She hadn’t wanted to get out of bed at the knocking on the door, so she made him do it instead. He’d been unusually keen to jump out from between the sheets and that really should have been the first sign that something was going on. It was too early and she was too drowsy for suspicion though so she just let it pass, closed her eyes, and tried to get back to sleep. She tried because, in spite of not wanting to get out of bed, she was still curious about just what it was that was so important that someone had to come to the door at, she looked at the clock, seven thirty in the morning. And wait a minute, hadn’t he been a bit too excited for this time of the morning? She opened her eyes, closed her eyes, and then opened them again slower before rubbing them with the backs of her hands.
She tried to decipher the noises that she could hear coming from outside. There’d been a beeping at first that had reminded her of her alarm clock but pressing the button on her alarm clock hadn’t worked and she would never tell him that she tried. He already had enough that he playfully mocked her for, he didn’t need more. She’d realised half way through the motion that the noise was coming from outside and she’d continued it anyway. Then it had stopped when she pressed the button which had confused her some more, but she was awake enough now to put it down to coincidence and wonder what the beeping was. It sounded like a truck reversing, just like a truck reversing. There’d been a knock at the door and then he’d run downstairs in a flurry of excitement and then there’d been a large vehicle outside, reversing towards them.
“What have you done?!” she shouted to nobody, and quickly got out of bed, threw on a dressing gown and some slippers and went downstairs, full of almost as much energy as he’d left the room with. She found him at the bottom of the stairs with a grin on his face so stupid that she wondered if the truck had left with half of his brain or something. “What’s going on?” she asked him.
He stood there, grinning.
“Are you alright?” she asked this time, worried that maybe the truck really had left with half of his brain.
“Fine,” he said at last, in such a tone as one might use when they were speaking through only a small part of their mouth because they were still using the rest of it to smile with. “Come outside.”
Finally, she was going to find out what all this was about. He opened the door and went outside and she followed him out on to the front lawn. When she’d gone to sleep it had been mostly grass. Now it was mostly a giant wooden box.
“What the hell is that?”
He grinned.
