Xerces Blue
She sits with the box as her only company for three full days.
It's edges pristinely wrapped, the brown paper pulled taught and intentional, smooth on every side. A measure of doubt sits tickling the back of her throat, vague and unthreatening but there nonetheless. There's something wrong with the package, something that refuses to make sense within the confines of her mind. It takes her three whole days to pinpoint the source of it as this: the man (just barely beyond boyhood at the time) she parted ways with was the human embodiment of dishevelled, incapable of producing these sharp corners with his fumbling hands. Yet this parcel sits before her now, silent in the shadow of the corner of her kitchen, and it has his fingerprints all over it.