Im the only one my street who doesn’t receive the parcels

I moved into the house on a Thursday.

It was a small street. Twelve houses in two rows facing each other, all of them brick, all of them attached, all of them more or less identical except for the doors. Different colours. Different pots. Different wreaths. The kind of street estate agents call friendly.

It did seem friendly.

Before I’d got half the boxes in, a woman from across the road came over with a mug in her hand and asked if I needed help. I said no, but thanks. She smiled and said, “You say that now, but wait until you find the box marked kitchen and it turns out to be books.”

I laughed because I had a box actually marked kitchen that was mostly books.

I told her that and she laughed too, like it was a line she’d been waiting for.

Then she said, “Well. Welcome to Beechwood Close. We’re quiet, mostly. The foxes make more noise than we do.”

After that the man next door leaned over the low fence while I was taking a lamp out of the car and said, “You’ll want to keep that out of the front room if you value your privacy. Opposite can see straight in after dark.”

He jerked his head toward the woman across the road as he said it, smiling a little so I knew it was meant as a joke.

His name was Peter. He was maybe in his late fifties. Grey hair. Good posture. He had one of those faces that seemed carefully arranged. Not false. Just arranged.

I liked him immediately. That was the strange thing. I liked all of them immediately.

Over the next few days I had the same sort of interaction with almost everyone on the street. Small kindnesses. Small jokes. A little too polished, maybe, but that could just have been me. It was a new place. People were making an effort.

I work from home, so I notice things.

One of the first things I noticed was the post.

Most mornings, around half eleven, the postman would come onto the street with letters in one hand and, under the other arm, a stack of thin brown paper parcels. Not boxes. Not padded envelopes exactly. More like stiff card mailers, all the same size. About the length of a magazine but narrower.

At first I didn’t think much of it. People order things. But then I noticed it wasn’t just one or two houses. It was nearly all of them.

House 2 got one.
House 4 got one.
House 6.
House 7.
House 9.

Always one of those same flat parcels. Always pushed clean through the letterbox.

I saw Peter pick his up from the mat once when I happened to be opening my front door. He looked at it, then looked up and saw me looking.

“Nothing exciting,” he said. “Just admin.”

He smiled when he said it, but not in a way that made me smile back.

That was the first moment anything felt wrong.

Only slightly. But enough that I remembered it.

A week after I moved in, a parcel came through my letterbox just after eleven.

I picked it up from the floor without really looking at it. I was halfway into the kitchen before I noticed the number.

I live at 14.

I turned it over. Thin cardboard mailer. No sender. Typed address label. My next-door neighbour’s name. Peter Hall. 16 Beechwood Close.

I should have taken it straight round. I know that.

But I didn’t.

I told myself I only meant to look at the outside properly. I told myself that if it was something private I’d just hand it over and say I hadn’t noticed. The truth is that by then I already wanted to know what “admin” meant.

It wasn’t even sealed very well. Just one strip of clear tape.

Inside there was a stack of pages.

A script is the closest word for it.

The first page had Peter’s name and address at the top, then a date. Yesterday’s date.

Below that, in plain black text, it said:

INTERACTION SEQUENCE 11: NEW RESIDENT / FRONT PATH

Then:

11:08 AM
Resident 16 exits property carrying black refuse sack.

11:08:14 AM
Resident 14 returns from shop carrying one plastic carrier bag and one multipack of bottled water.

Resident 16 initiates greeting.

PREFERRED OPENING:
“Settling in all right?”

ALTERNATE OPENINGS:
“You picked the right day for it.”
“Getting there, are you?”

Then there were my replies.

Not approximate. Not close.

Exact.

I stood in the kitchen and read the whole thing through twice.

It was the conversation I’d had with Peter the day before, outside my front gate, almost word for word.

Not just what he’d said. What I’d said as well.

There were pauses noted. A gesture from him. One point where I shifted the carrier bag from my left hand to my right before answering. There was a line that read:

Resident 14 gives brief laugh, then glances toward house 8.

I had done that. I remembered doing it.

At the bottom of page three it listed three possible ways the interaction might end.

The one that had actually happened was ticked.

I did what I think most people would do, which is I tried to explain it.

Maybe Peter was writing down conversations for some reason. Maybe it was some kind of bizarre amateur theatre thing. Maybe it was notes for a community project. Maybe the pages I was holding had been printed after the conversation, not before.

I checked the top page again.

Prepared: 08:12 AM

That was before it happened.

I took the stack back out and checked the rest of it.

There were six interaction sequences in total.

All dated over the past week.

All involving me.

The first was from my moving day, with the woman across the road and the box of books.

Another was with the man from number 10 who had said, “Bins are Monday unless they change their minds and decide to punish us,” which I had thought at the time was a pretty funny thing to say.

Another was with a woman walking a dachshund who had stopped outside my gate and told me, “He hates men with hats, so you’re all right for now.”

Every conversation was there.

Every one.

It made me feel something I can only describe as shame.

Not fear at first. Shame.

As if I had been caught doing something without knowing I was doing it. As if I had revealed a pattern in myself that other people could see and I couldn’t.

I slid the pages back into the mailer and took it next door.

Peter answered almost at once.

I held the parcel out and said, “This came through mine by mistake.”

He looked down at it, then at me.

For a second I thought he knew. I was sure he knew. Then he smiled lightly and said, “That’ll be the exciting admin.”

I said, “I opened it.”

He kept smiling.

