Speaker 1: Welcome to the Scary Story Podcast. We have an old
school story to day, a type of eerie mystery, something
that could happened to you. My name is Edwin, and
here's a scary story. When I was little, my sister
and I found a box of toys on the sidewalk
while coming back from school. I vividly remember the smell.
It was that strange old glue like mayonnaise, a scent
I only smell now on those wooden cases, the ones
with sets of domino pieces you get from the discount store.
The box was neatly placed on the sidewalk closer to
the curb one house over from ours. It was made
of dark cardboard opened half way inside were three more
cardboard boxes, the larger one at the bottom and two
smaller ones at the top. I try to grab the
entire thing to direg it closer to our yard, but
it was so heavy, and my sister didn't want to
steal anything, so she rereed used to help. I don't
know how many times I told her that it wasn't
stealing because it was in the middle of the street
for the garbage man to find, but she didn't budge. Instead,
she watched as I went through the boxes, taking them
out one by one and then on to the grass.
I opened the first box. As the car started approaching.
My sister paicked and yelled for us to run, but
wouldn't leave without me. I told her everything was okay,
but there was nothing wrong with it. She calmed down
and put her hands on her knees, once again leaning
in closer to my discovery. Inside the first box there
were two wooden cars, toys like for toddlers. It was
a strange feeling seeing something like that, toys things that
we barely had in the house. After lots of convincing
for my mom, there was someone out there giving them
out for free. I set the first box aside and
picked up the second one, a little heavier this time.
Inside was a book, a deck of cards, and marbles
of all sizes and colors. Since I jar, I wanted
to open them so badly, but curiosity got the best
of me, and I needed to know what was in
the other one, the larger box, So I set this
other one down, not as neatly as I had picked
it up. I thought of video games, a Yo yo,
maybe a remote control car in this bigger one, I
felt the excitement huddling in my stomach. My sister looked
around the street, still paranoid that we were doing something wrong,
but still checking out the jar of marbles. As I
was taking out the larger box, it tore from the
bottom and out plopped even more things. Now halfway on
the concrete and halfway on the grass was a red box.
I thought it was cool how they thought of doing
a box instead of a box kind of thing, But
it was strange. On the side of it there was
a crank small like a music box I had seen
at school. I had seen this in old cartoons too.
It was a toy that was supposed to surprise you.
You crank it, it plays a song, and then a
clown on a spring jumps out and scares you. You
didn't try it out. There Inside that other box was
a stack of papers, mail open letters with a tight
rubber band, and yet another box, this one of crayons,
huge with so many different colors, in a big yellow
and green case. It was nothing like the box of
twenty four that my parents had gotten for both of
us to share. And even though I kept telling my
sister that there was nothing wrong with bringing everything with
us and taking it home. I knew that it wasn't
something we could just tell our parents about right away.
What if they thought we had stolen it or bought
it somehow? How common was it for kids to find
things outside and simply take them. But our agreement was simple,
as you would expect. Nobody tells our parents we hide
the stuff under my bed. Either one of us can
come and play with what we found whenever. It was
at school when we learned about apology letters. The prompt
was something like, make up a situation where you were
wrong and disrespected somebody, Now write a letter of apologizing
to them. I really wish I could find mine now.
Such a simple worksheet too, It was funny the way
it was written out. I wrote about stealing that I
had found a bag of money that robbers had stolen
from the bank, and I hid it in the house,
and now I had to apologize to the police because
I had to help the thieves. It was getting to
me the idea of having a box of toys that
didn't belong to me hiding under the bed, but we
had taken them out a couple of times. The playing
cards were normal at first, we played crazy eight in
a game we learned called Egyptian Battle, But everything else
was how do.
Speaker 2: I say it?
Speaker 1: It wasn't what it seemed. My sister hardly asked to
see the toys. After the first week, she suggested a
couple of times that we tell our parents about it,
because she didn't want to get in trouble when mom
found it. She was known to search under the beds
for socks that went missing and for a time, candy wrappers.
I didn't want to tell anyone about it. I figured
if we would offer get the toys would eventually blend
in with the rest and I would finally get to
use the crayons and make noise with the Jack in
the box toy thing. Remember this was when I was
like ten, and these toys should not have been that
interesting to me. It was more of the excitement of
having something that wasn't mine a secret. Then things started
to get weird. It was a little dinosaur toy, a
t rex in the grass of our front yard. I
found it when we were coming back from school on
one of those rainy days, the ones where we pretty
much run down the two blocks to get home. That
was instead of waiting an hour with missus tabla rito
from detention while her parents came to pick us up.
