The first time I saw the box, I thought it was beautiful, which should probably have been enough of a warning, although I have never been particularly good at recognizing warnings when they arrive disguised as beautiful things.

It was sitting on the kitchen counter when I came home one afternoon, small and black and completely out of place among the grocery bags, unopened mail, and the banana I had bought three days earlier and was now pretending not to notice. I had not ordered a box, at least not one that I remembered ordering, and there was no reason for it to be there. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, expecting to find a shipping label or a return address or some other ordinary explanation that would make the whole thing immediately uninteresting.

There was nothing.

My name had been written across the top in dark ink. Not printed, but written by hand in a careful, old-fashioned script I didn’t recognize. I looked around the kitchen as though someone might be hiding behind the refrigerator, which was ridiculous because I live alone.

Mostly.

There are certain things you learn not to question once you get older. You learn that floors creak when nobody is walking on them, that cupboards you know you closed somehow find themselves open again, and that every so often you can wake in the middle of the night with the distinct feeling that someone has been standing in the doorway watching you. You learn to call these things ordinary names—settling, drafts, old houses, tiredness—because ordinary explanations make everyone more comfortable.

I carried the box upstairs and put it on my dresser.

Then I left it there for three days.

On the fourth day, mostly because curiosity has always been one of my more destructive qualities, I opened it.

Inside was a perfume bottle.

It was old-fashioned and beautiful, made of dark glass with a small gold label and the kind of shape that suggested it belonged to another time, when perfume bottles were objects people kept long after the perfume itself was gone. There was no note, no receipt, no explanation of who had sent it or why it had arrived at my house. Just the bottle, sitting perfectly still inside its little box as though it had been waiting for me.

I sprayed it once on my wrist.

The first thing I noticed was sweetness, something warm and buttery that reminded me of a pastry shop I had once passed in a dream or perhaps in a memory that didn’t belong entirely to me. There was something cultivated and comforting about it, followed by leather and then something darker that I couldn’t quite identify.

I stood in front of the mirror and watched the scent settle on my skin.

For a second, I thought I saw my grandmother behind me.

I turned around, but there was nobody there.

I laughed, because sometimes laughter is what you do when you have frightened yourself and don’t want to admit it.

“Very funny,” I said to the empty room.

My grandmother had been dead for nine years.

She had been the kind of woman who believed perfume should be worn sparingly, money should be hidden in at least three different places, and nobody should ever trust a person who smiled too much at funerals. She had also believed in things she would never have admitted to believing in, particularly in front of people who might have called such beliefs superstitious.

She knew which houses were bad. She knew which roads should not be taken after dark. She knew which names should never be spoken after midnight, although she would never explain exactly what she thought would happen if someone ignored her. When I was a child, I assumed these rules belonged to the same category as washing your hair before going outside or refusing to sit directly on cold stone because you would “catch something.” It was only later that I understood that my grandmother had grown up in a world where people didn’t always separate superstition from memory, or memory from warning.

She never, ever opened a package without looking at the return address first.

I looked again at the perfume bottle.

There was no return address.

That night, I dreamed about her.

She was standing in a kitchen I didn’t recognize, younger than I had ever known her, with black hair pulled back from her face and flour covering both hands. She was making something at a long wooden table while, behind her, a man worked at a bench I couldn’t quite see. His hands moved constantly, carefully assembling something small, and every few seconds I heard the quiet metallic clicking of pieces being fitted together.

My grandmother looked toward me but didn’t speak.

Instead, she pointed to the table.

There was a little black box sitting there.

The same box.

I woke at 3:14 in the morning with the strange certainty that someone had just left the room.

For several seconds I lay perfectly still, listening to the house. Then I smelled pastry.

Not the sweet, artificial smell of a candle or air freshener, but something warm and buttery, like sugar and flour and butter coming from an oven somewhere downstairs. It was such an ordinary smell that for a moment I felt reassured by it, until I remembered that there was no bakery nearby and that I had not been baking anything.

I sat up and looked toward the dresser.

The perfume bottle was there.

I was certain I had left it downstairs.

I stared at it for a long time before saying the stupidest possible thing.

“Did you move?”

Nothing happened, and for a moment I felt foolish enough to laugh at myself. Then the bottle moved, just slightly, making a faint scraping sound against the wood.

I got out of bed but didn’t touch it. Instead, I went downstairs and made coffee, because this is another thing nobody tells you about being an adult: sometimes the appropriate response to supernatural activity is caffeine.

By morning, I had convinced myself that I had moved the bottle myself. People are very good at convincing themselves of things when the alternative is more frightening than they want to admit, and I had a long history of choosing the explanation that allowed me to continue with my day.

So I went to work, answered emails, complained about traffic, bought groceries, and managed to spend most of the afternoon thinking about anything except the box.

Almost.

When I came home that evening, there was a photograph waiting for me on the kitchen table.

I knew immediately that it belonged to my grandmother.

I had seen it before.

Except I hadn’t.

It was an old photograph, slightly faded at the edges, showing my grandmother standing outside a small shop with a sign above the door written in French. She looked impossibly young, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, and beside her stood the same man from my dream.

He was smiling.

My grandmother wasn’t.

There was something about the expression on her face that unsettled me more than the photograph itself. She wasn’t frightened exactly, but she looked as though she were standing beside something she had already learned not to trust.

I turned the photograph over.

There were four words written on the back in my grandmother’s handwriting.

He made beautiful things.

Underneath, in smaller letters, she had written:

That was the problem.

I sat down at the kitchen table and read it again.

Then I noticed the date.

September 1943.

My grandmother would have been seventeen.

