I froze when I saw it. Inside the metal toolbox wasn’t tools at all—it was a stack of Polaroid photographs, rubber-banded together. My dad carried it like it weighed nothing, but when I lifted the lid earlier, it felt unbearably heavy, as though the box itself didn’t want me to see.
The photos…
They were of us. My little brother, me, Mom. Some looked ordinary—birthday cakes, Christmas mornings. But others… they weren’t memories I recognized.
One showed my brother standing in the barn, his hands covered in something dark. Daisy stood behind him, her eyes wide and glassy.
Another showed the back of Dad’s truck—late at night—with something wrapped in a tarp. My brother was in the corner of the frame, staring directly at the camera.
The last photo was the worst.
It was taken inside our house. In the middle of the night. All of us asleep in our beds. The angle was from the corner of the ceiling, as if someone had been watching.
I almost dropped the box.
When Dad noticed me, he slammed the lid shut. His face stayed calm, but his voice was too steady, too rehearsed.
“Don’t touch my things,” he said. “Some things aren’t meant for you to see.”
But when I glanced back at my brother that evening, curled up beside Daisy in the barn, I realized he already knew. He wasn’t afraid of the cow. He was afraid of what the cow had witnessed.
And maybe… so was I.