This presentation explores conceptualisations of objects’ other-than-human relationality in the light of Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s recent experimental novel The Box (2023). Wong’s novel draws on philosophical traditions such as object-oriented ontology and vital materialism to place the titular box – an unopenable, handwoven object – at the centre of the narrative. The box serves no discernible everyday purpose in the fictional world yet is neither reduced to metaphor nor work of art. Instead the reader is invited to consider its very thingness, as well as the different “form[s] of life” (229) of various other objects. As both a philosophical intervention and an aesthetic exploration of more-than-human relationalities, The Box highlights some of the ethical quandaries faced when exploring the relationality of objects. Perhaps inevitably, such relationality is always storied in the novel. Conceptualisations of more-than-human relationality are thus shown to face a similar double bind as that encountered in critiques of human exceptionalism, which are necessarily performed from a human point of view, although this is to some extent countered by Wong’s focus on nonlinear causality and seams.