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Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String/These Are A Few Of The Suspicious Things

Do one thing every day that scares you - Eleanor Roosevelt

By Andy KilloranPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String/These Are A Few Of The Suspicious Things
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

The thing was, Stacey understood that her sister Esme cared, that the constant fretting was for a purpose. She wasn’t unwell, Esme was trying to be guardian angel, and she just maybe worried a bit too much, and she wanted to keep her family safe and well, that was all.

Three weeks ago, it had been how to protect themselves from attack by grizzly bears (you punched them, hard, on the nose apparently: Or was that shark attack?). The month before, Esme taught her how to survive in an aircraft disaster: Also, how to not get eaten by fellow passengers and crew, pending rescue.

And just last week, it had been dealing with suspicious parcels, packages in boxes or wrapped in brown paper, bombs and anthrax and who knew what other nasties people might send through the mail

Stacey looked down at the brown-paper-wrapped parcel lying on the kitchen worktop. What? Who! How??

One of her kids must have found this on the doormat and brought it into the house for her.

Now, with Esme’s severe warnings running through her mind, Stacey contemplated the brown-paper wrapped suspicious parcel and tried to remember what to do next.

Stacey figured that the suspicions parcel, even if it was some type of improvised explosive device, could not have a Mercury trigger switch or anything very similar because one of the regular van-driving couriers must have delivered it. Everyone knew they weren’t too fussy in how they handled packages, so if it had exploded when anyone moved it, it would already have gone off.

What the hell else had Esme said?

There was no audible ticking (did anyone still use mechanical clocks to create timers? Who knew??). If it were a digital timer, it would probably be silent, anyway. The absence of ticking told Stacey nothing.

Her sister had given her the whole lecture on this only a week ago. What were the other signs that the package was suspect, that it might be a bomb?

Stacey gingerly carried the package into the garden whilst she tried to recall her ‘Bomb 101’ lesson.

Wait: Excess postage? That was one of the danger signs: Stacey looked down - nope, it didn’t look like it had that. Wasn’t the package coming from a foreign country another one of the warning signs? But again, no - this was pure domestic mail.

Stacey hesitated by the little paddling pool. One of the options to mitigate, she sort of remembered, was immersion in water. Or was that one of the triggers? Damn, which was it? She moved on past the pool. Four inches of water was unlikely to have had much of an effect on a bomb anyway if bomb it indeed was.

What else had her sister said? Hang on – greasy! Was the paper slick? Indeed that was one of the warning signs. Or was it smelling of almonds? Or was almonds when it was arsenic? No! That was cyanide. Cyanide smells of almonds!! But do you find cyanide in bombs?

Dropping to her knees, Stacey buried the suspicious, brown-paper wrapped package at the bottom of her 3-year-olds sandpit, then rose and backed four feet away.

Infuriatingly, her mind was now full of the song from the famous movie ‘The Sound Of Music’ – Maria (the nun and heroine) sang the song ‘My Favourite Things.’

‘Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings’

And Stacey’s mind was unhelpfully adding the following line of ‘These are a few of the suspicious things’.

Irregular or oddly wrapped and sealed, forcing you to open it at one end? No! Damn it, no, this was a standard rectangle; it actually looked a bit like a large paperback book. Jeez, had she just buried a book? But she hadn’t ordered a book. Who would be sending her a book?

She thought about the weight when she had been handling it. Was it excessively heavy? Again, no!!

So, like a book, but a book she wasn’t expecting, and so it couldn’t be a book.

Grabbing her kids plastic spade, she dug the parcel back out of the sandpit and moved a couple of steps to the paddling pool. Stacey dropped the package in the water and watched as it quickly sank to the bottom.

Stacey had zoned out for a minute, wondering what to do next (truthfully, she had been thinking a bomb in a package might be a handy thing to have with you if you were fighting off a grizzly bear), but it meant she did not at first notice the package opening in the water.

The glue melted, and the protective bubble wrapping lifted, and now Stacey could see her sister Esme’s familiar writing inside the package. What was this?

Stacey lifted the water-soaked parcel from the pool, holding it for a moment as the water streamed off it. The ink had run slightly, but Esme’s note was still decipherable, telling Stacey that she couldn’t be too careful and that it was a dangerous world. The letter also said that Esme hoped Stacey would find the gift in the package helpful.

Stacey peeled the wet letter off, revealing the sodden paperback beneath it. Esme had sent Stacey a copy of ‘How To Identify And Safely Deal With A Suspicious Package’.

After carefully securing the damp masterpiece in the trashcan, Stacey resolved to get on with her day.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Andy Killoran

British guy, recently retired so finally with time to read what I want and write when I want. Interested in almost everything, except maybe soccer and fishing. And golf. Oscar Wilde said golf ‘ruined a perfectly good walk’.

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