The story prompt is:
When Tabitha came home, she found a mysterious box without any label or return address. She opened it to find a wooden spoon. What could it mean?
Here
was yet another one, left as always on the kitchen table. Tabitha
didn't know how they managed to get into her house, but she had long
ago stopped asking herself about it and changing locks. She had stopped
calling the police too, they thought she was crazy. She sat at the
table to open the box with a knife. Her hands trembled, this should
be the last piece of it all. She had waited for it for months.
A
wooden spoon...
Was
it a joke? Tabitha didn't find it funny. It should have been a long
metal piece, long enough to... Wait!
She
caressed the handle of the wooden spoon. It was narrow enough, with
mysterious carvings all along. The symbols were the same.
Of
course, she couldn't decipher their meanings, but she had learned to recognize the patterns over the years. Twenty years of putting her
pieces together, at first they had come every hour, she had a
mountain of boxes in the kitchen when she came back from work. They
would wake her up in the middle of the night with their ringing
footsteps on the kitchen floor, she had never seen any of them
though. Then, it was daily, smaller pieces. She didn't know what to do
with all that junk, if she threw it away, it would be back on the
kitchen table in the morning. She had tried burning them, smashing
them, still the pieces would always be back.
It
took her a year to start seeing them as a big puzzle. It was Bill who
suggested the idea.
"Oh,
you have things delivered for your hobby? What are you building?"
He had asked.
But
after he touched the first piece, Bill had never been the same again.
She had seen his eyes turning yellow and glimmering in the kitchen
light and he had jumped on her. The neighbor had to take him away.
Tabitha had still the mark of his teeth on her shoulder after all
these years. A panic attack, they had called it. Then Bill had attacked
her every time he has seen her, at work, in the street, until he was
locked at the hospital.
These
things were dangerous, so Tabitha had gathered them all in the old
barn behind the house. To forget about Bill, she had created the
puzzle. Then the pieces had come more slowly, once a week. In the
barn, it was taking shape and Tabitha found herself getting excited
about it and anxious, until suddenly, nothing. The boxes stopped
coming. She patiently waited for...
A
wooden spoon!
Tabitha
stood up, walked to her bedroom to get her suitcase and directed her
steps to the barn, wooden spoon in hand. The machine stood in the
middle, large enough for only one person to get in. She pushed it
out. It was light on its wheels.
She
entered and place the suitcase beneath the seat. She closed her eyes
for a moment and took a deep breath. She places the handle of the
wooden spoon in the hole. The machine shook awake, trembled, lights
appeared all around, blinding Tabitha's eyes. With the noise, she
couldn't hear anything either. She clung at the wooden spoon in fear
and excitement. The machine left the ground too fast for anyone to
see and it disappeared with Tabitha in the late afternoon sky.
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