In the weeks prior to their break-up, she had taken to spending as much time as possible outside of the house. She had recently embraced a new pastime of refinishing old furniture and found the rear patio to be an ideal space to make a constructive mess. Dedicating herself to the arduous labor required to restore large, intricate pieces was a perfect method for avoiding the rest of the world, particularly the conflict that was developing inside her home.
Her boyfriend had always been outspoken, but lately his uninvited opinions had grown more strident and arbitrary, and less relevant to their day-to-day lives. Having previously worn headphones when she worked, she took to wearing them around the house, too, oftentimes without any audio content playing. Now lacking an audience, her boyfriend began to mumble his thoughts only to himself, his feet shuffling along the floor as he moved from room to room. When he started staying up all night, she moved into the guest room.
Most of her clothes were already there in the extra closet so it wasn’t a significant adjustment to their arrangement. She wordlessly retrieved a few personal belongings from the master bedroom and carried on with her life. But an unexpected consequence of this was that she didn’t initially notice when he left. Spend enough time avoiding somebody and eventually they just won’t be there. If they should leave in the physical plane, you won’t even notice.
When she finally noticed he was gone, she did not feel a great sense of relief, that a giant load had been lifted from her shoulders. Instead she realized, after the fact, that she had experienced the gradual easing of discomfort, as if recovering from a bad head cold. Or if a broken-down car parked in front of her house had finally been towed away while she was sleeping. It was a new day, but the same as any other.
The first package arrived about two weeks later. A small cardboard box with an ordinary label, she brought it in from the porch and pulled off the packing tape with her fingernail. Inside was a small wooden music box. She turned the metal key on the underside of the box, lifted the lid, and found that the mechanical device inside still worked. Cute, but not remarkable, it was something her sister buy her from a local swap meet. She left it on a coffee table in the living room and thought nothing more of it.
A week later, another package arrived and she immediately knew that something was amiss. The size of a large shoebox, the package was wrapped in plain brown paper with her name and address inscribed by hand. Though it wasn’t her ex-boyfriend’s handwriting, she knew that he sent it. She hadn’t heard from him since he left and realized now that this was a concern.
She carried the package into the kitchen and used a steak knife to remove the wrapping, revealing a medium-weight box with a taped-down lid. Inside, nestled in a wad of crumpled newspaper, she found two items: a small, cracked hand mirror and a cheap wristwatch. In the crevices of the watch was dry, caked-in dirt, as if the watch had been recently unearthed.
Her mind immediately went back to the day she noticed that he was gone. She had returned to the master bedroom, the one they formerly shared, and found that many of his belongings remained. Stacks of books lay in each corner, piles of discarded clothes were scattered about. Her first instinct was to immediately dispose of everything he left behind. Stuff it all into garbage bags and leave it on the curb.
But as she began to gather the refuse together, she noticed random items that brought back positive feelings, reminding her of times when he wasn’t the worst thing in her life. A comfy t-shirt that he used to wear on weekends, a photo of their first Christmas together. So she went to the garage, a detached unit at the rear of the property, and gathered whatever boxes and storage containers she could find. Respectful of the warm feelings they once shared, she gathered his belongings into the containers and returned them to the garage. But as she tidied up, she inspected the drawer of their nightstand and found that her ex-boyfriend had filled it with dirt.
Now, some weeks later, she was beginning to suspect that her boyfriend’s mental decline was greater than she realized. She repositioned the mirror and wristwatch into the package and carried it out to the garage. Her ex’s behavior was concerning, but there was little she could do about it now.
In the days following her boyfriend’s departure, she had thrown herself into her furniture work, adding a final varnish to a dresser she recovered from her mother’s house and stripping the paint from an old end table she bought at a yard sale. But the broken vanity she found online was the overwhelming object of her desire.
Sensing that working on her back patio was not a serious approach to her new avocation, she converted the dining room area into a creative studio, replacing the table with a workbench and adding an adjustable chair and a utility cart to hold her supplies. She then arranged for the vanity to be delivered directly into the new workspace. When she stood next to the piece, still dusty and discolored from years of neglect, she felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
The next package, a ten-inch square of thick cardboard, arrived a week later. When she opened it she found that it didn’t contain any packing material, just a small fabric doll. The doll had minimal facial features, hair made of yarn, and wore a basic cotton dress. But this doll had also been wrapped with a ropy branch of thorns. Her ex-boyfriend’s idea of a voodoo doll, she thought. A darkly beautiful objet d’art but also an unsubtle dig from a scorned lover.
