“Come on, open it!”

Aster stayed where they were (sat cross-legged on Evie’s desk) as their siblings crowded around the old box, watching the four of them closely. They didn’t really belong in this moment, one that was sure to be of fictitious reminiscing of days never experienced and a time for a generation to think about a vaguely romanticised past.

So they watched as Evie pulled out what seemed like a dress, the layered skirt swishing while she laughed and spun around with it held to her chest. A slightly faded (very, very slightly) blue, which Aster found slightly strange given their grandmother’s hatred of blue, but it was pretty enough. And tastes changed, right?

“Look, there’s a matching one!”

Rose lifted up an identical dress, except for the colour — this time a brilliant crimson, red as Rose’s namesake — and held it up to herself in the same way Evie had done with the blue.

“It’s Mum’s, then,” Aster guessed. “Or one of them is… you said she had a twin, right?”

“Nah, they’d belong to our aunties,” Evie corrected. “Maybe this blue one did belong to Mum, though — it seems like it’s a bit older.”

“They can’t be that old.”

“Maybe the chest is magic?” Nathan shrugged, chiming in for the first time.

“Can’t be!” Evie laughed.

Aster wasn’t quite so sure, though.

The dresses were tossed onto Evie’s bed without much more thought, and Nathan took his turn to find something.

“Ow!” he yelped after a moment, pulling his hand out much quicker than he had stuck it in. “There’s like, a needle in there!”

“God, are you bleeding?” Aster winced, scrambling off the desk to take a closer look. “That’d be an old needle… oh, that probably isn’t good.”

“Aster, can you give us a light?”

They sighed, pulling out their phone to shine its flashlight into the chest.

With the extra light, it was easy to find the source of Nathan’s injury — an old rag doll, looking strangely familiar to the second-eldest of them.

Aster gasped involuntarily as they noticed the pin sticking out of its left eye, followed quickly by Evie and Rose.

“What the fuck is that?” Evie breathed, forgetting her role as the responsible older sister for a split second.

“That’s a bad word, Evie,” Grace said, and the four older children all gave a shaky laugh as a response.

Inside, however, nobody felt like laughing.