Tritia followed her down the hallway into the closed room that had been her husband’s den. It was now simply a storage room, filled with the physical forms of painful past memories, items either owned by or associated with her late husband. Tritia looked around. She had never been in this room before, had never even been brave enough to ask about it. Now she saw that it was dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined two opposing walls. Clothes and personal effects were piled high on an old oak dining table that had been placed in the middle of the room next to other unused pieces of furniture.

“There,” Irene said. Her voice was shaking.

Tritia followed the old woman’s pointing finger. On top of the open rolltop desk, next to a dusty pile of old western paperbacks, was a small box still half-wrapped in the brown butcher paper in which it had been delivered. There was an irregular trail of clearness, a skid mark through the dust on top of the desk, which made it obvious that the box had been thrown there in haste.

Irene stood in the doorway, tightly grasping the brass doorknob. “It was sent to me yesterday,” she said. She swallowed with obvious difficulty. Her hands were shaking, and Tritia could hear her uneven breathing in the silence of the room. “There’s a toe in there.”

“What?”

“There’s a toe in the box.”

Tritia moved slowly forward. Her own heart was pounding loudly. She reached the desk, picked up the box, and opened it.

She had known what to expect, but it was still a shock. A toe, a human toe, lay in the bottom of the box, unnervingly white against the brown cardboard. It was such a small thing that she would have expected it to look fake, to look rubbery. But it was distressingly real. She could see the smooth rounded tip, the curved lines around the joints, the individual hairs growing from the flat skin below the pinkish nail at the top. It had been severed cleanly, cut somehow, but there was no blood, not even a drop.

Tritia put the box down, feeling slightly nauseous. The toe rolled over, and she could see red muscle, blue vein, and a core circle of white bone. The room suddenly seemed too closed, too cramped, and she backed up, away from the desk.

“Jasper lost his big toe in a logging accident in 1954,” Irene said quietly.

The severed joint seemed suddenly more sinister, invested with a documented past that lent it a decidedly supernatural aura. Tritia looked at her friend. Irene was pale, frightened, and for the first time since Tritia had known her she looked far older than her years.