The Gift to Martina Devoe

Martina’s backup alarm started chiming, quiet - like birds chirping - then got louder and more incessant. One gray eye cracked open, gummy from dehydration and poor sleep, and she tried to focus. Next to her pillow lay the cellphone she used as her primary alarm, which she’d muted while still unconscious after the first two times she’d hit snooze. Martina loved her snooze alarm. Her hangover loved it even more.

The backup meant she had overslept. Again. For the fifth time in a week. Or was it the sixth? Why did it always send her into a panic when her fail-safe alarm went off at 4:30? Who would even count that as sleeping in? Martina had the nagging compulsion to always arrive at work early, which warred with the night-owl tendencies that kept her up until well past midnight. As a result she had shoddy sleep and poor work performance.

She tried to throw her covers off, only to discover her complex entanglement. One leg had wrapped itself with the blanket, got it caught under the other leg, then she’d rolled over the opposite direction at least twice. Her left arm was stuck to her torso and the other somehow freed enough to grab her phone while she’d slept. Her pinned arm had also slipped free of her nightshirt and gotten pulled over her head inside out.

Martina took a few moments to disentangle herself, wondering if she’d tried to undress in her sleep, or before she’d gotten into bed. She’d been quite unsuccessful on either count. Last night’s memories blurred in her mind, sloshed with rancid alcohol and cottonmouth breath. She tugged the light fabric back into place after twisting free from most of the blanket, and sat with her legs dangling, still wrapped around one leg at the edge of her bed.

Through the alarm she heard two soft but rapid knocks. Who would be knocking at her apartment door at this hour? Martina went over and silenced her alarm. Why did it say 3 AM? Her phone agreed. Two more knocks. She definitely wasn't imagining things. She pulled on her white robe, the one with kittens embroidered on its left side, tied it and tried rubbing the sleep from her eyes. A third time, two more knocks.

Looking through the peephole of her apartment door, she glimpsed no one. She tried looking both directions, but the convex lensing distorted her view at the sides and proved useless. Like looking through a fishbowl. Martina slid back the chain, then retracted the deadbolt and cracked the door open. Not even a hint of a person. The hallway extended past several apartments in either direction, so the only place a person could hide would be in a neighboring apartment or a sprint to the end of the hallway to the emergency stairs.

Instinctively, she looked down as she was shutting the door and saw a box. Martina eyed it with suspicion. A small, unobtrusive box was just outside her door, wrapped in the same brown paper supermarkets used for bagging groceries. Fraying twine criss-crossed it, knotted together to hold the wrapping on. No stray strings remained, pruned from the knot to make it tidy. Beneath the intersecting strands and knot she saw its only other adornment: A generic, one-inch wide, white shipping label with “Martina Devoe” in crisp, handwritten, red Sharpie marker.

Again, she surveyed the hallway one last time, and still saw no one. She stooped to pick the box up and it surprised her how heavy it felt. Solid wood constructed, she thought - not cardboard. Easily fifteen pounds, she took a moment to gently shake it. Something hefty shifted from one side to the other within, thunking softly against the wood. Martina hadn’t been expecting any packages, and certainly no deliveries at this hour.

“I guess I’ll see what you are,” she said, curious. After all, it’s addressed to me, she thought.

She brought it into her apartment and set it label-side up in the middle of the island counter in her dining area. After turning on the light, she started rummaging in her junk drawer for her scissors to cut the twine. A loud bang startled her, and Martina let out a surprised shriek while yanking her hand out of the drawer, scattering its chaotic contents even more. Her scissors clattered onto the linoleum floor.

Looking behind her, she saw the box on the ground, and she grew uneasy. There was no way for that box to have moved two feet from the center of the counter to the edge it had fallen off, and certainly not without her hearing it. Yet there it was on the floor, on its side, a solid landing. She lived alone. Martina hated having roommates, preferring her solitude and privacy. The box’s relocation was inexplicable. Maybe she’d left it at the edge?

When she knelt to pick it up, she noticed the label had peeled back. Blood red ink had leached through, staining the brown paper and leaving a phantom imprint of her name underneath. Otherwise it appeared intact, but now its contents tinkled, as if something had shattered. Glass. Or perhaps jewelry, a necklace sliding loose. It also felt lighter.

Martina carried it into the kitchen and retrieved the scissors from the junk that had fallen with it to the floor, keeping an eye on the box the whole time. She wedged one blade beneath the twine horizontally, its tautness preventing any other way. Twisting the scissors ninety degrees, she sliced through the knot and the twine snapped apart. Martina then pulled apart the folds on either end. She disliked the messiness of tearing paper open, even at Christmas.