I remember the look of my sister's face when she
saw it, knowing very well that it didn't belong to
either of us, The fear of taking another toy that
wasn't ours, but this one was on our yard, not
on the sidewalk.
Speaker 2: This time.
Speaker 1: My sister was already waiting on the porch of the
house looking at me when I picked it up and
walked toward her. From that day, I only remember trying
to convince her not to tell mom anything, because by
telling her we had to explain why it was so strange,
and from there we would end up telling her about
the box of toys. She had a way of asking
questions like a detective, making us tell her things that
would later get us in trouble. Why would anyone tell
a parent about finding a small plastic dinosaur toy in
the front yard. My sister agreed to keep quiet, and
the toy went in the box. Two days after that,
on a Monday, we came home to a set of
juggling balls and then a wooden board game. It looked
like one of our cousins. It was called trouble. At
this point, I knew it was time to tell someone
about it, and yet, despite not having a reason to,
I kept quiet, and so far I think that has
been the biggest regret of my life. My sister and
I started reading the papers that were in the box
after trying to discover the secret of the toys. Like
The Johnson Kids, the detective series we had both read
at one point The Typical Kids Solving crimes and stuff.
We never really played with the toys. We were waiting
for the next delivery, guessing as to what it could be.
Neither of us took it seriously as we should have.
Of course, we were only kids and the letters were
only supposed to be a game. Sorry for taking what
didn't belong to me. Some of the letters read, I
would like to apologize for stealing letters, some written in
crayons and others in blue or black pen writing that
looked like that of children. I was hoping the toys
we kept finding would turn out to be a joke,
or of a neighbor kid playing in our yard while
we were at school and somehow forgotten them.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 1: Maybe one of the old ladies that lived at the
house in the corner, the one that gave us a
dollar that one time we were waiting for the ice
cream truck. I don't remember when the toy stopped feeling
like gifts and started feeling like warnings. Maybe it was
when the jack in the box broke, or maybe it
was before that, when my sister stopped talking during dinner.
More things kept appearing in the yard, now closer to
the house, a plastic jump rope one morning, coiled neatly
at the bottom of the porch steps, a kaleidoscope, and
in the mailbox, nestled in a bed of crumpled leaves.
I wanted to believe that it was harmless, that maybe
our neighborhood had just gotten strange and the way old
neighborhoods sometimes do when you start paying attention. But my
sister had stopped being curious. She wouldn't even go near
the box anymore. There was a jack in the box
that finally did it. I waited until she was in
the room, sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up,
arms wrapped around her shins. I took it out gently,
like it was something sacred, and turned the crank made
a sound like metal chewing on itself and uneven. The
song it played was off, like a lullaby underwater. I mean,
after all, this thing was broken. I remember turning the
handle so slowly, waiting for the pop, but when it opened,
nothing came out.
Speaker 2: Instead.
Speaker 1: Inside was a folded piece of photo paper, not even
a full picture, just a corner, jagged and yellowed. He
had a part of a face on it, a boy maybe,
or a girl with short hair too close to the camera.
The eye the picture wasn't looking at me, but somewhere
over my shoulder. My sister didn't scream or run, she
just got up and left the room without saying anything.
I found her later in the hallway, sitting with her
back against the wall, like she was waiting for something.
I sat next to her and told her I didn't
think the photo meant anything, that it was probably old
or maybe from the family who threw the box away
in the first place, But she didn't answer. That night,
she came up to me with a folded paper and
asked if we still had stamps. She said she was
going to write a letter to who. I asked, She shrugged,
just someone. That's an apology letter for what She didn't answer,
she just said, you don't have to read it. The
next morning, I watched her drop it into the mailbox
at the corner. She stood there for a while, even
after letting go of the letter. That's when I asked
her if she felt better, and she said no, just tired.
She said she wanted to get rid of the box,
all of it, burn it, or throw it into the
big dumpster behind the supermarket. I told her that was dumb,
that we were being watched and throwing it away would
only make things worse. She said she didn't care anymore,
that maybe you would deserve to be in trouble. I
told her she was being dramatic, that it was a game,
just a weird one, one that we would laugh about someday.
She said it wasn't a game anymore. She didn't talk
to me for two days after that, not at school,
not at home. It was worse than being yelled at,
and I didn't tell anyone about the new thing I
found that week, left just under my bedroom window, a
tiny music box, not like the red one from before.
