Short Story: The Box

Retired slayer Keely Brewster's dream of a quiet small town life is threatened when a mysterious package appears on her doorstep. Did her enemies track her down?

The box sat on the dinette table, a silent threat to everything Keely Brewster had worked so hard to achieve. She sat and regarded it as she sipped her chamomile tea. The tea was supposed to help her feel calm, but it wasn’t doing the trick. A shot of bourbon might activate the calming effect, but unfortunately Keely had given up alcohol. As was typical of much of her life, her timing in this sucked.

The box had suddenly shown up on her doorstep, all brown and nondescript. No postal marks, no return address, nothing to provide even a hint of where it had come from or who had placed it there.

The first thing she had done, after searching the yard and scanning the street for any sign of its deliverer, had been to get on her hands and knees and put her ear against it. There was no ticking, although that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a bomb, of sorts. The enemies she’d left in her wake weren’t the sort to use such inelegant human means as mechanized explosives, although that didn’t preclude them from paying off a human assassin to get the job done.

A magic bomb, on the other hand, would be much harder to detect and have much more far-reaching consequences than simply blowing Keely to bits.

The white-haired lady from across the street—Keely had only moved in last week, and hadn’t yet had time to learn any of her neighbors’ names—came out to walk her equally white-haired Scottish terrier. She stopped to stare questioningly at Keely, still down on all fours inspecting the box, prompting her to get up and, very carefully, bring the box inside, where she’d set it on the table before making herself a cup of pointlessly ineffectual tea.

Sipping and contemplating, she considered the list of people and other beings who would happily see her dead or dismembered. It was too long to count. After all, she’d killed countless of their kind. Some wanted revenge, some what they would call justice. Others just wanted to remove her as a threat to their existence. Nothing personal.

The former she could understand. The latter she wished would understand that she no longer posed them any threat. She was done with that life. She just wanted to raise her kid in peace. Let someone else deal with all the monsters for a change.

More important than the question of who had sent the package was figuring out how they had found her. She’d changed her name, her looks, her entire life so she could run to ground in the smallest nowhere town she could find that still offered her daughter a decent education. She’d done every possible thing to cover her tracks. This was supposed to be the end of running. A chance to put down roots and give her girl a normal life. Whatever that meant.

She glanced into the living room, at the toys scattered among stacks of still-unpacked boxes, and thought of having to load those boxes back in the Jeep, having to pack those toys and explain to her little girl that the new best friend she’d already made at school was someone she’d never be able to see again, not even to say goodbye. She finished her tea, longing even harder for that shot of something more satisfyingly numbing.

There was only one way to find the answer to her questions. She had to open the box.

She found the large crate labeled “cooking utensils” in the attic. It had gone straight there because she wasn’t supposed to need it. And there was no confusion about what it really contained because Keely’s idea of cooking involved sliding the pizza out of the box and removing the plastic wrapper before sliding it into the oven. She ripped off the packing tape and folded back the flaps.

The first thing she took out was a leg holster. It contained a large, serrated knife with an unnecessarily decorative handle—a family heirloom. She strapped it to her thigh, over her mom jeans, before removing a crossbow and a quiver of bolts. Setting them aside, she next took out a folded black bundle and shook it out to reveal a large black coat, chosen neither for warmth nor fashion, but for how well it hid weapons. Designs were woven through the fabric in dark blue thread—again, not a fashion statement. The designs were protection spells, magic sigils that transformed the garment into a literal coat of armor. Keely folded the crossbow, hung it and the quiver from her belt, and shrugged into the coat.

Downstairs, she added her wallet and phone to the coat’s multiple pockets and picked up her keys before gently lifting the box from the kitchen table. She glanced at the clock on the microwave. She had a little over an hour before she was supposed to meet the school bus. Anxiety filled her at the thought of not being there because of this infernal box. But she’d put plans in place for this sort of thing. If something happened to her, certain folks would know, and her girl would be cared for.

