The Parcel Next Door

The parcel stood in front of the wrong door for two days, and nobody touched it. It was addressed to somebody in the building. But the name on it belonged to nobody that Gerda knew, and she had lived on that floor for eleven years.

On the third day she carried it up one floor and rang. Anh opened the door and said that the name was not hers either. A family with a name like that had lived in the flat before her. She asked whether the sender was on the parcel. It was not.

They went down together and asked Bruno, who had the shop on the ground floor and signed for half the parcels in the street. He said he had signed for this one on Monday without reading the name. That was how it had come into the house at all.

The three of them stood in the hall and worked it out. The family had moved away four years earlier, and the flat had been rented twice since then. Somebody who did not know any of this had sent a parcel to an address that had been right once.

Bruno wrote a note and taped it to the door of the building. Nobody ever came for the parcel. What did come out of it was that the three of them now said hello, which none of them had done before, although they had lived in the same house for years.