The Box at the Door
It was just a cardboard box. I thought it was empty. It certainly was light. There was no movement discernable when shaken. No labels on it identified who put it there nor who it was sent to. How it got on my doorstep was unknown. What would you do, given that scenario?
As I looked up and down the street, I noticed the anomaly. Mine was not the only house with a box by its front door. Every house along the block had a box. Interestingly enough, none of them looked the same.
Some were small, some were large, and all had unique colors. Mine just looked like a common shipping box.
I’m a curious person. Most people I know would call their neighbors and ask them if they knew what was meant by all these boxes. Some might even ignore or get rid of the boxes. I, on the other hand, wanted to know what was in them, or at least what was in mine.
I was not about to let anyone else see, so I took the box into my house.
Taking out my McGiver utility knife, I cut through the seal on the top. I was about to open the box when I heard the music. It wasn’t any tune I recognized. However, it was quite mesmerizing. Looking down at the box, I noticed a faint light coming through the crack I had cut.
As the music intensified, the crack grew wider, and the light grew brighter. Rays of light filled up the room and coalesced to form an image.
At this point, I was entranced and couldn’t take my eyes off the image. It was of a car—certainly a very futuristic car.
Then I heard the voice.
“One day sale. Yours for the mere price of your…something sounded very garbled…then I heard, “Act NOW.”
I’m not sure what it was, but my senses returned. Maybe it was the cat scratching my leg. But all of a sudden, the music stopped, the image disappeared, and the box was gone.
I quickly went and looked out of my front door. I scanned the street up and down. Some of the boxes I had seen before were still there. Some were not.
Some with no box in front of them stood the same as mine. However, there were a few actual spaces. The houses that had stood there were gone. Left in their place was just a charred piece of land.
So, if you get an unlabeled box at your doorstep without explanation, think twice before you open it.
