, a sort of invisible radiation. The chill permeated from the puzzle, and spilled around my body, and gaming chair.
Something inside me could sense the cube was channeling an ethereal awfulness from a far off place. Perhaps an impossible place...
I flipped over the printed note. On the reverse side was a riddle.
One of the following statements is true.
The Cube can be solved.
The Cirphesian will kill you
Best of luck,
—Your Uncle Ike
I checked the rest of my drawer to see if there was anything else. But there was nothing. My drawer was completely clean.
Cirphesian? The hell is a Cirphesian?
The coldness across my back intensified exponentially. Shivers blitzed up to my neck as if my backside was suddenly exposed to a meat freezer.
I moved away from the cold, and could see icy condensation forming on my head-rest.
What the fuck?
I backed away and could see the faint sparkle of icyness on the chair.
Then a pair of invisible arms wrapped around me, like a hug from winter itself.
“Shhh. Quiet Wally. Just lie down. Shhh..”
It was my mother’s voice.
She was talking to me with a strange inflection, as if she were speaking to some eight-year old version of myself. “Shhhhh. Lie down. Don’t worry Wally. Just lie down.”
It was as haunting as it was comforting.
The whisper spoke right into my left ear, just like my mom used to do it whenever I had my night terrors. And there did come an urge to lie down. A powerful urge to lie down. As if some deep, primal part of me wanted to give in, collapse, and allow all the matter in my body to return to dust.
But I snapped out of it.
I fled out of my room and found both my parents on the couch. They kept their eyes on the TV. Blue Planet was on.
“Everything alright Wal?”
“Mom … Were you just in my room?”
“What?”
“Were you just in my room like a second ago?”
“In your room? No. Can you boil some tea?”
The invisible hands wrapped around my waist again. They were so icy-cold they felt like fire. I broke free in a jolt, and ran to the foyer.
“Some orange pekoe would be nice!” my mom called.
Those arms were trying to pin me down. Freeze me. What did that note say? That the Cirphesian would kill me?
I ran back to my room in a panic, and grabbed my uncle's stupid toy. The note said only one of the statements could be true. So did that mean if I solved the Rubik's cube … the Cirphesian couldn’t kill me?
A footprint made of frost appeared at my door. Another one formed closer. They were human-shaped footprints, except they had no toes.
“Your father also wants some tea.” My mom called. “Maybe boil a big pot?”
I circumnavigated the invisible ice-thing and tried to think of the hottest place I could go in the house.
Without hesitation, I scampered to the kitchen.
I set the broil temperature at 600 degrees and left the oven door open. Maybe I could prevent the thing from coming in here if I make it too hot.
I put the kettle on too.
A few seconds later I could see its hoary footprints follow me across the kitchen tiles. I slinked away and started looping around the house to avoid getting fatally ‘ice-hugged.’
The Cirphesian might have been getting colder (and perhaps stronger), but it certainly wasn't fast enough to catch me.
“Is this some new cardio routine?” My mom asked, still watching the TV.
“No mom. It's uncle's puzzle. I’m running for my life from a Cirphesian!”
“There's an Asian in the house?”
After a few minutes I returned to the kitchen and felt the sweltering heat. The area beside the oven was sauna-hot. I waited to see if that thing would dare follow me.
I saw its frosty, toeless feet appear on the kitchen tiles, but they melted immediately. Then the creature’s footprints reappeared by the door.
It wasn’t coming in.
Good. So long as I stand by this blistering oven, this thing will leave me alone.
I grabbed my phone and found a youtube video of some tween showing off how to solve a Rubik’s cube in ten minutes.
It was demeaning.
My chonky adult hands couldn’t make half the moves his dexterous little Swedish fingers could, but I had to try. After spending five minutes learning how to make a ‘white cross’ on my bequethed cube’s bottom, I then spent another five struggling with any progress on the second step.
“Did you put the tea on Wally!?”
The oven was sweltering. My hands were dripping from sweat. I could barely twist the cube properly, and I kept having to restart because this fucking Swedish kid’s tutorial was going way too quickly.
“Wal! Don’t forget there’s that trick to get the oven element to*—*”
“—Not now mom! I’m trying to solve uncle’s stupid fucking thing! Leave me alone!”
Then I saw the feet approach closer. The ground they stood on looked like it was cracking—as if the level of cold was condensing the atoms into new impossible positions. It may have been the coldest temperature ever achieved on earth.
