The cassette arrived without a return address. Its label was the colour of an unripe almond and carried only three empty boxes drawn in black ink. No title. No date. Nothing on the reverse.
Mara found it between the morning post and a newspaper she had never ordered. She held it to the kitchen window. The tape inside had already been wound to the beginning, the brown ribbon perfectly still behind its scratched plastic case.
Side A
Her old recorder resisted at first. When the mechanism finally caught, the room filled with the low pressure of blank tape: a soft hiss, a distant motor, and something like air moving through a narrow pipe.
A woman whispered the first number. There was a pause long enough for Mara to write it down. Then came a second, and a third. Each was spoken carefully, without fear or urgency, as though the voice had all the time in the world.
Fourteen. Eighty-seven. Thirty-one.
After the third number, the tape returned to static. Mara let it run. Two minutes passed before the woman spoke again, quieter now: not another number, but Mara's name.
The second listening
She rewound the cassette and called her brother. He listened over the phone while she played it from the beginning. The hiss returned. The pauses returned. But the numbers were different.
Her brother heard only the first two. Before the third, the line disconnected. On the cassette, beneath the whisper, Mara heard the electronic chirp of his phone dying several seconds before it happened.
She stopped the tape. The recorder's counter read 009, although they had been listening for more than a minute. When she pressed eject, the door would not open.
Three empty boxes
By evening, one of the boxes on the label had filled itself with a dark mark. Mara placed the recorder in the hall cupboard and pushed a chair under the handle, embarrassed by the gesture even while she did it.
At 3:14 in the morning, the mechanism clicked on by itself. The whisper passed through the cupboard door and travelled cleanly along the hallway. It gave one number. Then another. Mara did not wait for the third.
The following morning, the cassette was gone. On the kitchen table lay the unordered newspaper. Three small boxes had been drawn beneath the date. Two were black. The last remained empty.