Return to Sender

A few years ago we had a lodge member who was a pretty big youtuber

They were one of those annoying wannabe YouTube personalities. Over the years, I’ve seen him cough out cinnamon, lay flat on the hood of his car as it slowly creeps down low road, and douse himself in lukewarm water, all the while screaming epic win,epic fail, that was lit! Things like that. It can get tiring to watch him go about his shenanigans in the pursuit of viral fame. Everyone at camp was fed up with it. So, when he announced that he was going away for a few weeks, and asked that I be in charge of getting the camp mail, honestly, it was a relief. I can’t explain the peace of mind I had knowing I didn’t have to brace myself for any of his stupidity for a while. I was always afraid his stunts would wind up messing with camp one way or another.

Things were pretty normal for the first couple of days. Bills for camp electricIty, mail for campers, amazon packages for night programs. Then, one evening, A FedEx man dropped off a gigantic box with big red letters that said “Return to Sender”.

I’m no small fry, but I admit I had trouble lifting the box on my own. It was really heavy. There was no way it could stay in lodge, it was way to big. I decided I’d leave his package in the nature garage. It wasn’t like we kept anything important in there anyway. The garage door was a piece of junk that refused to open without a good thug and a whack(and sometimes a few people) In hindsight, I should have set the package down while I struggled to open the tricky door, but you know how it is when you’ve got a good grip on something, no point in setting it down if you don’t have to.

It was as I kicked the door for a third time that I lost my grip on the package, and it fell to the ground. I heard a light crack inside.

“Shoot,” I said

I hoped I hadn’t broken anything important, but figured I just wouldn’t tell [REDACTED] about it and let him assume the break happened en-route to camp from wherever it was coming from.

Hands free, I finally managed to get the garage door unstuck, and boy did it screech in protest as it rolled up and over me. I dragged the box the rest of the way, setting it in the corner for whenever he would come back to claim it. And then, I forgot all about it. Until a few days passed, that is.

I first noticed the smell at carnival that tuesday night, It was a sickly sweet odor similar to a skunk, and for the first few days after I smelled it, I genuinely assumed that’s exactly what it was: something living(or maybe not living anymore) in the nature garage. It was only when I realized the scent was growing more intense instead of fading that I went looking for a source, as other people started to smell it as well. That’s when I opened the garage door, and that’s when the odor knocked me back, holding my nose.

The culprit wasn’t hard to identify. The only change in the garage was the box I had dropped and then thrown in the corner. I remember thinking it must have been the meat for the cookout, but that would have been labeled as such. The meat must have gone rancid from being left out of the fridge for so long. How much meat could have been in there for the box to have been so large and heavy? It was a smaller week at camp so not a lot could have been in there.

I covered my nose as I approached the box, a pair of scissors in my hands. I probably wouldn’t have needed them to open it, as it had become soggy enough at the bottom to poke through with a finger, but I wasn’t about to poke my finger into spoiled meat juices. That soggy bottom was the reason I had to open the box in the first place. If I tried to drag it out whole, everything would spill onto the floor. I was going to have to dump the pieces of meat one garbage bag at a time, and take them down to the dumpster by Bosco, a process I wasn’t looking forward to.

My scissors tore through the tape along the top of the cardboard box. I thought the smell couldn’t get any worse, but as I flipped the flaps open, I discovered a whole new gamut of stink. It was like opening a burning oven, but instead of a heat wave, I was met with waves of pee and sweat. It was so bad that I staggered back and had to force down the puke begging to guzzle out of me. I don’t think I could have handled that scent mingling with the horrors coming out of the box. I’m not ashamed to admit I ran out of the garage for a breath of fresh air, but in the short time I’d spent in the garage, the smell had become so ingrained in the fabric of my clothes that it clung to me like a shadow.

Nothing I tried could keep the smell out of my nostrils. Not air fresheners, not a face mask, not three showers and a change of clothes. Every second that box lay open in the garage was another second the smell was allowed a foothold into my body. I had to bite the bullet.

I returned to the garage, the flaps of the box still open as though inviting me to look. I was prepared, a clothespin pinning my nostrils shut, a garbage bag in one hand, the strongest cleaner (pine sol!) I could find in the other, and long rubber gloves to keep my skin from having to touch what was inside. But, as it turns out, I needed none of those things.

I wouldn’t have to touch or clean the contents of that box, I would only have to suffer the nightmares every night. You see, there was meat in that box, but it wasn’t burgers or hotdogs. No, it was worse than that. It was my friend [REDACTED] from lodge. Dead. Still in one piece, but dead.

I called the cops, and naturally, they took me in for interrogation. It’s kind of hard *not* to suspect the kid who put the box in the garage, after all. Thankfully, they soon realized I wasn’t involved. My DNA might have been all over that box, the smell might have left a mark throughout the camp, but there was one piece of irrefutable evidence in my friends own hands that proved my innocence: a vlogging camera.

They showed me the footage only once. I’m not sure if they were allowed to, or if they felt so bad for me they figured it couldn’t hurt. Either way, I saw it.

[REDACTED] was sitting in the box outside of a shipping facility, laughing as he told the world how he was going to mail himself across state lines. He’d brought pee bottles, food, a pillow, and a few flashlights. His friend – someone not from camp-but I had seen several times to help with his stunts –, closed the lid and presumably dropped him off for shipment. Throughout the next couple of hours…or days, I’m honestly not sure, he recorded a few short clips about his progress. ‘I think I’m in a truck now, I can feel it moving’, ‘Must be in a warehouse. Pretty warm here. Still got plenty of food!’, that kind of stuff. And then, on the last entry of the camera, the box toppled over. He broke his neck, and that was it. He was dead just like that. The camera recorded until either the memory card got too full, or the battery died.

There’s one thing I didn’t tell the police after they showed me the video. One thing I heard in the footage that will haunt me to the day I die. Just after the tumble that broke his neck, I heard the familiar screeching sound of the nature garage door