Unwrapping the package, she discovered it was indeed a solid wooden box. Someone had coated the top with pinkish candle wax, taking meticulous care to ensure the joint between top and bottom stayed sealed. Two small hinges attached both halves on one side, and a wax-sealed latch held it together on the other.. A quick sniff filled her nose with lavender and a strong hint of patchouli. Each fragrance vied to mask the other in a complex miasma of pleasant but disparate aromas.

Martina scraped away the wax from the latch and twisted it free. It was of rotating bar and notch design, so it required no key. She had no reason to believe she wasn’t meant to open it. Undoing the latch wasn’t enough though, so she scraped away the wax as well as she could, then pried the box open with a scissor blade. The wood resisted, gummed with wax inside the gaps as well.

When the box popped open, it gave off a faint gasp. The collapse of an internal vacuum, she reasoned. Her kitchen light flickered for a split second then steadied. Pungent patchouli puffed out at her, and Martina almost gagged. Inside was just a black and white photograph of an old woman embedded in wax, and a pinkish candlestick half melted across the inside top of the box, as if the box had been left upside down in the sunlight.

“That’s damned odd,” she said aloud. “Thought there might be a necklace or something.” Disappointed, she left the box open on her kitchen counter and went to take her morning shower before work. Already she knew she wouldn’t fall back asleep. Such an odd and early start to the day.

She undressed and turned on the shower, testing the temperature with the back of her hand until it reached the preferred temperature. Blazing hot and steamy. Martina stepped in and began lathering shampoo in her hair. In seconds the water turned ice cold, then stopped altogether. She fiddled with the knobs but nothing came out at all. Not even a trickle. Already irritable from her hangover and the odd awakening, she fumbled for the towel she’d hung next to the shower only to discover it gone.

Martina clenched her fist, cold water dripping through her hair down her shoulders while the last of the steam dissipated. Calm. So the day wasn’t starting out the way she’d have preferred. If she hadn’t partied until 1 AM… She had only herself to blame. She stepped out to go get a new towel but slipped and fell, twisting her wrist as she attempted to catch herself, but bruising her hip all the same.

Once she stood up, she watched the glass she used to take her meds slide off her bathroom sink, shattering into a thousand pieces on the floor between her and the doorway. Several fragments lacerated her shins and the tops of her feet. Blood mingled with the water dripping down her legs.

“I’m not that drunk still, am I?” she insisted. She tried running water from the sink to rinse her hair, but that didn’t work either. “Fucking Mondays are the worst.” Martina took the kitten robe from the back of her door and put it on, stepping over the glass into the hallway, leaving faint, bloody footprints in her wake as she limped into her bedroom.

The bathroom light went out behind her. A breeze chilled her skin, raising goosebumps on her flesh as she pulled the robe closer. Her rumpled towel lay on the foot of her bed, damp as if it had already been used. “What in the world is this doing here?” she said aloud. She took it to the kitchen, where she managed to rinse her hair in the kitchen sink using the hand-sprayer. Her phone began to vibrate, its melody crescendoing to lure her to wakefulness. It said 4 am now, but she swore she had awoken to her 4:30 alarm...hadn’t she? Then she remembered she’d gotten out of bed at 3 AM. So confusing.

Dabbing at her legs with a paper towel, Martina blotted the blood before bandaging the cuts that were little more than superficial. She dressed in well-cut gray trousers and matching jacket, with a pale blouse that complimented her eyes. Coiling her hair up in a bun, she pinned it in place and applied a light amount of makeup, enough to mask the bags under her eyes.

Martina’s backup alarm started chiming, quiet - like birds chirping - then got louder and more incessant. She drank a glass of water to help the dehydration, knocking back a pair of ibuprofen for good measure. Through the alarm she heard two soft but rapid knocks. Was that someone at the front door again? Two more knocks.

A blood-curdling shriek came from the hallway outside the door, and she froze. Martina heard the water in the shower come on, then looked and saw the puff of steam as it began to billow out of the darkened bathroom. A husky, cracking woman’s voice sang, matching harmonies in the reverberation of the shower. The bathroom door creaked shut and latched. Beneath the door, the light flickered intermittently.

Hungover or not, that was enough for her. Reaching for the doorknob, she grabbed her purse and cell phone. Every light in her apartment turned off and something smashed against the wall next to her as she yanked open the door in a panic.

A small, unobtrusive box was just outside her door, nestled in crumpled and torn brown paper, like supermarkets used for bagging groceries. Fraying twine lay strewn about, sliced apart. Damaged knots once held the wrapping on. No stray strings remained, pruned from the knot to make it tidy. Broken, chipped wax covered the top of the box. Some of it had been scraped away. Beneath the wax she saw it’s only other adornment: Her name, “Martina Devoe,'' stained the wood in crisp, handwritten, blood. Martina sprinted down the hall, and her apartment door slammed shut behind her.