KAZ_0

Last Halloween, my cousin made me stay up late helping him decorate a pumpkin. This year, I wish we'd just gone to bed early.
My cousin is the sort of person who gets excited about every occasion. Give him a birthday, a cricket match or Halloween, and he'll find some excuse to decorate the house. I usually let him do his thing while I take pictures and make fun of his artistic skills.
Last October, he wanted a proper Halloween photo for Binance Square. We'd seen the #SEAPumpkinFrenzy campaign, so we picked up a pumpkin, some orange lights and a few cheap decorations from a nearby shop. I put my phone beside the pumpkin with the Binance app open on the screen, and we spent twenty minutes trying to get one decent picture.
“Move the lights a little,” he said.
“They're fine, yaar.”
“Bhai, just move them.”
I moved them. He still wasn't happy.
We finally got a picture we both liked, cleaned up the mess and went to bed. Nothing strange happened that night, and I forgot about the whole thing by breakfast.
That's when I found the box.
It was outside our gate, next to the flowerpot my mother keeps telling everyone not to knock over. The cardboard had gone soft around the corners, probably from the damp weather, and there was no address on it. I thought a delivery rider had left someone's parcel at the wrong house.
I brought it inside and opened it at the dining table.
There were a few old photographs, some children's drawings, a plastic mask and a tiny red shoe. It looked like the sort of thing you'd find in a cupboard after years of forgetting it existed. The shoe had a broken strap, and the bottom was covered in dried mud.
My mother came in while I was going through the papers.
“Where did this come from?”
“Outside the gate.”
“And you brought it inside without asking anyone?”
“Ammi, it's a box, not a bomb.”
She gave me that look mothers have perfected over generations and told me to ask the neighbours before touching anything else.
The family next door had two small children, so I showed them the shoe and drawings. Neither child recognized them. Their mother didn't either. I asked a couple of other neighbours, but nobody claimed the box.
An older woman across the street had a different reaction. When I mentioned where I'd found it, she asked whether anyone had seen a little girl near our house the previous night.
I said no. We'd been home most of the evening.
She seemed ready to say something else, but then she changed her mind and went indoors.
Honestly, I found that more irritating than frightening. Everyone was acting as if the box meant something, but nobody would explain what.
That afternoon, I sat down with the drawings. Most were ordinary children's pictures: houses with huge windows, families with stick arms and trees that looked like green clouds. One showed our house, including the bent metal bar on the front gate and the crack in the wall beside it.
I called my cousin over.
“Look at this. Isn't that our gate?”
He leaned over the table. “Yeah. Who drew it?”
“That's the problem. Nobody knows.”
On the back, someone had written, in a child's uneven handwriting, They said nobody lived here anymore.
My cousin laughed nervously and said it was probably an old drawing from before we moved in. That made sense, so I asked my father about the previous owners when he came home.
He remembered an older family who'd lived there years ago. There had been a woman and a young daughter, he said, but he couldn't remember their names.
“Why did they leave?” I asked.
“People move, beta. Maybe they found somewhere else.”
I showed him the drawing. He studied it, then put it down and told me not to waste my time worrying about it.
That was unlike him. Usually, my father loves telling stories about the old neighbourhood. He remembers which shop used to stand where and who built which house. This time, he didn't seem interested in talking.
I left it alone for a few days.
Then I posted in our neighbourhood group asking whether anyone had lost a box of children's belongings. A few people made jokes about Halloween. One person asked whether the box contained a red shoe.
Before I could reply, the message disappeared.
I sent the person a private message, but they never answered. Maybe they were messing around. Maybe they'd heard something from someone else. I couldn't prove anything, so I stopped chasing it.
A week later, I found an old photograph underneath some newspapers in the spare room. It showed our house from the street, although the gate was wooden and the tree beside it was much smaller. A woman stood outside with a little girl holding her hand.
There was a date on the back: October 31, more than twenty years earlier.
My father recognized the woman. She belonged to the family that had lived there before us. After looking at the photograph for a while, he admitted he'd heard something about the girl disappearing when she was young.
“Disappearing how?” I asked.
“People searched for her. They didn't find her.”
“And the family just left?”
He rubbed his forehead. “I was younger then. I heard bits and pieces from the neighbours. I don't know the whole story.”
I wanted to ask more, but he clearly didn't want to discuss it. I put the photograph away and tried to forget about the box.
A few days later, we decided to take the belongings to a local lost-property office. When I opened the box, the red shoe was gone.
My cousin helped me search the room. We checked the cupboards, moved the table and looked behind a pile of old clothes. Nothing turned up.
“Maybe you threw it away,” he said.
“Why would I throw away the one thing everyone keeps asking about?”
He shrugged. Neither of us could explain it.
By the time the next Halloween came around, I'd almost stopped thinking about the whole incident. My cousin wanted to decorate another pumpkin, and we ended up putting together a small display inside the gate. I took a picture for Binance Square, but this time I didn't leave my phone outside or stay up late trying to get the perfect shot.
We were about to go inside when my mother called me.
“Come here. Is this yours?”
She was standing by the front door, holding a tiny red shoe.
I knew it before she even turned it around. The strap was broken in exactly the same place, and the dark stain was still visible underneath.
For a few seconds, I honestly couldn't think of anything to say. My cousin came over, saw it and immediately asked where she'd found it.
“It was outside,” my mother said. “Next to the door.”
I told her we'd lost that shoe almost a year earlier. She looked at me as if I were trying to wind her up, but I wasn't joking.
There was a folded piece of paper underneath it.
The drawing showed our house, the pumpkin, the orange lights and the decorations we'd put up that evening. It even showed the little crack beside the entrance. Four people stood near the gate, and a small figure was outside holding the red shoe.
At the bottom, the same handwriting read: Thank you for leaving the door open.
My cousin grabbed my arm.
“Bhai, who keeps doing this?”
I wish I had an answer.
The front door had been closed all evening. We'd been home together, and nobody had gone outside since we'd finished the decorations. My father read the message and went quiet. When I asked him what he thought it meant, he finally told us that the missing girl had been around six years old when she disappeared.
He didn't know what had happened to her. Nobody in the family had ever found out.
We never discovered who left the box or returned the shoe. We didn't receive another drawing, either. My father repaired the gate, and the following Halloween we kept our decorations indoors.
I still think about possible explanations. Someone could have found the family's old belongings. A neighbour could have known the story and decided to play a cruel prank. Even the drawing could have been made by someone who'd seen our house before.
But I can't explain how the last picture showed the decorations exactly as we'd arranged them that evening.
Or why the front door was drawn wide open when we'd all seen it shut.
There was a little girl standing in the doorway, holding the red shoe.
And every time Halloween comes around, I check the lock before going to bed. My cousin laughs at me for it, but he checks it too.
$TSLA $BNB
#SEAPumpkinFrenzy
#EarningsSeason