Narrator: Abby T. | West Virginia, USA
Dad kept a small cardboard box in the cabinet above his refrigerator. He moved it from house to house for as long as I could remember. Nothing written on it. Brown packing tape around every edge.
After his funeral I brought the cabinet contents home in grocery bags. The box went on a shelf in our utility room. I was too tired to be curious about it.
Two evenings later, light was coming through the door.
I thought a bulb had blown and was flickering. Inside, the room light was off. A bright line shone from a split in the box’s corner. It cast an image on the opposite wall: grass, a strip of paving, the lower half of a wire gate. As though a small projector were running inside.
The grass moved. Somewhere I could hear a ball bouncing, then a child asking for it back. My first reaction was uncomplicated excitement. Dad had collected all sorts of old things. I thought I’d found something wonderful he’d forgotten to show me.
I picked up the box. No cable. No battery compartment that I could feel through the cardboard. The image tilted across the wall, and the child stopped speaking.
A shadow crossed the projected grass. It stopped at the edge nearest me. Then a face lowered into view, upside down, as if somebody on the other side were bending to look through the split.
The eyes were squeezed shut. They opened when I put the box down.
I covered it with a thick towel. The light shone through. My husband fetched a metal biscuit tin and we put it inside. The lid trembled for perhaps a minute, with a small tapping sound underneath. Then everything stopped.
I asked my aunt about the box. She went quiet and said Dad had once asked her to take it if anything happened to him. She hadn’t agreed. I was furious with her for knowing anything at all and leaving me to find it.
She says she didn’t know what it was. She only knew he never kept it in a room where anyone slept.
The tin is in our detached garage. I haven’t opened it again. I wish Dad had left a note. I wish he’d trusted me with an explanation while there was still time to ask him what part of it I needed to be afraid of.
