Three mismatched flatmates in Grzybowo receive a parcel that should not exist. When it starts moving, speaking, and sprouting a cactus from inside, their ordinary Friday disappears.
In the middle of Grzybowo, a crowded town that always looked as if it had been assembled by someone in a hurry and a bad mood, three entirely incompatible people shared a third-floor flat in a tenement the colour of dill soup. Nobody had chosen the arrangement with much enthusiasm. They had simply ended up there, like misplaced luggage. Yet it worked, in the way a crooked shelf works: badly, but long enough to become familiar.
Friday morning arrived pale and damp, with sunlight pressing weakly through a window they only opened in summer, and then only if they remembered which direction it swung. Leonard, a stocky librarian with an instinctive reverence for commas and a permanent look of patient disappointment, was spreading ginger jam on bread as if performing a delicate legal procedure. Matilda, a chemist so absent-minded she could misplace her own opinion, was padding around in slippers shaped like undercooked dumplings and accusing the flat of hiding the television remote somewhere near the carp aquarium. Philip, who treated absurdity as a life philosophy rather than a hobby, had left his latest invention - a self-winding sock - on the shelf to gather dust and dignity.
The knock came just as Leonard was considering whether the jam counted as breakfast or a cry for help. It rattled through the door like someone trying to wake a stubborn machine. When Philip opened it, there was nobody there. Only a parcel sat on the doormat, square, scuffed, and sealed with too much confidence.
No sender. No address. Just a label in blunt black print: Do not open if you dislike surprises.
Philip smiled at once, which was never a reassuring expression. Matilda produced safety glasses, an umbrella, and a pair of rubber gloves with the solemnity of a surgeon preparing for a scandal. Leonard, already regretting his proximity to both of them, noticed something odd before anyone touched the box. It twitched.
Not much. Just enough to make the aquarium carp lurch sideways and Philip lower his improvised hammer, which he claimed was for emergencies and looked more like something rescued from a shed disaster.
The parcel twitched again, then gave a small, offended hop.
Matilda stared. Leonard stopped breathing. Philip whispered, almost reverently, "That is either alive or very committed."
A thin hiss slipped from the tape. Then the lid split open by a fraction, and a green shoot pushed through the gap - not a flower, not a wire, but a tiny cactus, complete with a bright yellow USB cable dangling from one end like a misplaced thought. The room went still except for the carp, which seemed to be reconsidering reality.
"Did any of you order an electronic cactus?" Leonard asked, holding the jam jar up as if it might protect him.
The cactus blinked pink.
Then, in a voice that sounded as though it had been filtered through a cheap speaker and a great deal of secrecy, it said, "Prepare yourselves. Instructions will follow shortly."
Before anyone could decide whether that was a joke, a threat, or a symptom, the front door shook under a second knock - heavier this time, slower, as if whoever stood outside already knew exactly what was waiting inside.