Packages — #1
—Griffen
It started with the choker.
It had come in a package one morning, Veronica had nearly tripped over it coming home from her Monday run. She hadn’t wanted to go out running today, but ever since she had caught her stomach looking slightly pudgy in the mirror last month, she had been on an exercising kick. It… well to be honest it hadn’t been going great. Running just wasn’t as easy as it had been when she had been eighteen and in high school. Her form was absolute trash and her breasts were a lot more unruly than they had been when she had been running cross country. She felt like a character in some poorly written porno with how much they were bouncing around. Veronica idly considered It might be time to throw in the running towel and find something easier on her knees and chest like yoga.
Her thoughts about exercise aside, Veronica had been expecting some cleaning supplies she had ordered offline a few nights before, so she brought the small box into her apartment without a second thought. It was only after she opened it and found the plain black leather strap that she bothered to check the box. No return address, which was weird, but even weirder still it was made out to ‘Vikki’, which was a name she hadn’t used since middle school. Tired from a long day at the lab and the workout after, she had dumped the entire box into the trash and put the entire affair out of her mind. She had turned her bedside radio on and went to bed, letting the dulcet tones of Mozart lull her to sleep. And when her alarm went off the next morning she got up and ready for work.
It wasn’t until lunch when Aaron complimented her on her new jewelry that she realized that it had somehow made its way from the trash to her neck. She had been completely distracted from chewing him out of the inappropriateness of the comment to his superior with the existential horror of realizing she was actually wearing something she thought she had thrown out. Veronica had immediately gone to the bathroom and taken it off. Gently, using the clasp in the back and setting it on the counter. She had meant to rip it off and throw it into another trash can, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do that either.
That scared her more than anything.
She stood in that bathroom for thirty minutes, hand over the can trying to just let the choker go before giving up. Part of her wanted to put it back on for some unknown reason, but she was at least able to stop that impulse. Instead she dropped it into her lab coat pocket and went about the rest of her day, only ing it long after the day had ended and she was alone in the laboratory.
She knew something was going on since she couldn’t throw the thing out. Or burn it. Or do anything she could think of that would permanently damage the choker.
So Veronica focused on what she could do. Composition analysis found nothing odd about it. No circuits, no secret chemicals. By all s it was just a plain leather choker. A plain leather choker she couldn’t throw away. It was the barest of comforts knowing the choker itself wasn’t a problem since it left her no idea what was going on, but she took the win where she could. Still, she made a point of washing it a few times. It didn’t shrink, which was odd but could have easily been explained by some form of chemical treatment…
… that the composition analysis missed.
Veronica took the choker home with her that night with more questions that she started. Instead of leaving it somewhere that it might … escape or whatever it had done, she locked it in one of her drawers. And when she woke up the next morning, it was still in the drawer, locked away. She still couldn’t throw it out, but she took the win where she could and went to work without the choker.
Veronica didn’t even make it to eleven before she had to go home from feeling ill. Nausea so bad she couldn’t see straight or keep more than a thought in her head at a time. Antacid did nothing. Nor did any of the food she tried to attempt to settle her stomach. It was only out of sheer desperation that she opened the drawer and took the choker out. The instant she put her fingers on it, the nausea left and she could think again.
Something so painful normal, unadorned with details or markings and proven to be nothing odd in its composition and it still had this much of a hold on her after only two days?
Veronica drank that night looking to soothe the fear that came with that realization. It made her forget for the night, but in the painful reality of the morning’s sun and with Mozart still quietly playing in the background, she had the painful hangover realization that she couldn’t leave the choker at home again. She needed to take it to work with her so she could live her life while she figured out what was going on. She didn’t have to wear it, touching it in her pocket seemed to be more than enough to ease the nausea for the time being, but she knew carrying it around was going to lead to trouble. It felt like she was losing a game she didn’t even know how to play or who she was playing with.
Carrying it only worked until she did laundry two weeks later and forgot it in the pocket. The nausea settled in halfway through the wash cycle and she spent several minutes tearing first through her house and then through soaking pants looking for the thin leather. By the time she closed her fingers around the soaking choker, she had thrown up twice and was so relieved when the next wave of retching abruptly stopped that she cried in relief.
Veronica was stubborn, but the experience had shaken her enough that she conceded that she needed to wear the damn thing. Not on her neck, she hadn’t bent that much, but as a bracelet. Doubled around her wrist it was just long enough to look like a styled loop. She had never been one for jewelry before, so the extra weight took a bit of getting used to, but by the end of the first week she barely noticed it anymore. By the end of the second it had reached the point where she felt uncomfortable without her impromptu bracelet on. It only came off to shower and even then it was the last thing she took off before and the last thing she took off after.
Veronica still didn’t understand why she had the response to the thing, but after a month of fruitless looking, it slipped to the wayside. She had found a compromise, something that worked for her and accepted that this choker was just part of her life now. It was weird, but not weird enough to dwell on. In fact, wearing it had become so natural that she couldn’t even really what it felt like to go without except bad. It was just part of who she was at this point and she had found peace with it.
Then the second package arrived.