Day 16 of my drabble-a-day challenge! Here is today’s drabble:

There’s Always One

As kids we were told never to open the chest. Opening it would unleash something terrible.

That was all our father ever said. It says lot about him, and our relationship with him, that we never so much as touched it.

Even now, with our parents dead, and the house condemned by subsidence, we stand - grown women in our forties - and can't bring ourselves to lift the lid.

Jackson breezes in, laughing. "You superstitious pussycats! It's empty. I looked a couple of years ago.

Helena gasps. "Two years ago?"

"Around the time Mum got ill?"

"And the house started cracking?"

Day 16 means I’ve officially passed the halfway point!

You may be interested to know that, until thirty seconds ago, it was a wooden chest. Then I realised that I’d straight up missed a word out of a sentence earlier, and in order to restore sense I needed to lose a word. Hence the chest now being of non-specific material. I mean, really… what are chests ever made of, other than wood?