Before they began dating she found these eccentricities intriguing. But the more time she spent with him, the more she suspected they revealed a hidden condition that she didn’t care to diagnose. She learned to live with his shifts in demeanor but couldn’t ignore the fact that his thoughts were becoming increasingly detached from reality. She tried talking to him about getting help, but the more she insisted that he needed to get better, the less kindness she found in return. His encroaching arrogance now bore a tinge of contempt.
She carefully removed the doll from its box and began to carefully unwrap the thorns, taking care not to tear the fabric of the doll’s dress. Twisting her hand to reveal the underside, she felt a weird tickling sensation along the sides of her fingers, then an itching. Turning back her hand she found that a flood of tiny spiders had enveloped her hand.
She immediately dropped the doll to the floor and frantically brushed the spiders off her skin. The tiny creatures scattered and she tried in vain to stomp on as many as she could. Her heart racing, she felt a frustrated anger well up inside. She quickly grabbed the box and used her foot to scoop the doll up off the floor. She rushed to the back door and threw the box outside.
Marching over to the kitchen to retrieve the bug spray from under the sink, she thought back to how often her ex had disrupted her home, how much she enjoyed now having a peaceful space free of drama. Returning to her studio, she pulled the cap off the can and began spraying the floor liberally. Any compassion she harbored for the man she once loved was now effectively dead.
In the following weeks she dedicated countless hours to refinishing the vanity, stripping off the old paint, patching dents and scratches, and eventually turning to the repair of broken and misaligned drawers. It was on the return from a trip to the hardware store that she found another box sitting on her front porch. An eighteen-inch white cube left sitting under the mail box, it featured a plain label with her name and address, but no indication of how it was delivered.
She passed the box as she entered the house, sighing deeply in recognition of the new version of normal she was contending with. Retrieving a utility knife from her workspace, she returned to the porch and stood over the box, contemplating her situation. Her ex was being a nuisance, clinging loosely to an existence that she was ready to leave behind. But now nearly two months after their split, there was little she could do to permanently excise him from her life. Ignoring the packages wouldn’t make them go away, but she also understood that only she controlled her reaction to receiving them. She bent over at the waist and sliced open the box.
She set aside the knife and parted the flaps, finding a pile of loose, dark magenta rose petals that shifted slightly by the movement. Crouching down closer, she pulled the box towards her and pressed the flaps down firmly. She brushed the petals aside and found underneath, about three inches down, an item wrapped loosely in pale pink tissue paper. She slowly reached her fingers into the petals, underneath the object, and raised it up in her hand. Peeling back the paper, she revealed that in her palm was a small, severed heart.
She dropped the object back into the box and immediately lurched backwards, shuffling a few steps away. She caught her breath, cursed aloud, then instinctively looked around her to see if anybody was witnessing her predicament. Regaining her bearings she stepped back to the box with her hands on her hips. The heart was smaller than a fist and cut neatly from whatever animal it was sourced. Her ex probably bought it from a specialty butcher shop, but she took little solace in knowing that he didn’t do the butchering himself. She kicked the box off her porch in frustration and saw that it left a streak of dark red blood on the floor. Her ex-boyfriend was a menace.
She then heard a noise inside. Without thinking, she grabbed her utility knife off the floor and rushed inside. She took a deep breath as she charged through the foyer and into the adjoining hallway. She passed her occupied guest room to reach the master bedroom, where the door was left open only a few inches. She pushed it open not knowing what she expected to find.
She found the room as she had left it, a queen size bed on one side, a small desk on the other. She stepped into the room and pulled open the adjacent sliding closet door. Assorted coats and dresses hung from the rod, stacks of oddly-shaped boxes populated the upper shelf and the floor below. She turned her back to her belongings and sized up the room. Did a noise come from inside, or was she just starting to hear things?
Her eyes scanned the room, searching for anything out of the ordinary, and paused on a blotch of darkness where the bed met the wall. She went down to one knee and peered under the bed. In the shadowed space she could see that there was a dark scrawl of writing on the surface of the wall. She rose to her feet and pulled the bed back abruptly. There she found that her ex-boyfriend had scribbled long lines of text on the wall, beginning at the height of the bed, then descending downward in a disorganized flow. His words were frantic, describing dark veils and hidden messages and barriers between vision and reality. They became mere scratches of ink at the end, smudged with spit or some other bodily fluid. Her skin crawled as she imagined her boyfriend burrowing under their bed, scrawling nonsensically on the wall, in some clearly altered state of mind. Maybe even she was sleeping above.
