The Old Suitcase

In the bushes at the end of the neighborhood lay a suitcase. The streets and alleyways were quiet as always; the winds gave no indication of foreboding and the chirping of the birds did not cease.

Beaten by time, the valise looked pitiful, with uneven brown edges and distorted metal warped by the passage of time. It seemed misplaced in a nice, quiet neighborhood. A girl, on her way to school, stopped and peered at it curiously as it seemed to sink into the grass, swollen and strange, made even stranger by the lack of attention given to it. She, alone in the sunny morning, seemed to be the only person to have noticed its appearance.

She kneeled in the grass. One rusted buckle was already raised, beckoning to be lifted completely. A steady palpitation, caused by the appearance of an exciting event in a monotone life, thumped within her as she paused before the enigma. Fear and anticipation muted her as she stared ahead, pouring her attention into the peeling material, feeling drunk from the intensity of immense concentration on the present moment. She hesitated, realizing for the first time that with her opening the suitcase, danger might darken her uncomplicated life. The suitcase might be full of drugs, for instance. The second she opened it and discovered the stash, its owner would appear at her back, covering her mouth with a dirty cloth and ordering her not to make a compromising move. The suitcase might be empty save for a gleaming ebony gun, which might come to be identified with her fingerprints. She was incapable of annulling their presence now, as her damp fingers remained uncompromisingly locked on the tarnished buckle, neither opening it nor retreating back to safety. The suitcase might hold a colony of cockroaches that might come swarming out, covering her in blackness…or something even more morbid…

Might. Something. She drew a sharp breath and lifted the seductive, infested clasp, simultaneously enticed and repelled by the sharp snap that ensued.

She felt drunk off the idea of novelty and adventure. Curiosity emboldened and encouraged her. Could it contain fifty diamonds? Too banal. Far too banal…perhaps it contained old documents revealing the secrets of a family long gone to the endless beating insistence of time. Perhaps it contained the skeletal remains of a love story long ago extinguished, flickering faintly back to life only through the yellowed letters and dried flowers found in this pathetic, emotive suitcase.

It might have been all of those things or none of them. Time speeds ahead with constancy and abandon, illogically, as if demented or possessed by a force even higher than itself, dropping tantalizing clues from its pockets in bizarre places, like old suitcases on the edges of obscure neighborhoods, ready to be found and reopened…

That full-mooned night passed strangely for the inhabitants of that alley, as they lay plagued by strange dreams of the past and of trains, while the disturbing light of the moon intruded through lace curtains, as those she stood behind them at the window, waiting.

The following morning was peaceful and still. The suitcase was gone, and in its place were a mother and a child having a picnic, playing in the filtered early light. Their laughter could be heard in tune with the song of the birds, and with the rustling of the trees that, in the darkest corners of the neighborhood, watched closely and patiently.