The professor lay slumped on his desk, dead. One hand hung down; a finger hooking an empty coffee mug. His other arm pointed to his MacBook laptop. Before the man of letters drew his last breath he had been engaged in a game of WORDLE. His final game guesses:

BIKER

BITER

BOWER

BAYER

FUDGE

Detective Jeanette Fowler noted the last clue seemed strange. She understood BAKER as the next guess, but FUDGE? She grabbed pen and pad. Rearranging the letters, she looked at suspect Doug Fletcher, the chemistry professor. “I know you poisoned him. I guess your feud is over.”

Of all the private investigators, the grieving widow chose me.

I use “grieving” loosely, because Gloria wore a pink dress when she hired me to solve her husband’s murder. The cops already have a suspect—her. Gloria’s prints were on the bottle of poison-laced pills he downed, and police knew about her flings. But she said she was framed.

Days later, Gloria answered my knock on her door. A younger man was with her.

“I found the killer,” I announced. “At the county clerk’s, I obtained a recent forgery of your husband’s will. It leaves everything to…him.”

The younger man bolted.

Abbot held himself in a strict straight backed posture, his chest heaving certain that to this red-headed teenage girl-- this teenager they'd ABDUCTED!-- must have seen a monster baring down onto her.

She didn't look petrified. She didn't beg or cry.

She just took another dollop of pudding to her lips.

Blinking balefully at him.

"I'm sorry, and also sorry," she said as she began to pull at the hem of her plaid skirt, "that my friends and Adam absolutely won't give up the evidence."

Abbot just groaned, continuing his guard duty of Molly Jones seated.

"Tell me about you."

My mandatory investigating partner is an AI-bot, and I haven’t solved a case in months before the machine does. One notorious thief, who leaves a cryptic signature behind, has eluded us both though.

At this crime-scene, random objects hang from the ceiling.

“Based on the MO, here's a list of suspects.” My partner crackles and rattles off names.

"Ha!” I scoff and walk to the entrance.

“I sense disagreement.”

“Don’t you see the burglar’s signature?”

“No.”

I take a picture of the room and the bandit's smirking face, a juxtaposition of random objects, mocks me with all of its notoriety.

She gave him her smile. And her youth. And her joy. He feasted on it all, then demanded more. But she was spent. Used up. Exhausted. Still he supped on her life-force, until, with her dying breath, she cast him out. Weakly she stumbled away, her faint heart-beat barely a flutter. But outside his shadow was warmth. And smiles. And youth. And joy. The frost around her heart was hard and cold. But slowly it melted away. Each kind word. Each soft gaze. Each peel of laughter. Until she grew a new smile. Different, sometimes sad, but just as beautiful.

She took a deep breath. Their Facebook account hacked. Any minute her life would come crumbling down as she watched "him" do with a handful of her fellow church members. Their ugly secrets revealed for all the world to see. "New video uploaded!" "Christmas Origins?"

Was she spared or was this another Exposé but on a larger scale? By now the church was in an uproar having watched the documentary about Christmas' hidden origins, dark side, commercialization, and Secret Societies. The church had been convicted as Paul did in the Bible. It was time for renewal. Time for God's grace.

They cracked it open with a crowbar because the lock had rusted to glue, and the hinges moaned like they remembered. The crowd pressed in —a sweating, shifting wall of small-town pride—and the mayor, wiping his brow with a pocket square, declared it historic, though no one could remember what year it’d been buried or by whom.

The lid swung back. Silence knotted itself tight, heavy, as if the air had turned thick with waiting. Someone coughed. And then it hit—a smell like burnt hair and rotten lamb and old metal, flooding out in waves, rippling nausea through the crowd. Someone gagged. A child cried. The air recoiled.

Inside, the contents glistened wet and wrong. Not artifacts. Not memories. Things that squirmed, that pulsed faintly, that shivered like they were waking up. Something with too many legs and no face scuttled over the lip and dropped to the ground with a sound like meat slapping stone.

The mayor tried to speak, but his mouth foamed instead, his words guttural and alien, a voice that wasn’t his clawing out from somewhere deeper.

And then the lid slammed itself shut.

The ground beneath it cracked open, and the world began to tilt.

Ramaiyya's P.O.V.

I don't know why I am going with these people, but I believe them to be linked with the box which shocked me to my core and I nearly lost my voice. Yes I started to stammer from the moment I opened that box. No one knows the truth except me, and I can not tell them without learning it completely. Maybe the lake will help me learn the truth completely and I could save them. My amma and pati. They were, and still are tied in that small box, but how in such a tiny box and I am not able to release them. They are bound by some dangerous dark magic, which doesn't allow me to touch the thread or rope on them. They are shrunk into the size of a small toy, but they can talk, that how I learnt who they were. They spoke to me, but they don't know that I am Ramaiyya, their son/grandson. And I have taken a oath to tell them this truth only after relasing them. Maybe till then I complete my reading and reciting practice so that I could speak to them freely after releasing them. Hail trees.

As the ruling Coven of the 100th fold, we were destined for greatness. Rest assured, we took great care to honor humanity. We only turned them into giant apples to be eaten. Their sweet crunches were music to our ears.

As one could imagine, when we located the capsule from the depths of the Hellfire Lake with the absolutely voluntary help of one hundred slaves, we had high expectations. As the hexes were carefully disarmed, we dreamed of the dark magic unlocked before our eyes.

The smoke knocked me out the minute it opened, and when I woke up, I suddenly found out that the sun, which was covered by our darkness spells, actually came out for once. Miraculously, the pitiful humans passing by were not slaving away anymore to our bidding but actually thriving and—dare I say it—laughing at me! It was intolerable. According to the juicy taste of his last words, the greatest spell of history saved in that time capsule was a disastrous spell that inverted everything except for me.

Why would our ancestors make such a time bomb and rid us of the joy of human apples? I can’t tell. Maybe a certain snake might know…

It isn't a time capsule, it's a time bomb.

It exploded in slow motion decades ago, but the pieces and parts have been carefully preserved. Several zip-lock bags segregate different types, and they all fit inside a couple of shoe boxes. The bags and box wear no labels, but I know them well.

"What's that?" she asks, helping me cull items from my shed. Some stuff will be sold, some donated, and a surprising amount is trash. I've hauled everything in this outbuilding around for at least two moves, and the upcoming would be the third.

It's time to let things go.

I smile but don't really answer. "It goes in a 'keep' box," I say, pretending not to smell perfumed letters from one of the bags.

She pretends not to notice that I dodged her question.

It's okay. I still pretend to dodge shrapnel from the girl who wrote those letters decades ago, but I’m not very agile.

The folded pages of college-ruled wear the inky scrawl of a teen girl in love with a boy.

She grew up and so did I, but the time capsule of letters from a love that once was makes memory a minefield.