The package on my doorstep had my name, but I definitely didn’t order it. It had the size of a shoebox and was space gray with my name written on an orange shiny sticker, as if it were delivered directly from Mars. I asked if there was someone around and looked for any kind of hidden camera that could suggest it was a prank, but there was no answer, no sign of a video recorder, nothing.

I brought the package inside without knowing this would kickstart a strange sequence of events in my life, and sat on the sofa in the living room. The moment I started to open it with my Swiss knife, the alarm on my phone rang. Strange. 08:08 saying “DO IT!” and I couldn’t remember setting it at any point in the past hours or days. I was sure of opening the box before, but now I had some doubts about it, so I headed to the kitchen to make some coffee.

Latte macchiato or regular coffee? The package was still there, staring at me. Cappuccino with some CBD oil to help me think straight about this unusual situation. After the first sips, I felt ready to go back to the package issue. I opened it, and an orange light seemed to shine from the inside. Was I high? Under some glowy polystyrene balls, which seemed somehow magical, there was a book. It seemed to be completely handmade with the title “THE ANSWER” carefully crafted in neon green fine wood with some uncommon rounded leaves glued on the cover, making it look like a beautiful art piece.

Was this really for me? I checked again the recipient information on the package, and my full name was there without a sender. Few people knew my whole name, which made the situation even more odd. At the same time, I felt curious about the object while sensing a strange feeling of invading someone else’s property.

I was about to leaf through the book when I heard loud music and voices coming from the street - which wasn’t such a common soundscape from the 14th floor where I lived—so I went straight to the window to try to figure out what was happening. It seemed to be a parade with about 100 people arriving near my building, with a carnival float decorated with orange lights, as if it were somehow a visual extension of the package. A couple of bassoons were amplified by a large sound system while people were chanting different vocal sounds, dressed in sparkly gray outfits, dancing and moving very slowly. On the top of the main automobile, I could read “THE ANSWER IS THERE” in a handcrafted green banner.

If that was some kind of art performance, they might have gone too far. I grabbed the book and rushed to the elevator, but it didn’t seem to move for about 30 seconds until a sign popped out in the LED monitor: out of order. Good, I was in need of some exercise. Maybe it was just the CBD hitting with positivity, but in any case I rushed to the stairs and arrived completely out of breath downstairs after running fourteen floors to the first floor to join a considerable number of a curious audience that stood on the sidewalk trying to understand what was in front of their eyes.

"What is happening here?" I overheard an old white-haired woman asking a tall man.

"It’s an alien parade. They say they come from another planet and have the answer to fix our planet."

"Oh, I lived to see that!" she answered in a cynical voice.

I was shaking. They seemed like humans, but with no hair at all and very glowy skin, which could easily be expensive glitter make-up. They did move very slowly though, which might be learned from a couple of years of Abramovich’s techniques, as far as I could tell. Still: What the hell? That was not how I intended to start my Saturday. I walked in the direction of the parade, which was almost at the end from where I stood, and decided to just ask some of the performers about the book I got, but once I reached the end of the sidewalk, I just couldn’t cross it to reach the street, as if there was an invisible wall avoiding the passage. I froze.

The performer who was closest to me gazed at me with deep, dark eyes, and I realized how they all had very androgynous looks and reeked of a smell that reminded me of a mix of lavender and citrus fruits. It was surreal; I was hypnotized. The eye contact created an immediate strange connection between us, and suddenly there was no other sound, just this very soft voice inside my head that whispered, “Thank you for reading it.”

The next moment I remember, I was back in my living room with the book between my hands, unchanged. The orange polystyrene balls weren’t shining anymore; they were just white, plain, and boring. I went to the window feeling dizzy and confused, and it didn’t help when I looked down and just saw the cars passing normally for a Saturday morning traffic, while the city sounded just like it does every day.

The clock showing 08:08 changed to 08:09 at the very moment I looked at it. I felt slow, somehow powerless. I sat down on the armchair on my balcony to take some fresh air, trying to grasp something from the previous events, asking myself if this moment was also about to fade into another one like the parade just did, when I finally opened the book in front of me, facing the first page, which actually wasn’t a page since it wasn’t properly a book: it was an empty box with a 10-centimeter bright spiral seed that had a texture of shell and seemed to be covered in church-like arabesques made with a type of mate oil paint.

Under the seed there was an instruction written in very fine letters:

Plant me

somewhere

you are fond of

so you find me

in truth.

I was now facing my favorite spot in the city: a faraway, kind of hidden and wild garden where you could see the whole town shining from above. The fact that it hasn’t been discovered by tourists was magical, even more because some hidden hands were taking care of the place and keeping the plants from growing too wild.

It has been two years now that I planted the seed there and visited it regularly to water and take care of it. I had also started a psychological treatment to make sure I wasn’t going crazy, but I never told anyone about the plant. It was my secret, just like the garden, and it should remain so.

The tree grew incredibly fast and was already two meters high in its second summer. For the first time since I planted it, I now could see its first fruit growing, and it was different from anything I have ever seen. I grew up in the countryside and helped my family with the plantation for most of my life, so I could identify a very wide range of the flora, but this was something else, and I knew it since I first held that seed in my hands.

I looked closer: it was growing as a main sphere with curly tangerine tendrils coming out of it with colorful motifs that resembled the outside of the original seed inside the book.

I then visited it every day to make sure the fruit would rip in peace, and so it did. Once I felt it was ready, I took a bite of the huge fruit. The inside was pure joy, full of details in lime green, which looked like written words of a language I couldn’t read. I took another bite of that delicious sweet citrus flavor, and I was taken at once to the parade, with the vivid scene of the performer looking into my eyes and sending me a message inside my head. This time I knew I was looking at myself. It was me walking the parade with dark eyes and a genderless look. We both whispered “Thank you” with silent mouths, and in one second it was all clear: the seed, the book, the fruit—it was all me.

Back in the tree, I knew the next steps I should take. I finished the fruit, kept the seed, washed it carefully with water, and wrapped it in a paper inside the book that was given to me two years ago. I just knew inside my spiral bones that it should be passed further. And so it was.