The writing on the piece of paper pinned to the box said, "Don't touch."

Actually, it said, "DONT TOUCH!!!!!!! Pane of DETH!!" but for brevity's sake, "Don't touch" was an effective summary. Still, it didn't have quite the same effect. Said effect was, however, increased tenfold by its placement on a viciously pink, post-it note style background. This paper, against all evidence to the contrary, declared itself to be "Humankind's kindest kind of paper!" in small, threatening black print along its bottom.

The whole was a truly terrifying sight.

The terror was somewhat tempered by the state of the paper: battered, wrinkled, faded and lovingly stained. The paper told a story: here it had been screwed up and thrown into a trash basket in a fit of anger, only to be recovered, stealthily, minutes later; here it had been vindictively ripped off by an older sister (though she had been younger than the box's owner was now) – this act had, in all probability, been accompanied by a cheerleader-style dance involving waving the beleaguered pink paper in the air and an annoying, triumphant song whose motif was something along the lines of "Can't touch me." But the pink paper had been recovered, in the end, even if that recovery had involved several futile assaults on the enemy's bedroom (as if the owner of the box would ever go in there, like, voluntarily) and, in the end, near sibling-treachery in the form of tattling. It didn't matter. The box's owner had been triumphant. And even if the writing on the paper was asking for it, she wasn't going to change it. That would have been giving in. Here the paper was marked with sticky, friendly patches of mud and, in at least one instance, what appeared to be peanut butter.

Once, long ago, the paper had been fastened to the box with a pin of some sort – a pin that must have been smuggled with pure little-girl cunning, because there was no way the matriarch of the household would have let her have something that dangerous any other way. That pin had been ripped out, time after time, each recorded with its own individual tiny hole in the top of the pink paper, because putting the pin back in the same place would just be boring. Eventually the pin had been removed or lost for good, and the pink paper had been attached to the box by the power of not-quite-as-pink gum. Lots of gum. The gum of the ages, formed by time into something more resilient than rock, and less likely to let go of paper or box than a dog was likely to let go of a soggy slipper thrust into a face. No way was the sister going to get hold of it now.

Throughout the history of the pink paper and the box, several people had been incautious enough to ignore the sign, by accident (though it was hard to imagine an accident that would allow someone to miss the paper by chance. Temporary blindness, perhaps) or wilfully. The owner of the box itself didn't often disregard her own rules: maybe to deposit a new article in the box every few months, or to look over one of the older relics and roll her eyes with since-gained maturity and contempt.

This time, the owner looked not at the contents of the box, but at the paper itself. She stared at it for a long moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, tore it off. Even the gum had no chance against her.

She began to fold the paper. Then she stopped, and screwed it up, and threw it in the trash basket (for the very last time) and screamed.

The screaming, she decided, was good. It helped. But not quite as much as what she was planning would.

She turned her gaze upon the box, and upon its contents, and then upon the trash basket and its forlorn pink paper, and upon a box of matches that she'd smuggled up, in exactly the same way as she'd smuggled up that pin, in that other house, all those years ago. Except that had never really happened.

Dawn gritted her teeth, and touched the box's lid, and began.