This one was made of metal, scratched and dented. When
I opened it, there was no song, no figure, just
the dead moth inside the wings, curled up like it
was sleeping. I put it in the box with the
rest of the toys. I closed the lid, shoved it
back under the bed. I didn't touch it again after that.
The next toy came on a Sunday. We had just
come back from the grocery store, both of us sitting
in the back seat while my mom talked to herself
about forgetting dish soap again. My sister leaned against the
window the whole time, not looking at me. When we
pulled up into the driveway, I saw it, a red wagon,
small and rusted, right in the middle of her front yard.
Its handle pointed over the street like someone had been
pulling it along and just let go. There were no
tracks in the grass, no mud, even though it had
rained the whole night before. The wheels looked older than
anything we'd found before, cracked rubber, white spokes, dusted with rust,
and I remember the feeling not fear exactly, just cold,
like the air had dropped a few degrees. As soon
as I saw it, Mom barely looked at it, just
asked if it belonged to one of the neighbor kids,
and told us to leave. It alone until someone came
to get it. My sister didn't say anything. She went
inside and closed the door behind her. I didn't listen,
of course I didn't. I waited until it got dark,
and then I went outside with a flashlight. The wagon
was lighter than I expected. Inside was only one thing,
the glass jar of marbles from before, the same one.
I knew it because one of the marbles had a
chip in it, a green one, my favorite. But now
all the marbles were black, shiny, opaque, like they had
been painted or replaced. I touched them and they were warm.
I didn't tell my sister, not that night. I didn't
tell her the next day either. We had started talking again, though,
and then short bursts, but it was different now. We
both pretended that nothing was happening, that the toys had
stopped coming, that we had moved on.
Speaker 2: But then she was gone.
Speaker 1: It was a Monday morning. We were supposed to walk
to school together, but she wasn't in the kitchen when
I came downstairs, my dad was already gone for work,
and my mom was yelling at the cat for scratching
the laundry basket. She asked me where my sister was.
I said she was probably getting her shoes.
Speaker 2: I checked her room.
Speaker 1: The bed was made, but her backpack was gone. I
told myself she had walked to school ahead of me,
that maybe she was mad again and didn't want to wait.
She didn't show up to school. The police came that afternoon.
I sat in the living room while my mom cried
into a paper towel, and two officers asked me questions,
did your sister have any reason to run away?
Speaker 2: Or was she upset? Did she talk to any one
new lately?
Speaker 1: I told him I didn't know that we had a fight,
but it was dumb one, not serious. I told them
about the box and the toys, but they dismissed it
quite easily. Later that night I found it, part of
the apology letter. It was torn in half, one side
crumpled and stuck under her desk, like it had been
kicked there. The part I could still read said I
didn't know we were taking something that mattered. I just
wanted to keep it safe, but now and the rest
was missing.
Speaker 2: I kept that scrap of paper. I still have it.
Speaker 1: They searched for weeks, put up flyers, brought dogs, and
asked neighbors. Nothing I stopped looking After the second week.
I knew they weren't going to find her. Not because
I thought she was dead, I didn't. I just knew
she wasn't here anymore, like she had slipped through something
I couldn't see, and God close behind her without a sound.
People stopped asking after a while. My parents didn't, but
the neighbors did, the teachers, even the kids at school.
They moved on, but I didn't. I kept the box
hidden under my bed for two more years, but I
never opened it again. The box didn't survive the move.
When I was thirteen, we left the house, not because
of what happened, not out loud anyway. My mom said
we needed a fresh start, like we were cleaning out
a drawer. My dad called it an opportunity.
Speaker 2: We packed fast.
Speaker 1: My mom went room by room with trash bags, and
if something wasn't obviously useful or sentimental.
Speaker 2: It went in.
Speaker 1: The box had been under my bed for so long
I'd stopped thinking about it as real. It was like
a mole on your skin that you forget is even there.
She found it when we were emptying the bedrooms, pulled
it out like it was just another shoe box full
of tangled cords or old schoolwork. She didn't ask where
it came from, just opened the lid, winds at the smell,
and dropped it into the black trash bag. She looked
at me, you sure this is nothing?
Speaker 2: I nodded, and just like that it was gone.
Speaker 1: We moved three towns over to a cul de sac
where all the houses looked like they were designed by
the same sleepy person. The lawns were clipped into greenles.
