I found the box at 3 PM, right before my shift ended.
It is 1 AM now.
Four days later.
I haven't slept more than a couple hours since I brought it back to my apartment.
The pills the on-staff doctor prescribed to help sleep don't work. Not that that's much of a surprise; they're so old the logo on the side of the bottle is from before we rebranded 10 years ago. I just never needed them before so I never refilled the prescription.
The box I brought home is small. Small enough to slip into my pocket. The size doesn't stop it from catching the draft of the fan to rock back and forth on my desk. It's light. I don't even have to look down to know I've grabbed it. I recognize it from the feel and weight alone by this point.
It's an old box. The corners are rounded and wrinkled from wear. It has a black grease stain in the bottom corner closest to my right side. The top is sealed with what must be 20 layers of packing tape, each layer covering a slightly more damaged layer beneath. It's been wrapped like a mummy to keep it closed.
The shipping address is impossible to read with all the times it's been stamped over.
I haven't opened it yet.
I've never opened it before.
I've been working in the processing plant's mailroom for 38 years. Others have come and went. The entire staff I work with regularly turns over at least twice a year. The higher-ups stay, but they don't talk to me unless they need something. A lot of fancy titles and research positions. I'm the only one who stays in the mailroom.
The box is my oldest coworker, really.
It's managed to make its way back to my mailroom every single day since I was hired. It was new then. Fresh. The policy is to incinerate anything without a return address if I'm not given direct prior instruction to be on the lookout. I always figured they were worried about anthrax or something. I've been here long enough to know this place is doing something sketchy.
Fixing elections. Covering up scandals. Maybe illegal weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking… I don't know. It's got to be something filthy.
I don't think about it, though. I'm not the curious type. This company is the closest I have to family left.
I put the box in the bin with the others to incinerate for the first few months. Then, I tried bringing it to the incinerator myself. I got creative after that: I drowned it in the sink, covered it in gasoline, even tossed it in the corner of the room to forgot about it. Eventually I gave up and went back to just putting it in the bin with the others again. It didn't matter what I did to get rid of it. Why waste extra energy?
It's always in the incoming mail bin the next day.
At least it was. That's not really true anymore. Since I brought it home, it hasn't shown up at work again.
I don't know why I took it now. Didn't think it through very much.
If I had, I would have just opened it in the mailroom in my PPE. It would have been smarter. Safer, at least.
It could be dangerous. It could be filled with some kind of toxin or deadly substance I haven't heard about. Maybe it's a bomb rigged to explode when it's opened. PPE wouldn't help with that.
I can't hear anything when I shake it. It feels like an empty box.
Could be feathers. Crumpled paper. Cotton stuffing.
There's gotta be something in it. There has to be.
The thing that scares me the most is that it really is just empty.
There's never a satisfying pay off in real life.
My sister died last week.
I don't know why it hit me so hard. Rhode's been in an institution for longer than I've worked here. I hated her for years. Decades, really. She killed my mom. My dad too, if I think about why he got so drunk that night for too long.
I guess I feel a little guilty I haven't talked to her in 39 years. I'm just… it wasn't entirely her fault. Schizophrenia. Still feel like she should have been more responsible.
When I saw her body in the morgue it just looked like… a body. I hadn't seen her in so long I had nothing to compare it to. It looked lifeless, sure, but it looked like it never had life in it. They could have shown me another random woman and I'd have believed it was her. Like I said, not very curious.
I've been saving for retirement. I could retire early. I've invested well. I have enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life; even if I make it well into my 90s. Hell, I don't even really need my retirement pay from the company. I guess there's nothing keeping me here other than habit.
Maybe that's the real reason I can't stop thinking about this box now. Maybe I was scared of getting in trouble before. If they fire me now, I'm already set for life. That's one way to break a habit.
I think the box is probably nothing anyways. Nothing important. Nothing important is ever in a box that small.
Hmm.
Maybe I'll get married after I retire. I'm not sure I want to.
I don't talk to people enough. I'll have to get into the habit of that again. Usually it's just the new workers asking questions. Silly, silly questions. Asking about things that don't matter. They tell me about their theories on it. Theories they should be careful about caring about.
I don't know as much as most people do, I guess. I've got blinders on. I'm just boring and stupid. Nah. Everyone else is too curious. Everyone else moves on so fast. That's why I'm still here and they're not.
They remind me of Rhode. She had so many ideas leading up to it. Things hidden in books. Missing rooms in the house. Things she was worried others would hear whispered to me so quietly I couldn't even understand them. Uncle Sean was the same. They sounded so alike at first. Schizophrenia runs in the family. I guess no one was really too surprised about that part.
It's just still so hard to wrap my head around what she did.
She was in a hospital for two weeks. I guess she was taking a lot of drugs or something in the months leading up to it. The doctor said that's what triggered her first episode. That doesn't excuse anything. Uncle Sean never hurt anyone.
The day after she got out she killed the family dog. I had to lock myself in my room with the other two animals to keep her from killing them too. We'd raised that dog from a puppy as kids. She was old, but she had life left in her. She just said it had to be that way. I couldn't understand it. She loved that dog. I loved that dog. She was in a jail for six months then let straight out after the trial.
That was in December.
She killed my mom at the end of January. It took them four days to find her hiding in the woods afterwards.
My parents were divorced already and I hadn't talked to my mom in years. I was shaken, terrified, but could survive. But, it was just too much for my dad. Guess even through all the resentment some things never change. Maybe that's why I don't want to get married.
I dropped down to part time college at first to help my dad recover. He never did. I dropped out entirely after the car accident. I was going to be a chemical engineer before that. That's why I started working at the company. It's a chemical processing plant.
I just don't understand why she did it. It just…
It gets so easy to ignore everything.
Sure, at first it was harder… When I started working here the things I'd see were hard to ignore.
But I did it.
The voice coming from a package, asking me to open it. The clicking noise from the vent. That hamper that jolted as the janitor of the month wheeled it through the hallway towards the incinerator. The slime leaking through the envelope that made my fingers numb. Never did gain back that sensation.
Then there was her. That woman. She walked straight through the wall. No clothes. Deathly pale. She looked fresh out of the morgue but she was up and walking. She looked up at me, blinked, and then walked through the sorting bins, through the sink, and straight through the other wall.
I spent so long ignoring the memories that all I can picture when I think of her face is my sister's when they pulled the sheet off her on the autopsy table.
You just stop thinking about these things after a while. It gets easier. So, so much easier.
Yet, through all of that, all that I've seen, the box is the only thing that's consistent.
It's the only thing I've seen more than once. It's the only thing that's there every single day.
It's the only thing that refuses to let me stop thinking about it.
I didn't want to end up like her. I didn't end up like her. I spent years being nothing like her.
She could have just toughed it out, couldn't she have? That's the responsible thing to do.
That's what I did. I did that for 38 years.
It's pathetic that her death's the thing that dragged me down to her level. I shouldn't be giving in to this temptation. There's no excuse for this.
The only thing keeping me from nicking my numb fingers with the box cutter is the thought that opening this can't hurt anyone as badly as she hurt me.
There's gotta be something in it. There has to be.
The thing that scares me the most is that it really is just empty.
There's never a satisfying pay off in real life.