It arrived on your birthday.

No card. No postmark. No return address. Just a heavy package wrapped in plain brown paper, your name written across the top in handwriting you didn't recognize, sealed shut with a strip of dull tape covered in cramped, frantic marks that refused to resolve into letters.

You peeled the tape back anyway.

Nestled inside the grey foam was a 30 cm anime figure—or at least, the upper half of one. She ends in a clean, flat cut at the waist with an empty socket bored into the underside. Her painted face is a cracked, hyper-detailed mask: bloodshot eyes wide and unblinking, pinprick pupils, and a rigid grin crowded with too many teeth.

When you lifted her out of the foam, the resin was faintly, impossibly warm, like something that had been held in the dark right before you opened the box.

Her plastic mouth hasn't moved a millimeter. Her painted eyes haven't blinked.

So why is there a breathless, desperate voice echoing at full volume inside your skull, begging you to press her empty waist against the nearest surface and use what opens up?