Every time I get a box in my doorstep, my skin crawls. I used to have panic attacks, but now I know that a) the creepy gift will only come on my birthday and b) it’s inevitable.
I never had simple pleasures such as waiting happily for something I bought online or living for many years in the same house.
I’ve been moving every year, and this person still finds me.
According to my parents, the macabre tradition started when I was 10. My mother got the unknown box addressed to me, her only daughter, and naturally opened it to check it out; at 45, she literally had a heart attack.
But my parents were still able to hide its nefarious contents from me. We moved to another house, and they were the ones to find my creepy gift the next year again. When I turned 12, living in yet another house, I found the box for the first time.
Needless to say, it really messed up my head. My parents tried to tell me it was a sick joke, and that the thing was a fake one. For a while, I tried to believe it. But it was hard, because I had to spend all my birthdays at the police station, and the policeman never addressed that like it was fake.
I don’t have friends or a boyfriend, and I live in fear. I’ve been homeschooled after I was 12, and always worked home office; the only thing I ever do outside of my house is going to therapy. My parents are getting too old to move around every year, so I’ve been living on my own lately. It’s fine, as long as my lease and bills are under someone else’s name. It makes me feel like I have some control over my life.
I legally changed my name twice, but this person still finds me.
Happy birthday to me. I’m spending it at the police station again, testifying the same thing all over.
No, I don’t know who this person could be.
Yes, I tried setting up cameras, I tried having both policemen and private security at my door to catch them, but it was no to avail.
No, nothing out of the ordinary happened to me in the last couple of days, or in any other day of the year.
No, no one has ever tried to kill me. I never wronged anybody, I never accidentally witnessed a crime, I never did anything that could make a murderer target me.
Because – this much is pretty clear – my perpetrator is a murderer.
Every year, I get a woman’s scalp.
I already got all types of slaughtered females: old, young, middle-aged, blonde, brunette. This time, it was clear that the head belonged to a very young female – she couldn’t have been older than 10. My heart sunk.
I hate how they always ask twice if I don’t have any enemies, if I didn’t steal someone’s boyfriend. Because that’s the first thing in your mind – killing someone just to send the top of their head to your rival. There’s no such thing making mean posts on social media or spray painting the bitch’s car.
There are many things about this situation that are even creepier than the scalps.
The first, of course, is that I do my best to hide whenever I move to a new place, but the person doing this always finds me.
The second is that the box always has fingerprints of a single person all over it. He or she doesn’t even try to hide it. Whenever the police check them out, there’s no match.
Like this person doesn’t exist. Or doesn’t exist yet.
Am I too crazy to consider that my attacker is a time traveler?
The third thing is that, when the police technicians run the DNA test on the scalp, they always find the same result, year after year: the dead female is me.
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