Box

It arrived amongst the junk mail and bank statements. It arrived unmarked and unassuming four days before Christmas. It’s been sitting on my kitchen table for three days. I haven’t opened it. There’s no postage on the brown packaging. It doesn’t even bear my name. I’m still not sure its meant for me.

The package was surprisingly heavy, and when I picked it up off my front step, it felt as if it was unwilling to be suspended. As if gravity refused to let this particular item go airborne without a fight. I heaved it onto the table and put my ear to it. Stupid move if it was a bomb. Stupider because the box won’t tell me what it has inside. I left it there, unable to pinpoint why I was hesitant to open it. Looking back now, my only guess is that I lost my nerve.

Now, on Christmas Eve, with a strong old fashioned in my hand and Alabama Christmas playing on the record player, I’m circling my round art deco table, powerless to take my eyes off the package.

I’m a little drunk (I’ll admit) and want to know what’s inside, but the brown paper is so simple and discrete that I can only interpret it as a warning. It’s strange to receive an unmarked package, but it is stranger still because this isn’t the first unsolicited gift I’ve received.

Over the last three years, I’ve acquired a coin bearing the embossed image of St. Christopher, a pendulum crystal made of obsidian, and a cheap paper poster of the Eiffel Tower. All of these gifts had been found balancing on my door handle, unwrapped, and all of them had shown up around Christmas. I kept all of them.

I can only assume that they’re from the same person. Why they chose to wrap this one and not the others makes the hair on my arms prickle.

I set my sweating glass down on a coaster and pull the package toward me with both hands. I swear I feel something rolling inside. I slide into a chair and turn the box so that the folded edge of the paper is facing me. It’s a perfect triangle and fastened with simple, clear tape. I put my finger under the edge and hoped it would be too difficult to open so I could walk away, but the tape released easily. No going back now.

In the window, my reflection mimics me. String lights, bright and colorful, block my view of what’s outside. I know it’s snow, but in the back of my mind, I think I hear something crunching even though the album is loud enough to quiet my thoughts, and the whiskey has steeled most of my resolve.

Ripping the paper feels too frantic and too confident, so I carefully unfold each crease until the bare box is before me and the paper is untorn next to my glass. The box is taped shut and a perfect square, about ten inches by ten inches. I get up to retrieve a knife from the kitchen, snagging my nearly empty glass on the way.

As I’m refreshing my drink, I think of all the things that could be in that box; it’s a paperweight, it’s a random piece of thrift store junk, it’s a bronze statue of a goat, it’s a single dumbbell but as I go through the possibilities none of them feel right. Nothing eases my increasing heartbeat.

I step back into the common area, soft and glowing with Christmas lights. The fire crackled peacefully in the fireplace. The balsam and cedar candle on my coffee table filled my house with earth and evergreen. The box is waiting for me at the table like a disappointed lover. I stand over it. Knife in hand.

In the window, my reflection looks sinister; half of my curly hair has fallen out of the claw clip and is now splayed out over my shoulder. I forgot I was wearing eyeliner earlier and rubbed my eyes, giving myself a hooded, disheveled look. The clincher, though, is the knife, gripped in my hand, poised for stabbing, not cutting. In the reflection, you can’t see the box. In the reflection, there was no telling what I was getting into.

As I bring the tip of the knife down to carefully sever the tape, there builds in me a whooshing sensation like wind and ice racing up a sea cliff. My soul swells, ready to flee if there poses a danger to my physical body upon opening the box. The knife glides through the tape.

It’s easier at this moment to believe that the knife is a free agent and that cutting open the box is its doing, not mine. The tape feels too flimsy to hold what’s inside, too easily broken. Too easily released. It should have put up more of a fight, but now the box is open, and all that’s left to do is lift the cardboard flaps.

I can’t.

I don’t want to.

I chug half my old fashioned more whiskey than cherry. More hair than chest. I open the box.

There’s brown paper inside, and as I pull it out, I think it’s not too late. You can just throw it away. Walk away. Forget it. But as these thoughts race through my head, I tear through the brown paper and throw it on the floor. Some rational part of me makes a note to save it for use in the fireplace.

With the packaging removed, I can finally see what’s inside. It catches the light as I lift it out of the box. It’s an old round mirror with an intricately decorated mosaic frame. The glass is convex and warps my surroundings.

In the dim light, I am encircled in elongated darkness. As I bring my face close to the mirror, it melts and frowns. My eyes droop, and the top of my head pinches above my temple before bulging out as if I am a balloon someone is squeezing.

Depending on where I move, I get a different image of myself. I am long and skinny, short and fat. My left side is tiny, while my right side is broad. In every reflection, I am what I am not. I am alien. I am imbecile. The details around me fade into the blackness at the mirror’s edge, and only I am caught between the frame.

At the bottom of the box, there is a handwritten note; Don’t look away.