The box appeared on the porch like something the wind had dropped. Al Dunn saw it first, came inside from checking the fence line, and set it on the kitchen table.

"What is it?" Norma said.

"Don't know. No label. No nothing."

She opened it. Inside was a plastic box, cheap, the kind you'd get at a gas station. On top, a red button. Underneath, a piece of paper with words typed on a machine:

Press it. A stranger dies. You get fifty thousand dollars.

Al read it, frowned, and tossed it into the junk drawer with the takeout menus and rubber bands. "Some kid's joke."

But Norma went back to it. Three times that day she walked past the kitchen and looked at the drawer. On the fourth time, she opened it and took the box out and held it in her hands. It was lighter than she expected. The button was stiff. She pressed it once. It didn't click. She pressed it harder. Still nothing.

She put it back.

The plant was shutting down again. Not permanently—the foreman always said permanently, and every time it was temporary, but temporary was all you could count on in a place like this. The line would slow, the hours would shrink, and people would start looking. Norma had been looking for six months.

She was forty-five. Her back hurt from twelve years on the assembly line. Her knees made sounds when she climbed stairs. She was too old to start over and too young to quit.

The bills sat on the table like a stack of cards she didn't want to deal with. The electric company was friendly about it—late fees, that's all. The water company less so. The credit card company stopped being friendly altogether.

At night, she lay in bed next to Al and listened to him breathe. He was a good man, Al was. Quiet, steady, the kind of man who showed up to work every day for twenty years and never missed a Friday baseball game on the radio. But good didn't pay for insulin, and steady didn't stop the bank from taking the truck.

She got up at three in the morning and went to the kitchen. She opened the drawer. She took out the box. She sat at the table and held it in both hands and thought about the strangers who might die.

There were a lot of strangers in the world. Billions of them. Some of them were probably bad people. Some of them probably wouldn't be missed.

She pressed the button.

This time it clicked. A clean, sharp sound that seemed too loud in the quiet house.

She put the box back in the drawer and went to bed.

The next morning, Al didn't come to breakfast. She called his name, walked into the living room, and found him in his chair, the baseball game still playing on the radio, his head tilted back against the cushions, his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling.

She touched his hand. It was cold.

The coroner came and went. The neighbours brought casseroles she didn't eat. Her daughter called from college and cried on the phone for twenty minutes before Norma told her to stop.

After everyone left, she went to the kitchen. She opened the drawer. She took out the box. She opened the lid.

Nothing.

She closed it. She put it back in the drawer. She closed the drawer.

She went to work the next day. She told the foreman she was quitting. He said he understood. He didn't, but he said it anyway.

She found a job at a laundromat, folding other people's clothes for minimum wage. She moved to a small apartment two towns over. She saw her daughter once a month. She paid her bills on time.

The box is still in the junk drawer. Sometimes she opens the drawer and looks at it. Sometimes she doesn't.

In the middle of the night, she sometimes hears a click. She doesn't get up. She lies in bed and stares at the ceiling and thinks about the man who made the box and the man who designed the button and the stranger who died and the man she loved.

She thinks about all of them, and then she turns over and goes back to sleep.