The Trunk in the Eaves

The attic of my grandmother's house had been off-limits my whole childhood, not through any stated rule but through the simple fact that the pull-down ladder had been nailed shut for as long as I could remember.

After she passed, my job was to clear it before the estate sale, and I pried the nails loose myself on a gray Saturday with my cousin Priya holding the flashlight and complaining about spiders.

Most of the attic was ordinary — steamer trunks of old linens, a dressmaker's dummy, boxes of Christmas ornaments gone dull with dust. But pushed into the eaves, half-hidden by a fallen roll of insulation, was a smaller trunk, banded in iron, with a note taped to the lid in my grandmother's careful handwriting: Do not count what's inside. Just take it to the church and leave it with Father Osei.

Priya, naturally, wanted to open it. I told her about the note. She told me grandmothers say all sorts of things, and besides, what harm could counting possibly do?

We opened it together. Inside, packed in neat rows on old velvet, were what looked like small carved wooden figures, dozens of them, each slightly different, each with an expression that seemed, in the flashlight beam, to shift very slightly depending on the angle you looked from.

Priya started counting under her breath before I could stop her — one, two, three — and got to eleven before the flashlight guttered, though the batteries were new, and a cold pressed itself against both our backs at once like two hands placed flat between our shoulder blades.

We didn't finish the count. We closed the trunk, drove it to the church that same afternoon without stopping, and Father Osei took one look at the note and simply nodded, as though he had been expecting exactly this delivery from exactly this address for exactly this long.

He never told us what the figures were, or why counting them mattered, and my grandmother's diary, when we finally found it, had only one relevant entry from decades earlier: They must never know their own number. A thing without a number can still be managed. A thing that knows its number can be called.