empty contacts box
Item:
An empty cardboard box from 1-800-CONTACTS.
Why It’s Here:
I think this is a case of mailroom spillover. We get our mail in the laundry room, after all.
Here’s what I see: I see an ocularly-challenged neighbor who has accidentally overrun his disposable contacts prescription. Despairing of being confined to his eyeglasses for any great amount of time, he turns to the telephone and dials 1-800-CONTACTS.
And then, the waiting! Each day, he returns to the laundry room to check for his contacts—at first hopeful, and then anxious, and finally, as the days continue to pass with no contacts forthcoming, desperate! And finally, in a final manic fit, he returns one last time to the laundry room…and there! Look! Contacts!
In a frenzy, he tears the box open, and then freezes, struck by the most terrible fear—what if the contacts are not inside? He reaches for the box, and then draws his hand back; reaches, draws back! And as he argues with himself, his fragile mind tears itself to pieces, rent in two by the twin forces of hope and terror.
At last he plunges his hands—now mere animal claws, devoid of delicacy or subtlety—into the cursed box, but the great surge of terror which accompanies this act sends his teetering mind over the brink. He brings his hands out of the box, and with them, his contacts, and laughing and screaming he takes the contacts and plunges them into his eyes, and runs blinded and screaming out of the building and into the waiting night.
I think that’s pretty plausible, anyway.
Probable Recipient:
The recycling bin.
Of madness!
Poe vs. Lovecraft:
The presence or absence of tentacled Elder Gods is more or less the litmus test.