"Now, you're getting it! Make a submarine, a monster, a train! It beats the heck out of some dumb ol' hundred-dollar remote-controlled car! To the naked eye it appears to be just a plain old cardboard vessel! But this is actually a father-and-son project in disguise! Slay the giant! Kill the Nazis! Hunt for buried treasure! It's up to you! No, this is not just a box! It's everything mankind ever needed to accomplish pressed into a cube of corrugated cardboard pulp!"
The premise of the story is based upon what used to be one of the most common events in suburban American history in the twentieth century. Large appliances like refrigerators and ovens and dishwashers and dryers and console television sets were delivered to millions of homes in large cardboard boxes. When the things inside were removed in households with children, it was a rite-of-passage for kids to use those leftover boxes and their imaginations to turn them into everything from houses to spaceships. Mr. Gideon is toy salesman who has been approached by a man down on his luck desperately searching for a birthday gift for his son. What may seem like an over-the-top job of marketing and advertising is actually based on unknown hours of historical reality. The sales job of an empty box being turned into everything he mentions here is an illustration of just a fraction of the things these oversized boxes have become in the imagination of untold millions of children.
"First, you must return every scrap you don't use...and second, you can't ask me for more cardboard. This is all you may have!"
The price Mr. Gideon charges for the empty cardboard box is seventy-eight cents. That figure just so happens to be exactly the amount of money the father who is desperately searching for a birthday gift he can afford happens to pull out of his pocket. This transaction definitely seems to have something perhaps magical going on with it. Mike, the man buying the box as a birthday gift for his son, is astonished to learn the purchase comes with two unbreakable rules. His sarcastic response to the second condition rhetorically asks where he could ever possibly find more cardboard if he needs it. As Mr. Gideon, the salesman, ominously notes, these sorts of transactions always come with certain rules. The unspoken implication is that breaking these rules will result in some kind of unwanted consequences. And, indeed, that happens to be the case with this somewhat bizarre sale.
"Dad! He's alive! You did it! Bill is the best birthday present in the universe!"
Cam is the son of the man who buys the cardboard box that comes with rules. The father-and-son project which Mr. Gideon promised the box would become turns out to become none of the things his sale pitch suggested. The story unexpectedly takes a turn into Frankenstein territory when the father and son use the box for more than just imagining things. They manage to create a boxer named Bill who comes to life overnight. Rather than simply sitting inside the cardboard box and pretending to be zooming across the galaxy, the box has come to life in recognizably human form. As is usually the case with creating life in such a bizarre way, however, things get very complicated very quickly. What is celebrated by Cam as the greatest possible gift he could have gotten becomes far more work than any other present he could possibly have received.
