My husband and I bought a box of unclaimed packages expecting cheap gadgets and a few laughs. But the very last parcel had Caleb’s full name and the address of our first apartment printed on the label. It had been mailed fifteen years earlier, and one look at it made my husband beg me not to open it, not to touch it, not to lift the lid on whatever was buried inside.
By the time we reached the bottom of that box, Caleb had already claimed a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST DENTIST, despite the fact that he had no connection whatsoever to dentistry.
“I’m taking this to work,” he announced, holding it up like a hard-won trophy.
“Why on earth would you do that?”
He pressed it solemnly against his chest, both hands, like a man swearing an oath. “Because people deserve mystery, Dolly.”
I laughed and tossed another glittery phone case onto the growing pile of treasures between us on the living room floor.
For almost an hour, our living room had looked like the world’s cheapest Christmas morning. Avocado-print socks. A tangle of charging cables for phones we didn’t own. Three separate kitchen gadgets whose purposes we couldn’t identify, one of which Caleb was convinced was either a garlic press or a small medieval torture device. A single novelty shirt printed with a cartoon llama, big enough that both of us could have climbed into it at once, which we briefly and stupidly tried to do, and which produced the kind of helpless laughter you can only reach with someone you’ve known for half your life.
Buying the box had been Caleb’s idea, though I’d been just as sucked in by the time we placed the order. For weeks we’d been falling asleep to those videos, the ones where people buy whole pallets of undeliverable and warehouse-clearance packages and film themselves tearing into the contents, pulling out everything from actual garbage to sealed, brand-new electronics worth hundreds of dollars. It’s oddly hypnotic, watching strangers gamble twenty dollars on the contents of a sealed box. There’s a whole economy of lost things out there, apparently, an entire secondhand afterlife for packages that never found their people. Neither of us had thought too hard about the sadness underneath the fun of it, all those parcels somebody had once cared enough to send.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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