Fuck me.
If that thing even grazed me I’d probably die in an instant from hypothermia.
And yet I was still sweating my balls off by this oven. The heat was even starting to peel the stickers off of the Rubik’s cube…
Wait a minute.
I circled around the Cirphesian, and ran out of the kitchen. My fingers aggressively started peeling all the stickers off the cube.
The colored little squares stuck to my palms.
“Why are you running through the house?” My mom yelled. “And where’s the tea?”
Like a kindergartener in art class, I struggled to move the peeled squares onto each correct cube face. The sweat was making the stickers slide.
Behind me I could see the footprints shrivel the wooden floorboards and rob them of all color. Anything the Cirphesian touched turned into frozen black dust.
“And put milk in mine,” my dad said.
I stumbled into my room again, and quickly put all the correct stickers on all the remaining sides. A single white square fell off the cube and twirled downward like a flower petal.
I snagged the sticker, but before I could reapply it, I heard that familiar whisper in my left ear.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It’s okay.”
Without resistance, my body curled up into a fetal position.
The world around me faded into cold unseeable darkness.
“There you go. Just relax Wally.”
It was terrifying. Mortifying. But at the same time, ineffably relaxing, like the words were made of liquid morphine.
“Just close your eyes and everything will be okay. This is the end of the line.”
Icy weight fell upon me from all sides. Cascades of black sand held my fetal position in place. I was being compressed between layers and layers of permafrost I couldn’t see. I was being crystallized. Fossilized.
“Hush now. Just lie down.”
My neck had frozen. My shoulders had frozen…
“Shhhh. Shhhhh.”
My feet had frozen. My legs had frozen…
“Wally! The kettle’s boiling! Are you deaf!?”
My fingers still held the cube. My chonky thumb still held the last sticker.
“For godsakes Wal, we can’t even hear David Attenborough!”
It was like fighting off a cloud of anesthesia. Everything was blurred. Everything was cold and paralyzed in place. I twitched my frost-bitten fingers, and pushed the last sticker and cube together, praying that maybe, just maybe they could align.
And somehow they did.
In a woosh of air, my room’s stale, pizza pop smell returned to my nostrils. I woke up shivering on my shag-rug. The black sand, the coldness, the wraith-like voice, they all vanished.
The kettle was boiling.
“Am I going to have to get it MYSELF?!” My mom yelled from the living room.
I got up and stumbled over to the kitchen.
I finally took the kettle off the element and poured two cups of orange pekoe for my parents. Spoonful of sugar for my mom. Dollop of milk for my dad.
I walked past all the black, frost-bitten segments of our flooring, and delivered the tea to my folks on a little tray.
“Took you long enough,” my mom said, looking quite fed up. “What’s gotten into you today?”
I stood there, staring at my seventy-something parents, who were essentially sags of flesh that moved between their bedroom and the couch.
“Mom. I literally just fought off an ice-demon from another dimension that’s somehow tied to your family’s stupid legacy cube — which, by the way, nobody wanted because it’s cursed garbage — and it spent the better part of the last half hour trying to turn me into some kind of frozen ice trophy. So forgive me if I’m not in the mood for a lecture on tea-making etiquette right now. Give me a fucking break."
“Don’t confuse life with your videogames, Wal.”
“Whatever.”
I walked back into my room and slammed the door. I was still tense, shivering, and even snivelling from my exposure to the arctic death world. But I was alive.
I sighed.
If it wasn’t my ungrateful parents giving me crap, then it was my asshole uncle sending fucking Cirphesians to teach me a life lesson or some shit. Fuck sakes.
I opened the drawer to see if my wireless mouse was back.
Instead I saw a newly shuffled Rubik’s cube, and another note.
Well done nephew. Consider me dazzled.
Do you have what it takes to continue?
I turned the note over.
One of the following statements is true.
The Cube can be solved.
You will live a life of wasteful mediocrity
Make the right choice
—Your Uncle Ike
I closed the drawer.
I looked through a tangle of cables I kept in a box of old stuff above my wardrobe and found a regular wired mouse. I plugged it into my computer. It seemed to work fine.
I taped the drawer with the cube shut with no plans to open it again.
Then I reheated my pizza pops.
They tasted fantastic.
Some other places to find me: