Author: Alice Rayworth
Every morning, at 9am, the same moving truck pulls up and the same family gets out.
They are untouched by weather; even as the world turns grey and cold around them, they remain in the same summer clothes they first arrived in.
People who live next door, and those who can excuse lingering, have listened in and reported back: the children, three, are Meredith, shortened to Mer, Cassandra, shortened to Cassie, and Jonathon, who is only referred to by his full name. No one has heard the parents’ names, they are Mum and Dad to the children, and a variety of pet names to each other.
They wave at those people who still dare to wander past, too busy unpacking to stop and talk. Every day, the same boxes, the same gestures, and yet the truck never empties. Those same people have reported hearing a discussion, between the adults, an agreement that they will introduce themselves to the neighbourhood tomorrow. They seem unaware that, for them, tomorrow never comes.
Mr McCauley is the only one to ever speak to them, interrupting their frenzied movements a few weeks in. He said afterward that they had moved because Dad had gotten a new job, only a few miles away from their new house, and that he was excited to start the following week. The children, he said, had been enrolled at the local school.
And despite never starting that job, no one ever came looking for him. No concerned managers, no welfare checks from the police, not even a family member – grandmother, or uncle, or a sibling of one of the parents – ever came to check on them.
Mr McCauley hadn’t quite been the same since.
In the town hall, some unknown person put up a year calendar, marking the year anniversary of their first arrival, and everyone else has been dutifully crossing off the days ever since. The anniversary approaches, steady, like a tide that cannot be turned.
There’s no celebration planned, after all, what would they celebrate? Instead, people have begun to whisper, in lowered voices and behind drawn curtains, about what might happen when the final day is crossed off. Whether the truck will keep coming. Whether something might change. Whether it should have changed long ago.
No one has touched the family. Not by accident, not on purpose. It is not a spoken rule, but one everyone seems to know: you can wave, you can watch, but you must not get too close. The mailman, once, tried to deliver a letter. He rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he slid the envelope through the slot. The next day, the letter was gone. So was the mailman. A new one came the following morning, and no one questioned it.
The final week dawns. It’s an arbitrary day, really, and yet it seems to hold such weight. By quarter to the hour, everyone is out on the street, silent. They line the windows, they linger on sidewalks. Coffee cools in trembling hands.
The pattern repeats, seven more times.
And then it arrives.
The calendar in the town hall is full. Every day neatly crossed off. The red marker lies beside it, cap off, dried out. No one touches it.
9am comes and goes. The truck arrives. The boxes appear. The family steps out.
Across the street, the silence holds. Only the children’s voices cut through, the same phrases as always, looping like birdsong no one listens to anymore.
Unbothered by their audience, the family waves. They unpack. The sun sets.
And the people retreat to the town hall, to ask the only question they have left:
What happened?