The Noise in the Wrapping Paper

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The story

A late-night radio narrator describes a family in a Pittsburgh suburb who hear rustling from the pile of wrapping paper under their tree every night after everyone has gone to bed. The father finally sits up with a flashlight and sees a small paper hand smoothing the creases flat.

How it begins

You know the sound I mean. Everyone has heard it, though most of us have trained ourselves to call it the furnace, or the house settling, or the cat. It is a dry, whispering rustle, the kind of noise that paper makes when someone is folding it very carefully. Tonight I want to tell you about a family in a tidy brick house on a hill above the Monongahela, and the rustle that came to live with them the week before Christmas. The house was called Haverly Street, number fourteen. Ray and Donna Kozlowski had lived there eleven years. They had two boys, a golden retriever named Biscuit, and a…