“Did you,” he said.

“I thought it was mine.”

“Of course.”

I waited for him to say something else. He didn’t.

I said, “What is it?”

He looked at the parcel in his hand.

Then he said, “It helps things go smoothly.”

That was all.

I laughed a little then. Not because anything was funny. Because I felt I had to do something with my face.

Peter didn’t laugh.

I said, “You’re joking.”

He said, “No.”

And that was the moment it turned into fear.

Not because of what he said. Because of how calm he was when he said it.

That evening I stayed inside. I kept thinking about all the conversations on those pages. Not just that they’d happened. That they’d been listed as options. That there had been alternate openings, alternate replies, little branches that somehow still ended up in more or less the same place.

Just before seven there was a knock at the door.

It was the woman from across the road. The one with the books joke.

She was holding a ceramic dish covered in foil.

“Cottage pie,” she said. “Too much made. You may as well benefit.”

I stared at her long enough that she shifted the dish slightly in her hands.

Then I said, “What was the line you were supposed to open with?”

She blinked.

“I’m sorry?”

“The first thing. The script.”

Her face changed then, but only a little. A tightening around the eyes.

“I think,” she said carefully, “you should come inside and get some sleep.”

I said, “Did you know what I was going to say when I opened the door?”

She looked past me into the house, as if checking whether anyone else was there.

Then she said, very quietly, “Please don’t make it difficult.”

After that she handed me the dish anyway and walked back across the road.

I didn’t sleep much.

The next morning I waited by the window for the postman.

When he came, I saw him put one of the flat parcels through number 8. Then number 10. Then Peter’s. Then, after a pause, mine.

I was at the door before it hit the mat.

Same cardboard mailer. Same typed label. My name. My address.

My hands were shaking by then, which felt melodramatic, but there it was.

Inside were nine pages.

INTERACTION SEQUENCE 14: RESIDENT RESPONSE / EARLY DISCLOSURE

Today’s date.

The first page described me standing at the front window at 11:21 AM.

That was what I was doing.

The second page described me opening the parcel immediately.

Then sitting at the kitchen table.

Then reading to page four before standing up.

I stood up before I reached page four.

I remember doing it almost angrily, as if that proved something.

I stood there by the table with the pages in my hand and read on.

11:27 AM
Resident 14 stands, believing deviation has occurred.

11:27:06 AM
Resident 14 continues reading.

It’s hard to explain the effect that had on me.

I think something in me had still been hoping for a trick. Some arrangement. Some ugly joke by a street full of very committed odd people.

But there is no joke that gets stronger when you resist it.

I kept reading.

The sequence covered the rest of the day in fragments. Me checking the back gate. Me looking out through the upstairs bedroom curtain. Me not answering when number 8 knocked at 1:14 PM. Me making tea at 2:03 PM and leaving it untouched until it went cold.

All of that happened.

There were alternatives again. In one version I left the house at 3:10. In another I phoned someone. In another I confronted Peter in the street.

None of those versions were ticked.

At 5:42 PM there was a section titled DIGITAL DISCLOSURE.

It described me sitting at the table with my laptop open.

It described, in broad terms, what I would write. Not word for word. More like an outline.

Resident 14 seeks external confirmation.
Resident 14 frames material as request for advice.
Resident 14 omits certain details in hope of sounding credible.

That last part bothered me because it was true. Even now I can feel myself deciding which parts to keep and which parts sound insane.

There was one more page after that.

Page nine.

Or there should have been.

The stack went from page eight to page ten.

Page ten was the final sheet in the mailer.

The top half was blank except for the time.

11:43 PM

Then:

Resident 14 hears first knock at front door.

Below that:

Resident 14 remains seated for 4.2 seconds.

Below that:

Resident 14

And that was it.

The rest of page ten was blank.

I checked the envelope again. I checked under the table. I checked the bin. I even checked between the pages as if one could somehow be stuck there and I’d missed it.

Page nine was gone. Half of page ten might as well have been gone too.

I went next door at about six and knocked on Peter’s door hard enough to hurt my hand.

He answered after a while, already wearing his coat.

Like he’d been about to leave.

I held up the pages and said, “What happens at 11:43?”

He looked at the time stamp on the last sheet. He didn’t even pretend not to know what he was looking at.

Then he said, “Sometimes they don’t include the end.”

“Who are they?”

He gave me a look I still can’t make sense of. Not pity. Not amusement. Something flatter than that.

“Would you really feel better if I answered that?”

I said, “Tell me what happens.”

He glanced past me into the street. Two people were walking by on the opposite pavement. Number 8 and number 12. They didn’t look at us.

Peter lowered his voice.

“You’ve made yourself noticeable.”

“How?”

He almost smiled then.

“By asking.”

I said, “Can I stop it?”

He thought about that.

Then he said, “I’ve found it’s easier if you don’t turn unpredictability into a principle.”

I said, “What does that even mean?”

But he had already stepped back.

Before he closed the door he said one last thing.

“If there’s a first knock, there may not be a second.”

I’ve been sitting with the pages in front of me for the last three hours.

I don’t know what happens at 11:43. I don’t know what page nine says. I don’t know whether posting this changes anything or whether this was always one of the listed options too.

I have checked the lock twice. I have checked the back door three times. There is nothing outside that I can see, but the street is very quiet tonight. Too quiet even for this place.

It’s 11:41 now.

I’m going to post this before

There’s someone at the door.