I Have Your Eugene

The box was so nondescript that its very plainness almost made it suspect. A light brown cardboard cube roughly the size of a basketball with a shipping

label in one corner that was badly smudged, obscuring both the sender and the recipient; it had perfectly taped seams that stopped right at the ends of the flaps and there wasn’t a single dent, tear, scratch, scuff, or crumple anywhere on the surface. It looked more like a computer rendering of a box than the object itself.

Martin hadn’t the slightest clue what it was, but he received packages regularly enough that he wasn’t entirely surprised by it. Granted, he couldn’t recall having ordered anything that size, but it was possible that they’d consolidated a few items into a single shipment or had simply over-packaged the thing; he’d recently received a padded envelope in the mail with a cardboard insert the size of a magazine that held a USB storage device not much larger than his thumb.

He nudged the box with the tip of his boot and found that he was barely able to budge it.

Martin ran down the list of things in his head that he thought it might be and, even taken together, the whole lot couldn’t have weighed more than ten or fifteen pounds—nothing he could conceive of that would’ve been heavy enough to make it difficult to move.

He nudged it again as if expecting it to suddenly be lighter, but it still felt like it was filled with lead. This was ridiculous. What did he think it was, a bomb? Anthrax? A severed head? Still, he eyed it warily, as if conveying his suspicions to the box before lugging it inside and placing it carefully on the kitchen counter.