I knew almost nothing about her life at that age. There were photographs from before the war and photographs from after it, but the years in between had always seemed to disappear whenever anyone tried to talk about them. My mother had once told me that there were years in my grandmother’s life she simply refused to discuss, and when I asked why, she had shrugged and said, “Because she remembered too well.”

At the time, I thought that was simply something adults said when they didn’t want to explain something to a child.

Now I wasn’t so sure.

I picked up the perfume bottle.

The scent had changed.

The sweetness was still there, but underneath it was leather, warm skin, something faintly animal and something almost metallic. It smelled less like perfume now and more like a room where someone had been working for a very long time with their hands.

And beneath all of it was the sweetness again, like sugar beginning to burn.

I looked at the photograph, then at my grandmother’s handwriting, and finally at the name on the little gold label of the perfume bottle.

Until that moment, I had assumed it was the name of the perfume.

It wasn’t.

It was a surname.

The man’s surname.

I searched for it online.

Nothing.

I searched again with the date and then with the name of the town I thought I could make out on the photograph. I searched old businesses, French perfume houses, workshops, photographs from the war, names of craftsmen and manufacturers. I stayed awake far too late, following one useless result after another until the words on the screen began to blur.

There was nothing.

Eventually, I closed the computer and went to bed.

At 3:14 in the morning, I woke again.

This time, my grandmother was sitting in the chair beside my bed.

She looked exactly as she had the last time I saw her, old and small and slightly irritated, as though I had inconvenienced her by making her come all the way back from wherever dead grandmothers go.

For a moment I simply stared at her.

Then she looked at me with the same expression she used when I was a child and had done something she had specifically told me not to do.

“You opened it,” she said.

My mouth went dry.

“Grandma?”

“You always were curious.”

“You’re dead.”

She looked almost offended.

“I know. I’ve been dead for nine years. We’ve established this.”

Despite everything, I almost laughed.

That was the strange thing about my grandmother. Even dead, apparently, she could still make me feel twelve years old.

Then her expression changed.

She looked toward the hallway, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.

“Don’t let him finish it.”

I sat up.

“What are you talking about? Finish what?”

But she was already gone.

The room was empty.

Only the perfume remained on the dresser, dark and perfectly still in the early morning light.

The next morning, I found a small wooden box beneath my bed.

I had never seen it before.

Inside were tiny pieces of metal: a gear, a spring, a little brass key, and several other pieces whose purpose I couldn’t identify. They looked old, although I couldn’t have said how old, and there was something strangely intimate about the collection, as though I were looking at the remains of an object rather than a collection of unrelated parts.

Beneath them was a folded piece of paper.

I knew the handwriting before I opened it.

My grandmother’s.

There were only three words.

He made one.

I sat on the floor for a long time with the paper in my hand, trying to understand what she had meant.

Then the dream came back to me.

The workbench.

The metal.

The little pieces clicking together beneath the man’s hands.

The black box.

My grandmother standing in that unfamiliar kitchen, young enough to have been almost a stranger to me.

And suddenly the perfume made sense.

It wasn’t meant to smell like a person.

It smelled like a place.

It smelled like the workshop in the photograph: leather and metal, warm skin and old wood, with the faint sweetness of sugar drifting in from the bakery next door. It smelled like something being made carefully by someone who took enormous pride in his work, the kind of person who believed that if every piece was measured correctly and every mechanism fitted precisely into place, beauty could be manufactured as reliably as anything else.

That was what frightened me.

Not that the perfume smelled strange.

That it smelled beautiful.

Beautiful enough that I understood why someone might keep making something without stopping to ask what the thing was meant to do.

Beautiful enough that perhaps my grandmother had once stood beside that man and watched him work, believing that craftsmanship itself was innocent.

I heard a noise behind me.

At first I thought it was the house settling.

Then I heard it again.

A tiny metallic click, followed by another.

I turned slowly.

The pieces from the wooden box were no longer where I had left them.

The gear had moved across the floor and was resting against the spring, and the little brass key had rolled several feet away from the others. I watched it for a moment before realizing that I was holding my breath.

Then the gear moved again.

It was such a small thing, almost nothing, but there was intention in it.

I backed away.

From somewhere deeper inside the house came the sound of a man humming.

I knew the tune.

I had heard my grandmother humming it when I was a child, usually while she was cooking or washing dishes, always quietly, almost absentmindedly, as though she had carried the melody for so many years that she no longer noticed she was singing it.

I picked up the brass key.

The perfume bottle was still sitting on the dresser.

Morning light had begun to come through the window, turning the dark glass almost transparent at the edges, and for a moment the bottle looked completely ordinary again. It was just perfume. Just glass. Just something someone had sent me for reasons I didn’t understand.

Then the sweetness returned.

Warm pastry.

Butter.

Burnt sugar.

Something almost comforting.

I stood there with the key in my hand and thought about my grandmother at seventeen, standing outside that little shop in 1943 beside a man whose name had disappeared from every record I could find. I thought about all the things she had never told us, all the years that seemed to have been folded away inside her as carefully as the photograph had been folded inside someone’s drawer. I thought about how families carry things without knowing exactly what they are carrying, passing down objects and recipes and warnings and songs long after the people who first understood their meaning are gone.

The humming stopped.

The house became completely quiet.

Then I heard a voice behind me.

A man’s voice, very close to my ear.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I didn’t turn around.

I didn’t need to.

For the first time, I understood what my grandmother had meant.

The problem was never that he had made something beautiful.

The problem was that he had made something beautiful enough that someone had forgotten to be afraid of it.

And somewhere behind me, in the quiet morning light, something small and mechanical began to move.

Milanka Sulejić
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