BRIAN YEAPLE - OUT OF THE PAST

Brian Yeaple is currently earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing for Entertainment at Full Sail University. His focus is on comic books and graphic novels, and he has several projects in the works in various genres, including coming-of-age, action, adventure, drama, romance, and sci-fi.

Out of the Past
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     The box looked innocent enough as it sat on the front step in the morning sunlight while Darren stood examining it through the open doorway. It was a simple brown, twelve by ten by two cardboard box, with no markings, and clear packaging tape holding the lid closed. There was a label on it, but the ink was smudged and unreadable.   
     Did Maureen order something off eBay without mentioning it?
     He looked around at his peaceful, boring cul-de-sac in his upper-middle class neighborhood. No vehicles he didn’t recognize parked suspiciously. No one walking around that he hadn’t seen before. Nothing was out of place. Nothing out of the ordinary.
     He knelt down and tilted his head towards the box, listening. All he could hear were the birds in the trees and a lawnmower down the street. Running his hand over his mouth, contemplating whether to pick up the mystery box or not and the possible consequences of doing so, he was suddenly reminded of the fertility statue scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was one of those weird, random things one thinks of when faced with a peculiar situation and the mind is trying to cope with it.
     What am I so nervous about? He reached down slowly, and his mouth felt as dry as sandpaper as his fingertips brushed the sides of the box. He gripped the box gently and stood up. There was hardly any weight to it. He shook it slightly and could hear something shifting around inside. Glancing around the cul-de-sac once more, he backed into the house and pushed the door shut with his foot.
     “Okay. Let’s see what this is about,” he said, as he walked through the living room to the kitchen. He sat the box on the counter next to his morning paper and half empty cup of coffee.
     The tape on the lid was just loose enough for him to pull it off. Hesitantly, he opened the flaps to reveal a stack of photos of varying sizes, and he froze.
     “How?” he whispered. With a trembling hand he picked up the first photo, a Polaroid of himself at five-years-old dressed as a cowboy, smiling from ear to ear at the camera.
     Darren couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. His free hand fumbled for the stool he had been sitting on before the doorbell lured him away from his mundane daily routine. He sat down as his eyes began to well up. This isn’t possible.
     He put the photo down and picked up the rest of the stack. There must have been at least thirty all together. It took him over an hour to get through them because he stopped to study each one closely. He was in each of them, and they showed him at different stages of his life. Some were of him with his brother and sister, and a few with himself and his cousins, but they were mostly just him. Holidays, family gatherings, even his graduation picture.
     He was sobbing so much that he had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. When he got to the last photo he froze up again. He dropped it on the counter and buried his face in his hands. It took several minutes for him to take his hands away and look at the photo again. His face was flush with heat and his eyes were puffy as tears rolled down his cheeks.
     “This… this shouldn’t even exist,” he said, picking up the picture. “None of these should.”   
     The photo was of eight-year-old Darren, his brother and sister, and their parents. Darren, his brother, and father were in suits and ties, and his mother and sister were in red and green dresses. It was their family Christmas photo.
     It doesn’t make any sense, he thought. All of these pictures burned up in the fire.
     In Darren’s sophomore year of college, there had been a fire in his parents’ house. The fire claimed his parents and destroyed the home. These very photos had been in the house.
     He had no idea how these photos ended up on his doorstep, or who could have possibly put them there, but he didn’t care. He thought they had been lost forever, and he couldn’t help but smile knowing that he had them back.