The Box

Sheila had never seen a drone until that winter’s day. Well, she’d seen them on TV and the internet, but never in real life. It had flown down, or hovered, or whatever you call it with a medium-sized brown box hanging from a harness underneath it. She’d watched it all surreptitiously from her front window. It’d been ages since she’d gone outside, maybe months if she was being honest with herself, which she rarely was these days. The pandemic had shut her in more than she’d been able to do by herself in the past three years and gave her the perfect alibi for slowly fading from her friend’s memories and invite lists.

Sheila’s family had always been fairly small, two cousins who’d passed in their youth and then one brother who had long ago moved on from their small town. She thought he’d started a family years ago but wasn’t sure… She turned the box over in her hands as she was musing over long lost familial connections.. Everything she’d ordered for herself online had already come this week and last. There wasn’t a return address and the handwriting was unfamiliar to her, but it did have her name and address spelled correctly. And her last name was a weird one, people often spelled it wrong.. But not this sender.

It had been a few minutes at this point and now her anxiety kicked into high gear. Who could have sent this? What could it mean? Was it a stranger? A stalker? Her ex-boyfriend from 5 years ago? But no, not him, didn’t he get married two years ago? …

Her head had started to hurt and her stomach began the familiar churning it always did now when she started to panic. She gingerly placed the box on her dining room table, which was void of everything except for a delicate Christmas themed centerpiece and padded quietly over to her back living room. The nearly solid glass wall at the back of the house had an incredible view of the snowy, white wonderland outside. Sheila sat on her leather couch. Then got right back up, she’d been making cocoa when the package arrived and her doorbell had alerted her. At least it had probably cooled enough to be drinkable by now…

In the kitchen, she grabbed some marshmallows from her immaculately organized pantry and started taking her cocoa back to the living room, passing through the dining room again when she stopped. Had the box.. Moved? It looked… different somehow.

Sheila slowly sat down at the table closest to the box and took a deep breath. It was happening. She couldn’t ignore it this time. It was happening faster.. Hallucinations.. Surely, the box couldn’t have moved on its own. Science wouldn’t allow that and her own brain was certain, with all the alarms and security systems she had in this ultra smart home, that nothing or no one but her was inside the house. So then, the box hadn’t moved. It was her mind playing tricks on her. Again. But this wasn’t three years ago. So much had changed since her dad had died, and yet so much was the same these days.

She was a shut-in. That much was true. But no one had believed her when she told them, swore to them, that her father wasn’t dead. That he was gone, but not really gone. They told her, her friends and some court ordered psychiatrists, that it was grief. A natural response to an unnatural incident.

Her fingers started unconsciously strumming the box as she thought back to the night her father died.

Another cold night waiting for the Professor to come home. Her father. The only parent she’d ever had, and the most important person in her life. But he was late, again. Things had been strained lately, something was going on at the Lab and she didn’t know all the details but knew that something was wrong. Her dad never let her go this long by herself - after Sheila’s mother had left them and her brother had gone to college, the two of them had become inseparable. He told her everything - or almost everything it seemed. Someone had been following him.. He hadn’t told her out right, but she’d overheard a conversation with a mystery person on the phone a few weeks prior. Her father, Professor Jackson, was a genius and way ahead of his time when it came to temporal engineering. Sheila knew he was in trouble but was too young to do anything to help him. So, she waited … stayed up all that night and the next while some family friends came in and out to comfort her.. She waited.

His car was found some days later, upside down in a ravine and burned beyond recognition. There was a body too. Of course, everyone had assumed that it was the Professor’s, everyone except Sheila that is. It didn’t seem real that he could be gone. With no real explanation, the police and coroner ruled it an accident.

Sheila hadn’t left the house since.. Not really. And then when the pandemic hit and she could literally do everything from home; eat, work, workout, read, and order everything to be delivered straight to her doorstep… she decided she did not ever need to leave the house again.

Her fingers stopped tapping the box suddenly. What if it was a clue? A confession?

She didn’t dare to let herself hope that it could be from her dad himself.. Besides, the handwriting had been different.

Sheila decided to get up and take a shower, it might not hurt to put some real clothes on just in case. Someone had sent this. It meant something, although her brain was struggling to comprehend what it could be, what it could possibly mean.

A few hours later Sheila was back in her empty dining room staring at the box. She had gone back and forth for the last few hours on whether to open it or throw it out with the trash. She’d even left a voicemail for her brother, something she’d not done since their dad’s disappearance. He hadn’t answered, of course. Brad was never available when she needed him, when they’d needed him. But it didn’t matter. Her mind finally, sort of made up, Sheila gathered her strength (something her father had always insisted was deep inside her) and pulled the tape sealing the top off of the box.

With some curiosity, but mostly terror, she pulled the top open and peered inside.

It was a single object. Unlike anything she’d seen before, yet somehow familiar. It was a mixture of delicate looking metal, possibly gold although she wasn’t sure and one almost too obvious looking button.

Push it. You can do this, Sheila. Don’t be afraid. I’m with you.

It was her dad’s voice. In her head? Likely. She’d heard his voice many times in the house when she was alone, singing her to sleep at night, laughing at the dinner table, memories from long ago. But these words hadn’t been a memory. She’d heard them somehow, loud and clear.

Reaching in, she took only one more second to breathe deep and then pushed the button.

A bright light flashed through the home and the next moment Sheila was gone. Only an empty box lay on the dining room table, another cup of hot cocoa that she’d made had already started to go cold.

Sheila’s cell phone rang from the other room, the Caller ID flashing a picture of Brad and his name underneath. It went to voicemail.

The End.