The rain had been falling since before dawn, the kind of slow, patient rain that seems less like weather and more like a mood the sky has settled into. I remember standing at the kitchen window with a mug of coffee going cold in my hands, watching the water bead and slide down the glass, thinking about nothing in particular. That was the last hour of my life that belonged to the ordinary world, though of course I didn’t know it yet. You never do. The ordinary world doesn’t announce its departure. It just slips out the back door while you’re looking somewhere else.
I saw the box when I went to check whether the newspaper had come. It sat on the porch beside the umbrella stand, square and brown and dark at the corners where the rain had already begun to soak through the cardboard. My first thought was that a delivery had gone to the wrong house. We got other people’s packages sometimes, the way everyone on our street did, and I had grown used to carrying them two doors down or leaving a note. I stepped out under the eave and picked it up and found no label on it at all. No name. No address. No barcode, no shipping sticker, nothing to say where it had come from or who it was meant for. Just a plain box, wet and slightly warped, with the flaps tucked into one another the way you close a box when you don’t want to bother with tape.
I brought it inside and set it on the counter. Daniel was at the table with the crossword and his reading glasses pushed down his nose, and when I asked if he had ordered anything he said no without looking up. I said neither had I. He glanced at the box then, the way you glance at a thing that isn’t your problem, and went back to the puzzle. I remember that. I remember how uninterested he was, and how later that same detail would rearrange itself in my memory into something else entirely.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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