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Calvin's Care Package

No amount of brown paper could keep Calvin from recognizing that box.

By Steven A JonesPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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Calvin's Care Package
Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

The paper was the weird part. Calvin had received countless care packages from his parents during his first year at ISU -- ok, countless packages from Mom and one short letter from Dad reminding him that degrees were expensive and failure builds character -- but none of them had ever come wrapped. Really, “wrapped” wasn’t the right word here. To say that something has been wrapped implies a level of care that escaped whoever mailed this particular parcel.

Even the postmaster seemed concerned as she slid the package across the counter, eyebrows tilting as though she expected the ragged edges of the brown paper to disintegrate at her touch. He mumbled his thanks as he traded her a slip of paper for the shoddy box, turning on his heels to hide a crooked smirk. If he didn’t know better, he would say the torn paper had been hastily applied by someone with clumsy, clawed paws.

He did know better, of course. Years of therapy and public education had finally pushed away his childish fantasies. It would be nice if the world was simple. If the deep thoughts that occurred to him as a child speeding down leaf-strewn hills in a rickety wagon could actually change things, or the bad guys were easy to spot because of their deranged mutations, razor-sharp fangs, or terrible odor. But the terrors he imagined as a child were more tangible and less poignant than the dangers of the real world. Inflation and civil unrest didn’t exactly leave a trail of drool in their wake.

But on days like this, when the crisp autumn air had yet to give way to lung-scraping frost, he still caught himself slipping into the old worlds. The trees swayed in the wind, and part of him willed them to double over. To stretch and morph until they were the archways and barren rock of a distant alien world. In a few weeks, their rusty leaves would fall away and the campus would turn into a noir film: black and white, with only moral shades of grey.

The only mystery that Calvin really needed to solve was how to scrape a ‘C-’ in Accounting.

He shuffled through a crowd of girls on their way to the dining hall and bit back a joke about the suspect contents of the evening’s meatloaf. People don’t take kindly to casual asides about incidental cannibalism, even when they know the mini corn dogs on the menu are made of the same low-cost-but-perfectly-normal imitation meat as a regular corndog. Once again, Reality was terrible in such a stifling way.

Settling onto a bench, Calvin turned the package over in his hands. The writing on its face didn’t look like Mom’s, nor was the box light enough to be another disappointing lesson from Dad. But the return address matched the one he memorized in grade school, back when he was certain he’d be kidnapped by nefarious agents and forced to work on top-secret science projects until breaking free and finding his way back. No one else lives there, he reminded himself, Mom must’ve been writing in a hurry.

As Calvin slipped his finger underneath the crude paper trimming, he pictured his mother scrawling a note with one hand and stirring a potful of slop with the other. She had the old landline tucked in the crook of her neck, even though Dad cut the cord years ago. Whatever she was simmering smelled better than the meal he choked down twenty minutes ago, but he would never admit it.

The paper fell away without protest, revealing a completely innocuous cardboard box. He ripped at the tape that held the top flaps down, wincing as it peeled the paper away with it. Damaging a useful box -- even one as old as this -- never felt quite right.

He found almost nothing inside, save for another note in the same shaky handwriting and a toy ray gun from the late 1980s. Calvin recognized it instantly, from the faded green plastic of the body to the comically oversized dish wrapped around the muzzle. It felt lighter than he remembered, presumably because Mom yanked the batteries for use in something else. Although it was equally possible that his tiny hands had simply struggled more with its awkward bulk when he was young.

Without thinking, he hefted the gun and fired it into the nearest stand of trees. For one terrible moment, he considered making laser noises with his mouth. But he mastered the impulse before anyone noticed and shoved the thing back into the box. Despite his haste, he couldn’t help noticing that someone had slapped a piece of tape above the ON/OFF switch, relabeling it GROW/SHRINK in the same, sloppy handwriting. All caps, the unsteady lines of every letter like twigs draped over each.

That wasn’t Mom’s handwriting. It was his.

He turned the box again, this time so violently that its contents almost spilled out onto the pavement. On the sides, in impossibly small stick letters, he saw four labels. Each given their own panel, each running a different direction against the grain of the cardboard beneath them, but all clear enough to be legible:

TRANSMOGRIFIER.

DUPLICATOR.

TIME MACHINE.

CEREBRAL ENHANCE-O-TRON.

Calvin snatched the note from the bottom of the box, his eyes flying over the words so quickly that he had to go back a second and third time to be sure he read them right.

Calvin,

I know this first year has been tough, but we still believe in you. I thought maybe one of your old toys would cheer you up. Good luck on your Finals.

We miss you, all three of us!

All three of us. The more he stared at those words, the more he began to hallucinate an inky paw print at the bottom of the page. He fought it at first, reminding himself what Susie told him when they broke up before college could pull them apart. But the siren call of those words, the idea that Mom and Dad weren’t alone in the house, rattled the cage in which the battered remnants of his imagination lay dying.

By the time he’d sprinted up the stairs to his dorm, Calvin was breathless. Exhausted by the climb and delirious with nervous laughter, he fumbled with the lock for longer than usual. It clicked eventually, leaving him to stare at the cardboard box in solitude. He dropped it in the middle of the room, where it was all but swallowed in a sea of old carpet and $2 movie posters, and started banging around in the drawers of his desk.

He found the batteries underneath a pile of sticky notes so old that their edges had started to arch back toward their top, hoisting them victoriously and wrapping a few knuckles against the desk in the process. The pain faded as he attacked the old ray gun with a miniature screwdriver. By the time he’d shoved both cells into place, his fingers had gone numb.

Armed with a fully operational shrink ray, Calvin returned to the box. His eyes hung on it as he flipped the switch to GROW and raised his arms, bringing the machine to bear. The muzzle came to rest just below the TIME MACHINE label, and he gave the trigger a gentle tug.

“See you soon, Hobbes old buddy.”

Fan Fiction
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About the Creator

Steven A Jones

Aspiring author with a penchant for science fantasy and surrealism. Firm believer in the power of stories.

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