The wind keened in the birches as the door swung behind Claire and the house took her in. Ice climbed the windowpanes in delicate ribs. On the mantel, three birthday cards leaned like little doors; all of them were blank inside.
“Do you like the house?” Aunt Maureen asked by the fire. She didn’t turn. Her hands were clasped—too tight, as if pinning something shut.
“It’s quiet,” Claire said. She kept her coat on. The couch still wore roses from another decade. The coffee table had a new scar in the veneer and, centered on it, a box in pale pink paper. No ribbon. A warped tag: To Claire – Happy Birthday.
She hadn’t told anyone.
“It’s polite to open a present when it’s given,” Maureen said, voice syruped, not sweet.
“I can open it after dinner.” Claire’s stomach answered with a small, hard knot. She had come for a key, for the letters Maureen said were “left behind.” She had promised herself she would not leave again without them.
“After dinner,” Maureen echoed. The fire crackled and flinched. “Go on, then.”
Claire sat. The paper was damp under her fingers. The tag’s ink looked wet, as if it had just remembered her name.
She worked a fingernail under the seam. The paper parted with a sound like a quiet sob. Maureen’s bare feet whispered on the rug behind her and stopped. Lavender. And meat.
“No ribbon,” Claire said, to have something small to say.
“Ribbons are for show,” Maureen said. “This is for keeps.”
The paper sloughed away in slow strips. Underneath: a wooden box, old and blackened at the edges as though it had been warmed too close to a fire. No hinges—only a fine line like a healed scar.
“Where did you—” Claire touched the seam. Cold bled through the wood. It hummed faintly, as if a fly were trapped inside. “What’s in it?”
“What’s yours?” Maureen’s gaze fixed somewhere above Claire’s shoulder. “What your mother and father never let me give you. Go on, if you don’t accept it, it won’t keep.”
“You said they—”
“I said what I said. And now, all you must do— is accept.”
Claire pressed her thumb to the lid and levered upward. The box creaked open. Darkness first, then the pale oval of a face nested in torn velvet. Brown hair matted to a skull. Eyes wide and glassed. Mouth slack with dried blood tracking the chin.
Maureen’s face.
Claire did not breathe, nor blink.
Behind her, Maureen whispered—right behind her—though the air had not moved. “Well?”
The head’s lips twitched. A twitch that softened into a smile with too many teeth. “What did you get?” the voice asked, silk dragged over broken glass.
Claire’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. The house sat silent— patient.
“You don’t want to hurt my feelings,” Maureen breathed, closer now. A hand hovered near Claire’s shoulder, yet did not touch. “It’s polite to say.”
The tag lay on the coffee table where it had fallen, a curl of pink with her name fat and black. The ink shimmered, waiting.
Claire stared into the box. She thought of her mother’s handwriting on hospital forms, her father’s careful squares on grocery lists. She thought of the key she had not yet asked for. If she named it, it would be hers. If it were hers, it would never leave.
She shut her mouth on the word the head wanted.
“What did you get?” the head asked again, smiling wider, as the tag’s letters began to crawl.
Claire picked up the tag. It tried to stick to her fingers like a tongue. She turned it over. The back was clean, pale, patient. She lifted the pen from Maureen’s dead-silent mantel, shook it once, and bent close to the box until her reflection bent with her in the head’s dull eyes.
“I—” she began, and felt the breath behind her lean in, hungry as a drain.
“I deny thee,” she whispered.
The house let go of its stagnant breath, and the warmth from the fire—found her. The tag took the ink and would not let it go, though it smeared beneath her fingertip. Claire pressed it to the wood.
When she looked up, the chair—and the room— were empty. On the table, the seam in the box knit neatly shut like a freshly sewn wound.
Outside, the wind forgot how to keen. On the mantel, two cards leaned. The third had fallen open. Inside, one last message in her mother’s handwriting: Do not open.