She stepped around to the other end of the bed and pulled it forcefully away from the wall. Underneath she found the carpet dingy and foul and immediately went to her knees with her utility knife to pull it away from the baseboard. She ripped fiercely at the swath of dense carpet, not pausing for another thought. The entirety of this room had to be replaced.
It was mid-morning some weeks later that she found herself sitting on her back patio, amidst the remnants of her original workspace. She sat on a flimsy wooden chair, sipping coffee from a generic white mug, looking inside through the back glass sliding door. There she could see her former dining room, her would-be work studio, where her beloved vanity sat in a state of abandonment. The effort it had taken her to repaint and recarpet the master bedroom left her with little energy for personal projects and not nearly enough focus to enjoy the process.
The aftermath of her boyfriend’s departure had left her questioning how she could even move forward, whether she would ever regain the control she felt in the initial few days after their break-up. When he was rational, the boyfriend she knew was strong-minded but reasonable, not one to allow a contentious issue to affect his day-to-day life. But now she could look back and see signs that he was capable of holding a grudge, that he was somebody who could allow a grievance to become his permanent state of being. She couldn’t now think of a scenario where he would ever leave her alone.
She considered calling the police, to seek whatever assistance they could offer. But what good would it do if she couldn’t tell them where he had gone, or what crimes he had committed. Surely he was harassing her, but what would an impartial third party tell her about somebody sending her weird, unsolicited gifts. Could she even prove that her ex-boyfriend was the one behind the whole campaign in the first place?
For a moment she wondered if this would be how she lived the rest of her life, that his presence would always be there. She could move away, she thought, but then cursed at herself for considering such a drastic solution. And how could she be sure that he wouldn’t just follow her wherever she went? Perhaps she could find peace by merely accepting this new, unwelcome way of life.
She then heard a sound that she didn’t immediately recognize. Her doorbell rang for the first time in as long as she could remember. She stood from her chair, looking inside, and considered whether she should answer it. Through the glass door into the house, she could barely see the dark shape of the front door on the other end of the house. Light through the small square window signaled what existed on the other side.
She slid open the glass door, drank a final swig of coffee and set aside the mug. Trudging through the house, she felt as though her legs were weighed down by weeks of frustration, her feet shuffling along without the desire to move forward. Reaching the front door, she paused with her hand on the door knob, and leaned forward with her ear turned outward. She took a breath and opened the door.
Outside she saw no person, but instead another box: large, upright, and situated in the middle of her porch. Unsurprised by the situation, she took a step outside and looked in both directions for the source of the delivery. Seeing nobody, she looked down at the package, her mind free of motivation. The largest box she had yet received, it reached up to her mid thigh. She kicked at it with her foot and found it too heavy to budge.
She then stepped aside on the porch to the front window of the house, where she had positioned a rustic outdoor bench, the first refinishing project that she had completed some months before. She sat on the bench and ran her finger along the line of flowers that she had painted on the arm rest. Looking over at the box, she gazed absently as if she expected her situation to change itself in some meaningful way.
She turned her gaze towards the street and watched a random car drive by. The distant sound of a child playing made her feel as though the outside world was a million miles away. And that she was the crazy neighborhood lady who had a big weird box on her patio.
She then heard a large thump from the side of her house. She instinctively rose to her feet and moved quickly to the opposite end of the patio. She leaned over the porch railing, craning her neck to see around the side of the house, towards the detached garage.
From along the foundation of the building, she heard another thump. Something was moving in the crawl space under the house, pounding roughly into a support beam. She then saw a lattice panel along the bottom of the edge of the structure get ejected from within. A dark figure was emerging from under the house.
She froze with her mouth open as a mass of dirty, unruly hair came into view, followed by a mound of mud-streaked flesh. A filthy, disgusting man was crawling out into the daylight. She mumbled bits of words as she struggled to comprehend what she was seeing. His body was thin, and caked with grime and dirt, and he struggled to stand after he cleared the passage. Turning towards her, she saw him in full and recognized his decrepit, nude body.
His face turned downward, he shuffled barefoot down the driveway towards the front of the house. Crossing to the front steps, he glanced up in her direction. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he said to his ex-girlfriend.
He climbed the steps towards the front door and bent to pick up the box. She followed as he returned in the direction he came, watching from the driveway as he carried the box to the detached garage. She stood mute as he set the box down, opened the garage door, and unceremoniously placed the package amongst his other belongings.
She then watched as he walked back down the driveway towards her, dropped down to his knees, and crawled back under their house.