I live in an older apartment building in the same town where I grew up.

The place was built somewhere in the 1960s, back when everything was made out of concrete and steel.

You can tell it's been patched up and repainted more times than anyone can count.

Like many buildings from that era, it also has a shared basement. Down there, every

apartment gets a small chain link fence to keep whatever doesn't fit upstairs, holiday

decorations, old furniture and junk. You can see into every cage from the aisle if you stand in the right place.

Most tenants hardly go down there.

I'm one of them.

The only reason I went down that afternoon was that I needed to dig out a box of winter

clothes I'd stored months earlier.

The basement door is at the end of the hallway near the laundry room.

It's always locked, but every tenant has a key.

When I opened it, the familiar smell of dampen cardboard drifted up the stairs.

I looked on the lights and walked between the rows of storage cages until I reached mine near the back wall.

At first, nothing seemed unusual.

Then I noticed one of the boxes was on the floor.

It had been sitting on the top shelf last time I'd been down here.

I remembered putting it up there

because it was filled with old bucks

and weighed too much to keep moving around.

Now, it was lying on its side near the front of the cage.

I stood there for a moment, trying to remember.

...