Our neighbors waved like they were in a commercial for
an insurance company. There was a grocery store that always
smelled like rising bread, and no one ever parked in
the wrong spot. Nobody asked about my sister, at least
not at first, and when they did, teachers, classmates, people
from church, a man's were ready. I used to have
a sister, she passed away. It was a truth sort of,
or at least close enough that people didn't dig deeper.
Some would nod with sympathy, or others would just say, oh,
then move on. It was clean, efficient, easier than trying
to explain something I didn't understand myself. For a while,
they worked. When I started school, I joined the track team.
I wondered birthday parties and learned how to forget things.
My parents stopped leaving the porch light on, but at night,
when the house was quiet, I would still sometimes expect
to hear her. Not her voice exactly, just the sound
of her feet light and quick padding across the carpet
toward my room. I used to hear that sound for real,
and that was the thing. I used to know what
it meant. Now it was just an echo in the walls.
I stopped dreaming about her after the second year, but
every so often I would wake up in the middle
of the night with the shape of her name in
my mouth, like I had been talking to her in sleep.
When I moved out at eighteen, my mom mailed me
a cardboard box labeled childhood Stuff. Inside were bent picture books,
some drawings, a few ribbons, and a shoe box of
mixed legos. I was glad the marbles were gone, and
so it was a crayon box and the red box,
and the one with a crank that was long gone too.
I kept one thing, the book, the one that had
the torn piece of paper from her apology letter. It
was folded flat between two pages of an old encyclopedia
I didn't know we were taking something that mattered.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to keep it safe. But now.
Speaker 1: Now what The torn piece of paper didn't continue. Some
nights I would trace the torn edge with my thumb
and imagine what the rest of it said. Other nights
I didn't want to know. I visited the old neighborhood
for the first time when I was twenty five. It
was a weird time to go, not for any anniversary
or reason. That was just passing nearby for work and
decided on impulse.
Speaker 2: To make the detour.
Speaker 1: The street felt smaller, like someone had gently shrunk it
while I was away. The trees were taller than I remembered,
shadowing the road in a way that felt more permanent.
Our house, or the house I had once been hours,
had a fresh coat of blue paint, white shutters, a
new porch railing.
Speaker 2: It looked like it.
Speaker 1: Belonged to someone with clean shoes and a working lawnmower.
There was a woman out front watering a garden. I
hesitated and then walked up and told her I used
to live there. She smiled politely said that she had
been in the area for a long time. She remembered
my family. She said, she used to see me and
my sister playing in the yard, and then she said
something that's lived in my head ever since. Sometimes I
still see her out back playing alone. She said it
in a soft, matter of fact voice, the way people
mentioned spotting a deer in the woods. I could tell
she was waiting for me to continue the conversation.
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 1: I thanked her and left, even though I had a
dozen questions curling in my mouth. I walked the street again, slowly,
letting my shoes scuff the sidewalk. The cracks were still there.
The faded chalk outlines of hopscotch and initials were long gone,
but I remembered where they had been. I stood at
the edge of the yard for a long time. The
air was still, the house felt like it was watching
me or waiting. I didn't know what I expected to find.
And then I saw it. Near the porch steps. Half
hidden in the grass was a marble, a single one,
red with a yellow swirled inside. It looked new, or
maybe it looked exactly the way you had always looked
like it hadn't aged at all. I didn't pick it up.
I just stood there, staring at it. The way you
look at a flame or a photograph of someone you
forgot you loved. The marble shifted slightly in the breeze,
rolling a fraction toward me. I turned around and walked
back to my car. I didn't look back, not even once,
because deep down I knew something I couldn't say out loud.
I couldn't tell anyone anything. I didn't want to apologize.
Speaker 2: I couldn't. It wasn't supposed to.
Speaker 1: No one apologized to us for taking someone so special
for the night, sorting through her toys and clothes for
vultures to rip through them at the thrift store. They
wouldn't understand the pain of throwing away a hair brush.
In the back of my mind, I knew that if
someone apologized for that, I too had the potential to
make them disappear. It was supposed to be a game.
I think it still is. Scary Story podcast has written
and produced by me Edwin Kovar Rubyas. This story was
written in an older style, with pieces left for us
to fill in the blanks. And I know, I know
only some of you love this kind of story, but
I really want to show you what a short story is.
Speaker 2: Supposed to do. In our minds, at least for me.
Speaker 1: Either way, I want to know what you think, so
let me know in the comments and reviews. I'm catching
up with my reply but i'll get there. Thank you
so much for these, by the way, and thank you
very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.