Creative Writing – The Package, Part One
After weeks of waiting Tom’s package had arrived. “It’s finally here!” The thought kept repeating itself in his head. Laura, his wife had picked it up in the morning at the post office. It needed a delivery confirmation signature. Tom anxiously waited all day at work until he could speed home to open it. She told him it was left on the dining room table for him. When he got home, he was so ecstatic he dropped the keys twice when opening the front door. Like a kid on Christmas morning, he was giddy to rip open the package and find the treasure within.
Tom ran to the dining room leaving the front door open. The sounds of his neighbors coming home from their long days at work are in the background. There it was, displayed in the middle of the table. Perfectly centered on top of the white linen table cloth Laura’s mother gave them on their tenth wedding anniversary. A family heirloom passed down for a few generations. Tom’s hands reach for his prize, the package. But he stops with fingertips only inches away from touching it. Frozen he sees a dark red splash on the front, where the label reads his mailing address. The zip code is barely legible underneath the red. “What’s that?” Tom leans in closer, not altering his frozen stance much. “I think that’s blood.”
He backs away from the package slowly, as if it were a wild animal or a bomb ready to explode and take half the house with it. He slowly lurks around the perfectly centered box. On the back, the side opposite to the opening of the dining room where he entered. Tom is horrified to see his package half stained in dark red. It looks like someone dipped it in a barrel of blood or it’s Hemorrhaging from some unseen fatal wound. The dark red was now seeping into the white linen tablecloth. Tom now notices the slow sound of heavy drops echoing in the background. He imagines a thick puddle of dark red building up on the professionally cleaned carpet underneath the dining room table. An uncontrollable shiver of ice rolls up his spine. He feels a numbness that begins at his heart that slowly spreads to his toes and fingertips.
This blog post was originally published on my other website Comic Book Graphic Design and has now been migrated here to RSC Arts, Ralph’s Art Blog.
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