The post box stood at the side of a busy road, filled with parcels, love missives, greeting cards stuffed with money for every occasion, and, the perennial favourite, letters home. 

On the tenth of April, nineteen fifty six, a little girl had her older brother lift her up so that she could reach the slot, and deposited a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied – thanks again to her brother – with string. 

She smiled, satisfied that the present would soon reach its intended recipient, and returned home the way she had come – riding piggy-back on her brother’s bicycle.

On the fourteenth of April, nineteen fifty six, the parcel was Delivered to the first of what would be many addresses. The lady who received it opened it without reading the address on the front, reasonably assuming it was the wildflower seeds her sister told her to expect.

But when she saw what it was, she turned the paper over, and saw that the postman had delivered it to the right street, but wrong suburb. She carefully re-wrapped the parcel, retied the string, and wrote the correct suburb on the front.

On the seventeenth of April, nineteen fifty six, the parcel was delivered to its second recipient. The man who opened it had been expecting the special playing cards he’d ordered behind his wife’s back, and had been waiting by the letterbox for at twelve o’clock everyday so she wouldn’t find out about his latest lapse. He was therefore more than a little vexed at receiving a childish parcel, addressed in childish handwriting and delivered to the wrong street number. 

He took it inside the house, with the intention of re-posting it later that day, and it sat on his desk for two years until his wife decided to clean it and, on discovering the parcel, did what her husband would have done, had he not died of a heart attack when the postman doubled back and handed the parcel he had been waiting for – to his wife.

By the time the parcel was finally delivered to the correct address, the intended recipient was no longer living there, and it sat in their letterbox, space encroached upon from all sides by other unopened, unacknowledged mail, until a new family moved in.

In nineteen fifty-nine, the parcel arrived at the dead letters office, where it sat for three years – saved from the furnace by its diminutive size, which caused it to slip down between shelves – until a worker rescued it and, having just received his marching orders, slipped it into his pocket and took it home with him, hoping against hope that it was an engagement ring or something else that was worth more than what it cost to post. When he got it home and discovered what it was, he went outside, climbed the fence, and pitched it into the creek that ran past his backyard.

Because the creek was filthy, and also due in no small part to the rumour that there were snakes in the putrid water, the parcel sat languishing for another ten years before two boys, who were actually hoping the rumours about the snakes were true, fished out the parcel.

The paper had all but disintegrated, but the boys could just make out the address. The boy who had fished it out took it home with him to show his mother. When she saw what it was, the boy’s mother almost dropped the pan she was holding.

She took it to her father’s house the next day, and knew from the way his hands were shaking as he took it from her that he knew who had sent it. 

It was the doorknob from the door in his study, in the house he had once shared with his wife. All three of his children had begged him to stay the day he left, but it was his youngest, Shelley, who had chased his car down the street.

In April, nineteen-fifty-six, Shelley nagged her older brother to tell him where Daddy lived, and when he gave in she nagged him to break off the knob on the study door. She was sure Mummy wouldn’t notice, because Shelley was the only person who showed any interest in Daddy’s stamps.

She particularly liked the dark green one with the picture of the bird who had a harp for a tail. Daddy explained that it was called a lyrebird, but Shelley much preferred Harp Bird, so that was what they called it. It also became the little girl’s nickname, and she and her father shared the same exchange whenever she went downstairs to visit him:

‘There you are, Harp Bird!’

‘There you are, Daddy!’

She was so concerned when she found the stamp wedged between floorboards in Daddy’s empty study that she decided to send it to him. Not wanting it to slip out of the envelope and get lost, she stuck it to the doorknob and had her brother take her down to the post box to send it, and was told by her brother to wait outside the shop while he went in and bought them each an ice cream.

Apparently unable to resist the temptation to ride a big kid’s bike, Shelley was seen by several people as she peddled slowly down the street, but she disappeared from view when she turned the corner, and no one could recall seeing her after that.

Unable to bear living in the house that his daughter had been thinking about on what had possibly been the last day of her life, her father moved to the city, where none of his surroundings accomodated any notion of children playing.

It was there where his eldest daughter visited him sixteen years later, and finally delivered the parcel to it’s intended recipient. He sat down in a heap and cradled the doorknob in his hands before putting it on his dresser, where it would sit until his granddaughter came over to start cleaning the house of which she was now owner a month after his passing.

She picked up the doorknob, which sat next to a picture of her long lost aunt, examined the perfectly affixed stamp, and smiled. 

The tiny DNA sample that had sat preserved beneath a postage stamp for fifty years, was tested in a police laboratory, and was matched with the tiny, time-ravaged remains of a child found buried under a house just three doors down from where she herself had lived.

On the tenth of April, two thousand and six, Shelley Miller was laid to rest next to her father, Reg. A picture of a ‘Harp Bird’ was etched into her head stone, along with the words she would surely have said had they met under different circumstances.

‘There you are, Daddy!’