Sitting at her desk Casey sees something out of the left corner of her eye and knows immediately what it is. The empty pizza box sitting in front of the door, waiting to be thrown away, is closed, but she has no doubt what is inside.
She plays what she has just seen over and over again in her mind, to make sure she has seen it correctly. A small, darting thing. Dark in color, and raised off the floor about the same height as the width of a pencil. Yes, if you laid a pencil down on the floor, that's definitely about how high up this thing would be while in motion, and that's how high up it was.
She takes a pencil out of her desk to test it.
Yes. That's right. That's exactly right.
She leaves the pencil on the floor, not wanting to go back to roughly the same level as the thing she had just seen in order to retrieve it. She tries to go back to work but her thoughts won't let her focus on anything other than what she knows to be in that box. It's a true shame that she had eaten breakfast, yogurt of all things, with granola, right before seeing the thing that she saw. A bowl of mush, with bumps in it, and then she saw the thing. Her mouth starts watering in this very specific way that lets her know she's about to vomit.
She runs to the back of the apartment, hoping to reach the bathroom in time, tries very hard not to think about what she saw anymore, for fear that she'll vomit in her mouth, and in her hands, which is almost worse, but not quite, than what she saw. She drops to her knees in front of the toilet, flipping the lid open with a loud clack, and her yogurt and granola leave her body in a clumpy spray. She feels a bit better, after getting the sick out of her system, and goes to the sink to put some cold water on her face and wet her bangs. She finds that she can always feel just a tad more put together after she's wet her bangs. She walks back to her desk and as she does, the pizza box in front of the door gets closer and closer.
She stands over the pizza box and can hear it now. The thing that's inside. She can very distinctly hear a scritch-scratching on the interior cardboard of that box. She's got to get it out of the apartment. She will NOT be looking inside of the box. She makes a careful series of movements over to her desk and pulls a thick black Sharpie out of the cup of pens she keeps next to her lamp. She then goes back over to the box, and bends at the waist, as though she's about to touch her toes, and writes in bold letters on top of the box:
THERE IS A BUG INSIDE OF THIS BOX.
After she's done this she opens the door, fast and wide, then as quickly as possible grabs the box and flings it out onto the sidewalk and shuts the door.
She looks out the small window in the door and can see that the box landed face down on the sidewalk, but there's nothing she can do about that now.