My fourth-grade writing assignment

Rachel was napping when the doorbell rang.

It startled her -- she sat up and nearly fell off the couch. The late afternoon light was slanting in through the blinds. She had been asleep for hours. She rubbed her eyes and stumbled through the living room to the door.

She opened the door, but no one was there. There was, however, a large brown box at her feet.

She bent to pick it up. It was heavy, too heavy to carry very far. She thought, vaguely, this must have been a very expensive package to ship. She slid the box into the door and across the carpet so it was in the middle of the room. She sat again on the couch and stared at it through sleep-bleary eyes.

She wasn't expecting a package. She wondered what it could be.

She stood again and wandered into the kitchen to look for scissors. She opened the junk drawer and rooted through balls of string, random loose buttons, batteries, refrigerator magnets with paper clips and small nails stuck to their backs, and eventually found a small pair of scissors with orange handles.

She walked back over to the package and knelt beside it. It was tall, a foot or more, and wide, a large square box with her name and address on it and little clue as to where it was from.

She searched for a return address but found none.

She used the scissors like a blade and sliced the tape that bound the flaps of the box together.

She managed to free the top of the box and open it -- all she could see, at first, was mounds and mounds of packing material that looked like dried grass. It crunched a little when she touched it.

She started to pull the grass out of the box by the handful, making a big messy pile on the carpet next to her. She pulled and pulled for what seemed like a very long time before she found the heavy item in the box. She had a large pile of the grass next to her.

The object was black and glossy -- it looked like marble, only smoother. It was completely smooth. When she touched it her fingers slid along the surface. It was very black, a deep, inky color that gleamed in the light and seemed to absorb the light, to change a little with it, revealing reddish tones.

She slid her hands around it and lifted -- it was very heavy.

She managed to pull it out it out of the box and place it on the coffee table, where she looked at it, puzzled.

What on earth? It looked like the statue of a man. Who would send something like this to her?