In the playground across the street where local children go to scream, a chubby black boy stands alone, apart from the others. He is not screaming. He is watching you. He wants to see what’s in the box, and you can hardly blame him: the box is, after all, like, really big. It takes up your whole stoop.

You try and lift it. You cannot lift it.

The boy watches as you try and lift it.

How the hell did the FedEx man carry this thing to your stoop by himself, you wonder, and decide that you need to work out more. Stop eating carbs.

Your assistant, Barb Newberg, eats carbs all the time, but she doesn’t like to eat carbs by herself, so she hauls into your office endless plastic bins of Panera. Oily danish and muffins. Barb and her carbs. Like so many middle-aged women you know, Barb Newberg confuses kindness and gluttony, and it’s really time for a new secretary you think as you examine the box, which is certainly big and certainly heavy and all blank but for the taped seams, your name and your address in Foggy Bottom, which is 2486 Asher Place in the fine and fair city of Washington, DC.

You stop for a second and consider: maybe you shouldn’t bring something inside the house without knowing its makeup or origin (the post-9/11 Amerithrax scare when you were an intern has never quite left you), and that is why, standing out here in your bathrobe on the landing of Asher Place Townhouses across the street from the city playground with a chubby black boy staring at you now very intently on one of the hottest days of the year, you leave the box on your stoop, hustle inside to the kitchen and rummage the drawers until you find what you’re looking for: a knife, and it is a small, rust-dotted paring knife belonging to Olioke, which you carry in one hand as you return to the box.

You pare the seam. You look inside as the boy, unsupervised, crosses the street and walks up behind you.

“What’s that,” he says.

The boy climbs up your stoop uninvited and watches respectfully as you stab two messy slits into each side. His patience, he thinks, will be rewarded. It’s only fair.

But life isn’t fair.

By slipping your hands through the slits, you create makeshift handles, and, in this manner, sort of tug the giant box inside, into your living room, ignoring the look on the boy’s face as you gently close the door on him, in silence.

You open the box and immediately recall from fifth grade a picture book called Mammals of Africa: how in the book there was a beast that looked like an anteater; how when the teacher called on you, you talked so confidently about the anteater and were mortified when the teacher scolded you when you were finished talking for not getting it right—it was no anteater because anteaters were in South America, she said, and your class had been studying Africa, and she held up the book and pointed at the title Mammals of Africa—and the teacher, Ms. Sline, who had spent one year living in London with her fiancé before he left her, who still spoke with a fake British accent and even, occasionally, adopted dumb British slang into her speech, barely opened her mouth when she said the word to you, and when she asked you to spell it, you spelled it like you heard it, and that is how the other children came to calling you Odd Fuck all year—but it is not solely because of this memory that you know the gigantic taxidermied beast in your living room is an aardvark; you know it’s an aardvark because that is what Greg Tampico told you the first time he finished sucking your cock.