The Box

There is a box that sometimes sits at the end of North and 5th. It is not a unique box. Just a boring brown cardboard with a shipping label and an orange butterfly sticker carefully attached. For a while we thought that it was someone’s abandoned package. That it somehow got dropped by a delivery driver at this location, but no one’s ever claimed it. No one’s ever moved it.

As far as I am aware no one actually knows how it got there. Just how no one knows where it goes when it disappears. All we do know is that whenever it does appear it is always the same brown box. With the same orange sticker. In the same place. At the same intersection. Over my years of watching, I have seen many approach the box. Mostly to try to read the shipping label, but by most accounts the shipping label is illegible— nonsensical even— and those that have claimed that they could read it in the past all mysteriously go missing in the night.

So there it sits at the edge of 5th and North. Waiting. Forever remaining untouched… until today.