One cold and rainy November morning, a package I did not expect arrived on the stoop.
It was early in the morning and the sun had just begun to creep over the rooftops of my overpriced “quaint” neighborhood, in a small American city. Soaked yellow and orange leaves hung around the sides of the street in piles like Halloween decorations that hadn't been put away. They clung with the kind of weight wet leaves have, to the windshields of crookedly parked cars.
The steam from my coffee cup mixed with my breath on the wet, frosty morning. Goosebumps and small, violent shivers covered me as I stood in old, thinned out jeans and a black tee shirt on my concrete stoop. At my feet was the package. The mystery package. I hadn't ordered anything, I was trying to cut back on spending. Money was tight and I could barely afford groceries let alone the sort of frivolous wants I used to order with reckless abandon before being laid off and then eventually taking a much lower paying job.
My new job was so much less stressful though. And it had so much time off attached with it. They seemed like worthwhile trade offs for my mental health. But, unfortunately, my healing mental health didn't equate to a healing credit score and bills being paid.
The brown cardboard box at my feet didn't include any clues as to where it originated. No branded packing tape like the kind used by some of the top online retailers in the world. There were not large company names or catchy slogans brandishing the surface of the box.
A small shipping label had my name and the correct address. I triple checked it to be sure the information was all right. Maybe it had been mistakenly sent to one of my neighbors. But, the details were all correct. It was seemingly for me. But where did it come from?
My eyes darted to the upper left corner of the label, cutting lazily through the swirl of haze made by my coffee and my visible breath, which had a long drawn out sigh to fuel it. This was too weird for a Saturday morning. I wanted to be inside with intentions of productivity, the mental list of all those little things needing doing, the chores, the bills, the returned calls and attempts at reading again and laundry. That never ending list could be nagging at me as I sipped coffee on the couch instead of the stoop.
There was no return address. There wasn’t even any indication of which parcel carrier had delivered it. And as I thought about it, Friday night was an odd time to get a delivery around here. I got home around 9pm and don’t remember the package being there. Had it really been delivered that late? Had the delivery person finished for the day and realized they forgot that package. Maybe they were coming into town anyway on a Friday night and thought they could drop it off on their way to the bar.
Which bar do package delivery people go to? Is there a vibe they are attracted to in such an establishment? I thought about the bars in proximity to my neighborhood. The Green Eagle. That's the bar the delivery people go to. I guarantee it. I rolled my eyes. Of course they’d go there.
I thought some more and realized maybe something more likely would be that the package was delivered to the wrong apartment in my building and that wrong apartment’s occupant just left it out here instead of leaving it in front of my door. But which occupant would it have been?
Maybe Mrs. Robertson in number four. She was a retiree and lived alone with her cat, Buckles. I often saw her in the hallway and would say hi, but she’d never say hi back. I had also never seen her leave the building. Maybe she had everything delivered so she never had to leave. Maybe she couldn’t leave. I had never glanced down to her ankles for any reason, she could have a monitor. Mrs. Robertson could be a hardened criminal under house arrest in this building. Perhaps she was a thief or committed a crime of passion. She did live alone after all, no sign of a partner.
It seemed unlikely though. Mrs. Robertson would have left it in front of my door.
Finally, I picked the cardboard box up. A small rectangle of dry stoop was left where the box had sat. The cardboard was cold and damp, but not wet. As I stood with it in hand, I tried to ascertain its contents based on weight. It could be a book, maybe two books even if they were paperbacks. I had been meaning to read again. Maybe the universe was just trying to help me along on that quest. The empty promise to enrich my life by reading novels again. A half intentioned resolution made yearly that never produced results. But who would be sending me books? Who would have the audacity to make the selection for me? Surely not anyone who knew me well. Everyone close to me knew I had that frustrating tendency to avoid any suggestion for books and movies given with the words “you would love this”.
I finally decided I wasn't going to advance this investigation any further on the stoop. I took my coffee and my package and headed back inside to my apartment. I set the box and my coffee cup down on the cluttered table in the kitchen. Stacks of unopened mail and the contents of pockets emptied on the daily were swept aside.
The box felt alien in the warm cluttered apartment. It was cold and rigid and seemed like something that should stand alone. Though made of cardboard, and damp cardboard at that, it felt like mere kitchen scissors wouldn’t cut the tape and grant me entrance to this mysterious box and its contents. But I was being silly. It was regular tape and a regular box and a regular package.
I grabbed my trusty scissors and began to slice the long strip of tape. It of course cut with no effort at all and the flaps of cardboard lifted slightly now that they were no longer pinned down by the tape. I imagined a sigh of relief escaping the box. I swore I could almost see a wisp of visible breath not unlike my own when I was on the stoop. All in my head of course.
I slowly opened the flaps of the box and began to peek inside at light flooded the interior void. “What in the world?” I slowly whispered as things came into view.But just as my mind began to process what I was looking at, my vision began to blur and the world started going dark.
And that is the last thing I remember.

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