Someone Turned the Mailbox Around

Chapter 1: Mailbox

The first strange thing was not the old man in the road.

It was the mailbox.

Someone had turned it around.

I noticed it before the football game, when the fields held the last dull light of October. The box stood at Bell’s Crossing, where County Road 6 bent past an abandoned farmhouse and narrowed between two walls of black pine. It was an old rural mailbox, dented along one side and fixed to a cedar post gone silver with age. For as long as I could remember, its door had faced the road.

That evening, it faced the house.

“That’s weird,” my sister Mara said from the passenger seat.

“What is?”

By the time she pointed, we were already past it.

I forgot about the mailbox before we reached the school.

I was seventeen then, old enough to drive after dark but young enough to believe the car made me dependable. My father had died the previous winter, and since then I had taken pride in small duties: buying milk, checking the oil, driving twelve-year-old Mara wherever she needed to go. When nervous, I rubbed the smooth place on the steering wheel where Dad’s hand had worn through the grain.