The neighbor lady and her dog were returning from their walk as Keely carried the box out to her Jeep. She ignored the woman’s strange look, ignored the woman completely, feeling a pang of regret as she climbed into the driver’s seat, knowing that it didn’t matter what the neighbor thought of her. As of tonight, the woman would no longer be her neighbor. Keely and Jess would be long gone from that place, running away once again with nowhere to run to.

She sighed, the thought making her tired and sad. She started the car.

The little town she’d chosen as their supposed safe haven was nestled in a mountain valley, surrounded by woods and hills. Keely didn’t have to drive more than fifteen minutes to reach the middle of nowhere. Another ten minutes of hiking brought her to a clearing, far enough from the trails to be reasonably safe.

She carried the box to the middle of the clearing and set it down. Retracing her steps to the tree line, she assembled her crossbow as she went and slid a bolt into place. She found the stump of an old tree, long ago cracked in two and knocked over by wind or lightning or who knew what else and now hidden under several layers of vines intertwined with dead and decaying leaves. She crouched behind it for cover.

Keely had always found that the most straightforward way to defuse a bomb was to detonate it.

Taking careful aim at the center of the box, she let the bolt fly. It pierced the box with a satisfying whoomp, followed by the troubling sound of glass breaking. Not an explosive, then, but a contagion, or a spell or spirit unleashed.

Keely shot to her feet, stretched out a hand toward the box and shouted an incantation. A containment spell. Not a powerful one, nor was she a powerful practitioner—or one at all, really. The spell had been taught to her for just this type of situation, one of only a handful she knew but had never put to the test.

She could only hope that it worked. Still, she took a deep breath as she approached the box. She worked her knife loose from its holster and used it to slice open the box, noticing as she did a deep reddish-purple stain forming along the bottom edge as some sort of liquid seeped through. A potion, maybe?

Bracing herself, she flung back the flaps of the box and peered inside. A plain white envelope lay atop a nest of crinkly, shredded tissue paper.

Warily, Keely picked up the envelope and opened it. What she saw made her sink to her knees as her prior surge of adrenaline subsided.

She removed the card from its envelope. “Welcome!” was written across a navy blue background in a cheerful gold-embossed font. Opening the card, Keely read, “Welcome to the neighborhood! We hope this gift helps you feel right at home. Signed, your friends at the Oakdale Hollow Chamber of Commerce.”

Keely let out her breath and took a sniff. Her nostrils were hit with the strong smell of red wine. Taking the crinkly stuff out of the box, she uncovered a basket filled with cheese and sausages and a bottle of Shiraz, now broken and leaking over everything—just as well, she supposed, what with her giving up drinking and all. There was also a box of gourmet cookies and an assortment of coloring books. The food, thankfully, was wrapped and protected from the spilled wine. The coloring books didn’t fare as well.

Keely sat and stared in wonder. Wonder mostly at herself, at the fact that not once, not even for a split second, had it ever occurred to her that this box could be something good, something innocent, something normal and perfectly mundane.

Paranoia and a tendency to assume the worst had helped keep her alive for fifteen long years in her career of fighting evil. But those things were out of place here, and she was out of touch. She didn’t know how to do normal. She didn’t know how to deal with innocence.

“How am I going to do this?” she murmured to nobody in particular.

The answer came as she emptied the rest of the wine on the grass and put everything back in the box. She would be on time to meet the school bus. She would take her girl home, and they would eat cookies and drink milk and color on wine-stained coloring pages and Keely would remember that there are good things allowed to exist in this world alongside the bad, and she, somehow, had been allowed a very good thing.

And then she would meet her neighbors and try to convince them she wasn’t as strange as she might appear.

And they would figure out normal, together, one day at a time.

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This story first appeared in Women's Work. If you liked it, you can check out the rest of my published fiction here, and subscribe to this publication, where I'll be publishing both new fiction and previously published novellas as they break free from Kindle jail.