The box sat in the middle of my floor. It was a plain, brown cardboard square, but it felt like a live thing. A sleeping animal I'd poked.
I didn't touch it again that night. I did my homework. I listened to Alex come home, his footsteps heavy on the stairs. I heard the low murmur of the late-night news from my parents' room. Normal sounds. I tried to make them wash over me.
The next morning, Saturday, the house was a series of disconnected movements. Dad was in the garage, organizing something with a lot of banging. Mom was at the kitchen table with her laptop and a stack of bills, her forehead pinched. Chloe was home, a rare sight, buried in textbooks at the dining room table. Alex was still asleep.
I ate a bowl of cereal standing at the counter. I watched my sister. Her focus was absolute. She highlighted a line in her book, her movements sharp, efficient. The kindergartener's crayon drawing she'd kept was in a portfolio in a school storage closet. A good luck charm. I wondered if she knew where it was now.
"Mom," I said. My voice was too loud in the quiet kitchen.
She looked up, her eyes taking a second to focus on me. "Yes, honey?"
"When I was little. Did I… did I like to draw?"
The question landed awkwardly. She blinked. "You drew all the time. Why?"
"Just wondering. Was I any good?"
A faint, tired smile touched her lips. "You were very… detailed. You'd get obsessed with one thing and draw it over and over." The smile faded. "We still have some of it, I think. In a box somewhere."
"Yeah," I said. "I think I saw it."
I carried my bowl to the sink. Detailed. Obsessed. The words matched the frantic, dark lines of the falling man.
I went back to my room and closed the door. I pulled the box fully into the light. This time, I didn't just sift. I methodically removed every sheet of paper, placing them in piles on my rug.
There were three distinct types. The early ones: rainbows, smiling families, our house with a chimney. Standard kid stuff.
Then, a transitional phase. The suns started getting faces. Frowny faces. The cars developed frowns, too. The lines got heavier.
Then, the third pile. The one that made my skin feel tight. These were on printer paper, not construction paper. The subjects were ordinary, but wrong. The ladder drawing. The car on the green paper. A drawing of our old cat, Mittens, but she was lying on her side with X's for eyes. A picture of my mom, but I'd scribbled dark, angry circles over her eyes.
And a new one. One I'd missed. It was a drawing of a street intersection. I recognized it. It was the corner of Maple and 5th, two blocks from my elementary school. I'd drawn the traffic light, the big oak tree on the corner, the fire hydrant. And in the middle of the intersection, a blue car. It was colliding with something off the page. Glass was drawn around it as little jagged stars. A stick figure was halfway through the windshield.
In the bottom corner, I'd written the date. My handwriting, big and uneven. March 15.
I didn't need to check the current date. March was months away.
My heart was beating in my throat, a dry, fluttering pulse. This wasn't a memory. This was a place, specific and real, with a future date on it.
I scrambled for my phone. My hands were unsteady. I typed "Maple and 5th accident" into the search bar. I added our town's name. I hit enter.
Local news links filled the screen. My eyes scanned the headlines.
Two Vehicle Collision at Maple and 5th Sends One to Hospital.
UPDATE: Charges Filed in Maple Street T-Bone Crash.
Community Calls for Stop Sign at Dangerous Intersection.
I clicked the top link. The article was from four years ago. A blue sedan had run a red light at Maple and 5th and T-boned a minivan. The driver of the sedan, a 45-year-old man, had been hospitalized with serious injuries. A photo accompanied the article. It showed the intersection, the oak tree, the fire hydrant. A twisted blue car was being towed away. Glass glittered on the asphalt.
The article's date was March 15. Four years ago.
I dropped my phone. It thudded on the rug. I stared at the drawing in my hand, then at the photo on my phone screen. The details weren't just similar. They were the same. The angle of the car, the placement of the glass, the shape of the tree.
This wasn't a prediction. This was a record. I had drawn something that had already happened. A real accident.
But I hadn't known about it. I was sure. My parents didn't watch the local news with an eight-year-old in the room. Had I overheard them talking? Seen a paper? Maybe. It was possible.
But the ladder. Mr. Hendricks fell yesterday. I drew that years ago.
The facts arranged themselves in my head, cold and hard.
1. I drew specific, violent events as a child.
2. At least two of those drawings have now matched real events.
3. One event (the accident) happened before the drawing could have been a prediction.
4. One event (the ladder) happened after.
So what were they? Echoes? Warnings? Was my brain somehow… recording things it shouldn't know?
A knock on my door made me jump. I shoved the drawings under my bed just as the door opened. It was Chloe.
"Hey," she said, leaning against the doorframe. She looked tired. "Mom says you're being weird. More than usual."
"I'm not being weird."
"You asked about your childhood art. That's weird." Her eyes scanned my room, missing nothing. The empty box. The piles of innocent drawings still on the floor. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Cleaning."
She didn't believe me. But her curiosity was limited. Her own world was pressing down on her too hard. "Well, don't be weird. Mom's stressed enough." She pushed off the doorframe. "Dad's firing up the grill for an early dinner. Be downstairs in twenty."
The door closed. I pulled the dangerous drawings back out. The car crash. The ladder. The dead cat. The scribbled-out mom.
I needed to understand the order. I needed to know when I drew these. There were no dates on most of them. But the accident drawing was dated. It was from four years ago. I would have been thirteen. That didn't fit. The style was the same as the younger, frantic drawings. Had I drawn it at thirteen? Or had I written the date later?
The box. It was the only clue. I turned it over, looking for anything. A price tag. A store label. Nothing.
Then, on the very bottom, written in small letters in the corner in black marker, I saw it.
M's things. From the old house.
Storage Unit #47.
The old house. We moved here when I was nine. Two years after the accident on the green paper. Two years after the scribbled-out mom.
Unit #47.
My dad had a storage unit. He'd mentioned it once, off-hand. For holiday decorations and old files.
I sat on the floor, the drawings spread around me like a crime scene. The pebble in my shoe was now a shard of glass. I had two data points that formed a line, and the line pointed to a locked metal door in a facility across town.
And I had a drawing of my mom with her eyes scribbled out. I looked at it again. The pressure of the crayon had torn the paper.
What did I see, back then, that made me do that?