(This is the first story I ever published: 3rd place winner of the 2009 Vancouver Currier Literary Contest, which was to write a story that included the line, “The ‘gift’ came in a small, brown box.”)
Millard Bottomwell found the magazine a few steps from the trail, half-buried under a flat stone and spattered with a freshly-devastated anthill—the work, certainly, of the two youngest Cartwright boys who had fled past him back toward town a few minutes before, howling in the rain like hyenas.
He huffed a few bitter words down the path behind them about litter and wasted youth and bent to tug at the glossy, soggy pages.
It looked like some sort of catalogue. He peered at the cover, but it was getting late and his rheumy eyes couldn’t make out any details in the green gloom of rain and leaves. The pages were crusted together and it was badly faded. Just trash, he told himself, and gave it a whack against the wet denim on his knee, flinging angry ants and the biggest gobs of mud into the bushes along the path. Then he rolled it up and slipped it into the pocket of his overcoat.
Bottomwell had lived in the same saggy, two-room house for as long as he could remember. It hunkered at the edge of town, crouching its back against the woods like an old toad ready to jump. He stomped up the steps of the porch, pushed through the crooked screen door to the kitchen, and unfurled his prize. Gently, he peeled each page from their binding and dipped them under the faucet, watching sand and mud swirl down the drain and spitting harsh words about clogged sinks and crooked plumbers. Then he lay the pages out to dry, setting the order card aside, which had fallen into the sink with a wet slap and made him mutter about the goddamn cards that fell out of the middle of magazines. He swallowed his curiosity and resisted looking to closely at anything, supplementing his willpower by not donning his glasses. Tomorrow he’d have a look.
The next morning he opened the yellow, vegetable-patterned curtains and prepared his two soft-boiled eggs slowly, turning the water up to a tedious simmer. He dunked his Wonder Bread into them gingerly, and chewed each bite an even twenty times. His eyes wandered between his glasses on the table and the blurry squares of the catalogue pages drying along the kitchen counter, and hanging like laundry from the three other chairs around the table.
After washing his spoon much longer than was probably necessary, he could think of no other reason to put it off. He perched his reading glasses on the tip of his nose and peered down at the pages, one by one, through the narrow eyes of an angry parent, beginning with the cover.
It was clear he had been wrong in his assumption that the neighbor boys had left this in the woods—it was much older than that. The cover was still too faded to make out what it once advertised, but the title, barely legible and scripted in gaudy, elegant font, was Material Bliss. He scoffed and unconsciously glanced around his kitchen: faded curtains and Formica table set, with all but the chair he now sat in erupting yellow foam; the cabinets, doors askew and covered in green paint, wood cracked with age; the throw rug in the middle of everything—once, he’d thought it was too garish, but now it was a depleted sort of murky grey-brown. He thought maybe it had once been orange and yellow, to match the curtains.
Some of the pages were altogether too faded to read, even after he’d taken them outside into the sunlight. It was much too bright, but the smell of yesterday’s rain was pleasant enough to suffer through the rest. Each page advertised one item. Some, like the ‘Pine and Oak Rocking Chair—sit yourself to inner-calm!’ were alright, he supposed, but others, like the ‘Ribbons of World Peace—bring love to the world with ribbons in your hair! (color may vary from image shown)’ were esoteric and annoying. Each page had a whimsical drawing of pudgy children with the wings of butterflies laughing and playing with whatever was for sale. He studied each, holding each side up to the light and peering down his nose through the lenses of his glasses.
“Crap,” he said of the rocking chair.
“Hogwash,” of the ribbons.
“Ridiculous,” he muttered at the ‘Crystal Pantaloons—shimmer like the stars!’
And of the ‘Solid Marble Wall Clock—know what time it really is!’ he only grunted.
He crumpled each page as he went and tossed it in the green plastic trash bin he’d brought outside with him. No prices were listed anyway, which meant it was too expensive.
After a while the last page was in the trash. Garbage after all.
Back inside, something he’d forgotten caught his eye: the pale rectangle of the cardboard order form, drying by the sink. He hobbled over, scowling, and was just about to cast it amongst its fellows in the waste basket when something printed across the bottom of it, less faded than the rest of the magazine, grabbed his attention.
Find happiness in your Free Gift Today! No Purchase Necessary! Satisfaction Guaranteed! (Must be 15 or older. Offer not valid in MI, TX, or AB. Happiness not guaranteed. Allow 6-8 Weeks for delivery.)
His hand let the card hover above the trashcan. The place was probably long out of business. Must be garbage, anyway. Free. Pah! What was free anymore?
