The Echo Box

The gulls began before her alarm, their cries dragging across the glass like chalk. Nika lay on her back and counted the seconds between calls, the way she used to count breaths during panic drills. Morning light pooled in a patch on the floorboards, pale and cool, as if the sea had slipped into her apartment and decided to rest. The kettle clicked on by itself; she had set it the night before, a tiny audition of control. Steam curled against the window and left a wet thumbprint. In the hallway, someone’s child laughed at a cartoon’s canned squeals. The building smelled faintly of oranges and dust.

She opened her phone, closed it, opened it again. No new messages except the calendar’s polite cough: mood board due Friday, site visit Tuesday, sleep.

On the landing, a stack of mail leaned against the iron rail like it needed help standing. She crouched and skimmed advertisements, bills, a postcard from a colleague in Porto with a photo of a tile wall, blue fishes chasing each other’s tails. Beneath the stack was an envelope that did not belong to any present time. Its paper was thick, browned at the edges, with a typewritten address. Her full name, then a dash and the nickname that nobody used anymore: Verochka.

Her fingers ran under the flap. The glue gave with a tired sigh. Inside lay a single page with lines pressed hard enough to tramp through the paper. The letters shook, but there was a rhythm to them—twelve-year-old stubbornness. She sat on the stairs and read.

“When the gulls come back, open the Echo Box. Remember the promise. Don’t go to the red warehouse until you’re ready to listen. If you forget, your hands will remember.”

No signature. No date. The typewriter’s O was a little square, the ribbon faded unevenly. The smell of old paper bloomed: attic, chalk, a trace of her mother’s varnish. Nika lifted the page to her face, letting the ghost of those years pass over her skin like a draft.

She stood slowly. The alarm on her phone decided now was a good time to sound polite bells; she swiped it quiet. Through the narrow stairwell window, the harbor blinked, slate under a wash of cloud. A tour boat idled and then yawned away. The red warehouse squatted at the edge of the pier, rust crawling up its siding like ivy. As a girl, she had thought of it as a sleeping animal. In some mornings she still did.

Back in her kitchen, the kettle had forgotten what it had started and sat there with its mouth open. She poured water over tea and watched leaves rise and sink. The page lay on the table, so loud it made the room’s other things look pale: the bowl of keys, the chipped mug with a chip shaped like a crescent, the plant her neighbor swore was unkillable and yet was slowly giving up.

Echo Box. Her palms tingled, and she pressed them flat on the wood to quiet them.