Almond (ONC2021)

Chapter 1 - Delivery

On the white envelope was one word.

You.

I picked it up off the porch. No addresses. No postage. I glanced up and down the street. Nothing but a quiet suburban Monday morning. All of my neighbors were either at work or traveling for the holidays. The envelope was light, seemingly empty, until I felt something small and hard, like a rock, in one corner.

"Hey Beth," I called out for my wife. When she poked her head out of the laundry room, I held the envelope up. "What do you make of this?"

"It's a letter." She narrowed her eyes to read it. "And it's for you."

I smirked. "Thanks. But if you had picked it up then 'you' would mean for you." I tilted the envelope back and forth and whatever was inside slid in tandem. "Should I open it?"

"Of course. It's probably from one of the neighbors." She returned to folding clothes for her trip.

With a shrug, I tore one end and let the object slide out onto my palm.

It was an almond.

No letter or invitation.

Just a nut.

"It's an almond," I yelled to her.

"A what?"

"An almond."

"Max, are you sure?"

That was kind of an insulting question, but I was too distracted to be offended. "Yeah, look."

She came out of the laundry room with an expression that said she clearly didn't think I had the mental capacity to differentiate an almond from the gas bill. But then she saw it and looked just as confused as I was, which was rare, and something that I would normally be smug about. "Hey, you're right."

I plucked the almond from my palm and held it up between index finger and thumb. It seemed silly to more closely inspect it, as what more could be revealed about a simple nut? Then I noticed the red markings.

On one side was some kind of design. The almond wasn't very large, so correspondingly, the image was small and hard to make out. As I squinted, it appeared to be a rudimentary face, akin to something that a child might draw.

Beth had much better eyesight. "Looks like a skull."

It was an astute observation. "Yeah. Creepy."

"I'm sure it's nothing," Beth said proactively. It was as if she could peer through my forehead and see my imagination already doing cartwheels.

"Nothing? Someone sent me a scary nut. That can't possibly mean anything good. I don't think that's how all the single ladies in the neighborhood would choose to flirt with me."

She smirked. "Only the ones who've met you."

"Seriously, what do you think it means? Some kind of death threat?"

"It's probably the neighborhood kids playing a prank on you."

"Me? What'd I do?"

"Maybe they saw you running around in your squirrel combat outfit and figured you were the neighborhood loony. Y'know, kids can be cruel to misfits."

For several months I'd been locked in a housing dispute with a gang of squirrels that kept chewing their way into our attic. I'd go up, shoo them out and patch the holes. In short order they'd destroy my patches and move back in. Rinse and repeat. I had picked up knee and elbow pads to more comfortably crawl around the narrow parts of the attic but the piece de resistance was the miner's cap with a working headlamp that I found at a thrift shop. When the ensemble was complete my wife had dubbed it the Squirrel Combat Outfit. Personally, I thought I looked quite dashing, but I was also smart enough to not let anyone catch me wearing it.