Still, it hovered. What would the harm be? After all, it did say ‘No Postage Necessary.’
So he checked the little box next to the phrase Yes! Send Me My Free Gift! (By checking the box I acknowledge I have read all the Terms and Conditions), wishing only a little he knew what they were while he filled out his address on lines so faded they were almost invisible. Then, he made the walk to Main Street and dropped it in the mail at the little red brick post office.
For the next six weeks, Bottomwell went back to his routine. Groceries on Monday, walking on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on Saturdays pulling weeds in the garden. Now, though, it was spiked with something new, enticing. Every night he fell asleep thinking of the little card making its journey to the post office box in White Falls, New York, wondering who would pick it up when it got there and what would they send back. For the first week or two he tried to tell himself nothing would come—the card was bound for nowhere; they’d been out of business for thirty years or more, or else it was some sort of scam. By the third week he had forgotten pretensions—he knew something was coming.
The ‘gift’ came in a small brown box, and arrived at noon, exactly six weeks later. It was rectangular and heavy, like a book. He frowned. Some sort of cult indoctrination. That would explain everything. His thoughts bounced to the empty trash bin and he glared at the package he held out like a dead snake he’d found in his kitchen. Ah, well. Might as well at lest open it before he threw it away.
“Let’s have it then,” he growled at the package, and took it to the table and his glasses.
There was no return address to indicate that this was, indeed, from White Falls, but in neat script along the seam was handwritten, “Your free gift is enclosed!” So without more hesitation he ran his long, cankerous thumbnail along the tape and pulled back the flaps.
The scent hit him at once, wafting up from the box and enveloping him in unwanted memory. Honey and lilac and citrus and delicate sweat, it was the smell of her.
“Oh my God, it couldn’t be,” he breathed to the kitchen, louder than he’d intended, but there it was. Beneath the scent lay a simple bar of soap. The kind she’d always used.
He was awash. The way her eyes had sparkled when they’d first met, the way he’d kissed her on her nose after their first date. They were so young then! He remembered the first time they’d went camping, and how it had rained the whole time and neither one of them had cared, and how it had rained again on their wedding day and they’d laughed at the dichotomy. He remembered all the little arguments, and the big ones, and the making up afterwards, and the car wreck in India, and how they somehow pulled through unscathed. And how, eventually, they’d laughed about that, too.
He remembered how he’d held the hair from her face when the sickness first hit, and how they’d told each other it was just a bad bout of the flu, how the pain had hit her a few days later—how young she’d suddenly seemed. He remembered holding her hand when the doctor had just shaken his head, and said ‘I’m sorry.’
The memories from her last days came at him from the dark places he’d pushed them into. Staying by her bed, and holding her hair from her face. She didn’t look like herself those last days, gaunt and withered, angry and sad. But her eyes were clear, and her voice, right up to the end, when she’d gazed up at his face, eyes burning with love, and said, “It’s your life, now.”
And then how the sparkle in her eyes had fled, and it wasn’t really her at all.
So long ago. And now his life. Canned food and long walks, wanting no one and desperate for someone. Of habit and pattern and isolation, of never wanting to feel anything again—not wanting it so badly that he’d forgotten why, her last words squandered and forgotten under a lifetime.
It was dark. The kitchen was dark and his chest ached from the sobs that had wracked through him, so strongly from both joy and sorrow he couldn’t tell one from the other. He ripped his eyes from the porcelain square of soap to the little white clock that hung on the kitchen wall. It was ten after five. The post office would be open in less than four hours.
He washed his face and stared at himself in the mirror for a long time. His jowls always made him look like he was scowling, even times like now when he wasn’t. His eyes were dull and pale, and now red with tears, his bulbous nose a color to match. He was hideous and lovely and alone, and he was with her again.
Finally, he went back to where the box lay open at the table and gazed down one more time, running one wrinkled finger lovingly along the smooth, waxy surface of the bar of soap still nestled in it’s crumpled, brown paper packing. He bent his face close and smelled her again, her just as he remembered.
Then he tenderly closed the flaps on the box and resealed it with a yellowed roll of packing tape. He dug through some drawers until he found a thick, black marker, and wrote across the new seam in neat print, despite the tremor in his hand: Please Return to Sender.
He took his time walking to Main Street that morning, and dropped the package reverently into the mailbox in front of the little brick post office. On the way home, it began to rain.
Millard Bottomwell slept when he got home, for the rest of that day and all through the night, still and dreamless.
When he woke up, he was smiling.
I loved it!