There are only two things on the desk. My eyes trailed the grain of the wood across my desk, purposely avoiding both the box and key. The box is a gift, and the last gift I received from my father. It's just a small, tightly locked, dark chestnut box with no way of opening it. Thoughtlessly I placed my hand on the top of the box and began tracing the small floral pattern engraved onto it. That was until my eyes caught the edge of the key, sharply reminding me why I was there. There, at my dingy little desk, in my drab, poorly lighted apartment. The key, being a newfound intruder that caused my stomach to tighten every time I glanced at it. Though I still felt my heart plummet when I saw it dangling from my keychain. Rather than throwing it away as I should have, it sat here, staring menacingly.

I had accepted a long time ago that I would never be able to open this box, and in turn, never see what my father had left for me just months before his death.

Stefan Becker. He was a tall, stern man who, despite his soft looking features and blonde hair practically worked for fun.

"Could you come here for a second?" I remember him starting.

"What is it? I'm watching my show." I would always whine.

"Come here. I have something for you."

Though at the time I was as bratty and annoyed as any other preteen, I still begrudgingly moved from my spot on the couch to where he sat was at the kitchen table. It was there where he picked up the small brown box, sitting on the edge of the table and showed it to me, "This is a gift that my dad gave me when I was your age, and I think you're mature enough to have it now." he told me in a firm voice.

I had looked at him with an odd expression, before taking the box into my hands as though it held a bomb. The way he spoke presented it as much more important than it seemed.

"What's inside?" I asked him.

"I don't have the key, but it could turn up," he replied, ignoring my question.

"What? How am I supposed to know what it looks like?"

"You'll know," was all he gave for an answer, and that was that.

The key had never been found, until today. Convinced that there was no other possible answer as to what the key could be, I tentatively picked up the key once more. Sliding the key into the lock and slowly turning it to the side, the silence broke with a click.

Pushing the top flap back, I was taken aback by the pitiful sparrow laying on its side. For a moment a rush of panic swept through me that there was a dead bird in the box, before realizing that it was fake although realistic.

Picking it up and examining it, I found a small keyhole on the birds back, and without a second thought, put the key into the back of the bird. Fitting perfectly, the sparrow sprung up and opened its eyes, and, looking up at me, the bird looked entirely too real.

I watched in awed silence as the bird hopped around and began to flap its wings as though preparing to take flight. Before it was able to do so, I lunged forward and grabbed the bird. The wailing of the sparrow beats into my ears as I forced the toy back into the box.

My hands felt tight and tense, and yet I couldn't get them to stop shaking. They began to shake so hard it was difficult to keep them in the box. With ragged breathing and a few unnoticed tears dripping down my cheek, I closed my eyes.  

The simple act of closing my eyes proved to be a mistake, one of the many. With my head turned downwards, shoulders hunched back, and my hands still tightly, pressing down on the now immobile lid, my eyelids felt heavier.

As if a black sheet had not only gone over my eyes but around my entire my face, my body, creeping in around my lungs and squeezing. As if I was trapped, and smothered.

With my mind drifting, and my body falling slack, the once vice-like grip on the box fell, and my hands instead chose to slide down and onto the desk. The desk is one of the few pieces of furniture that came with this apartment. With it's rough, cheap material scraping against my palms irritatingly, it was hardly a secret as to why.

It was the sound of the barely audible scraping that finally caused me to open up my eyes. The room was silent. There was nothing to be heard not in the room, or outside the small window facing the street, six stories up.

I snapped my head upwards to stare at the musty gray wall in front of me, breathing in a quick breath that seemed to blow away any smoke in my mind.

The bird. What about the bird. The room had gone stone silent when the sparrow had just been screaming not long ago. Distantly, in the back of my mind, I know that the bird must be in the box. There was nowhere else it could have escaped to after I shoved it into the box. A feeling of dread started to well up in my chest as the silence became virtually unbearable. Why was it so quiet?

My hands reached out for the box once more, recalling what I had done in the beginning, catching the lid on it on the edge of my fingertips and slowly curling them upwards. I felt my blood go cold. The box wouldn't open.

My arms moved before I fully processed what I thought to do, my body reacting so fast my mind couldn't keep up. Before I knew it my clammy hands unsteadily grabbed the box before bringing it close to my chest and wrapping one arm around it. Without hesitation, I tried to pry the box open to no avail.

A sound of frustration and distress escaped my lips as I dropped the box back onto the table. Leaning over and dropping my elbows back onto the table, I couldn't help but cover my face in despair. The box was lighter than when I first picked it up, and the key had seemingly vanished. It was as though I had lost him all over again.