Unexpected Interaction

You go to sleep at 7:30 pm, thinking that you'll benefit from going to sleep early tonight. You've been staying up until at least 11:45 into the night, sometimes even staying up all the way past 3. You guess that the pros of living alone at 24 are finally being outweighed by the cons, and you decide to finally get it together.

Nothing would've ever prepared you for being woken up in the middle of the night by your doorbell ringing. Is it your neighbors? Did Shelly from the apartment across the hall lose her keys again? Did your mother come all the way from the town next over for a family emergency? You look at the clock, it's 2:00 exactly. Who would ring the doorbell at 2 in the morning if it wasn't important?

You go to your apartment door and open it to find a small brown package on the floor. You are puzzled, you never ordered anything to be delivered by this time. You already had your last order delivered to you three days ago. Whatever the package is, it has your name and address on it so maybe the delivery department downstairs had someone bring it up to your doorstep. Usually they just placed it in the package box right by your door or they'd call or text you first. But it's the middle of the night and you're still tired, so you place the package on the floor next to your bed and you fall back to sleep.

When you wake up at 11 am you look at the package and open it up. Inside is a dog bone, a dog chew toy shaped like a fish, a pink dog collar, and a picture frame of a white dog with brown spots over it. The bottom of the frame says 'Sunflora'. A nice name, but you're just completely bewildered. You know that you never ordered dog stuff at all, so you question why someone would have a package like this delivered to you with your name on it. It doesn't make any sense.

A knock on your front door gets your attention. You open the door and see Marty from the upstairs floor with a dog that looks exactly like the dog in the picture frame standing right beside him. "Hey neighbor!" Marty greets you.

"Hey, Marty. What's up?" You ask.

He tells you about his brand new pet dog, Giselle, and how she's been zooming around the apartment all week long. She's been zooming across the apartment hall, across the street, across the park, and even across the trash area behind the apartment. You ask him what the relevancy of this is, since it sounds like nothing but normal dog behavior, but Marty tells you that she only zooms across the area whenever he brings up your name around her.

"It's strange," Marty laughs, "like she really loves you. But she's never even met you, and yet when I mentioned your name last week for the first time around her, she just started barking happily and zooming across everywhere she went."

That doesn't make sense to you. Or maybe...just maybe there's something to this. You look at the dog that's staring back at you with that tounge-out smile that dogs do when they're excited. You tell Marty to wait right there and you go get the package from your bedroom. You show Marty the contents of the package.

"A bone, a chew toy, a pink collar, and a picture frame with a dog that looks exactly like Giselle." You tell him. Giselle sniffs the box and reachs for the dog bone. You let her and she walks off to the the corner to chew on it in peace.

"That's so freaky." Marty says. "She looks just like Giselle too. You don't think that this picture came from he previous owner do you?"

"I dunno, man." You shrug. "They sent it to my place with my name on it. I never ordered any of this stuff either. Someone rang my doorbell in the middle of the night, at 2 am mind you, and left this package there. I just assumed it was from the delivery department and didn't think much of it."

Marty suggests that maybe someone you know sent this because they lost their dog and didn't know where to look. You disagree. You don't see how that makes sense because why would someone who's looking for their lost dog contact you, some random person they might know and then send you a package with your name on it?

You look at the picture frame again and you decide to post a picture of the package's contents on your twitter and instagram. You ask for whoever sent the package to dm you. Three whole weeks pass by before you get an answer. In between then, Marty grows close to his dog and you also grow close to the furry girl. It's only until after the dog becomes a constant staple in your life that you get the dm.

The dm says it all. Giselle is not the dog in the picture. That dog is her mother. The person that messages you is Shelly from across the hall, the one that sometime loses her keys. She used to watch over Sunflora ten years before Giselle was born, and then she lost Sunflora one day while she was in the backyard, having accidentally left the door open. Sunflora somehow managed to get past the fence and she hasn't seen her since.

You then go over to Shelly's place to get better answers. "Why did you send me these dog items in the middle of the night? I get that you wanted to find Sunflora and Giselle but why not go directly to Marty then?"

Shelly tells you that she never knew that Marty had Sunflora's pup. Someone told her that you had Sunflora now, and that she'd be better off simply delivering dog objects to you in your name. You ask her who told her to do so, and she replies that she got a facebook message from an Alexandra Messenger. When she shows you the messages, the profile picture of Alexandra Messenger shows a woman's face. You realize why Shelly went along with the suggestion, this person looks way too similar to you.

The woman in the photo looks too much like you. She could probably even be your sister. You want to know why this woman would do all of this and send you this stuff through Shelly, but then you decide that you do not care. You love your friend's dog way too much at this point to consider looking further into it. Whatever the mysterious sender was trying to do, they changed your life for the better.