Raj & The Healer's Injection

"I don't know, honey. I think we bought it on Amazon. Maybe," I say to my wife, as she walks into the living room with an unmarked package, wrapped in plain brown paper.

"This one's for you," she says. "I ordered it."

She hands me the box and tries to kiss me. I move back a bit, still holding the box and trying to get her to give me some space so I can read the label. She doesn't take the hint. She puts her arms around my neck and kisses me again, harder this time.

"Hey now, baby, let's not forget that our anniversary is tomorrow," I say, pulling away from her slightly. "We've got the whole weekend ahead of us."

"Oh yeah?" she says, playfully looking up at me through her eyelashes. "What are you planning?"

"That's for me to know and for you to find out," I say with a wink. "But right now, I have a gift waiting to be unwrapped."

She smiles at that, and lets go of my neck and takes a step back towards the couch while I sit down on the floor with the box in front of me.

As best as I can tell by the size of it, the box is about nine inches long, six inches wide, and four inches deep -- standard Amazon packaging dimensions -- but there's no label. Not on the outside of the box or on anything tucked inside either.

I pull out a pair of scissors from a drawer in our coffee table, cut open the tape around the edges of the box, and open it up. The contents are packed neatly in bubble wrap -- books? -- and underneath them all is an oddly-shaped piece of wood wrapped in what looks like a bath towel with strange symbols carved into its surface.

The shape is familiar somehow -- like something from my childhood that I've forgotten about since then -- but for some reason that isn't really registering with me right now; my brain isn't connecting with whatever it was that put that thought in my head in the first place.

In any case, I set the wooden thing aside and get to unwrapping everything else while my wife goes off to get us something to drink; just another normal evening at home with my girl... or so it would seem if not for this damn box sitting next to me on the carpeted flooring between us!