Otto was a very organised boy. His pencils were sorted by colour. His books stood in height order. His breakfast was always eaten in the same sequence: toast first, then egg, then one glass of orange juice, then done.

The trouble was tomorrow. Tomorrow was never organised. Tomorrow could bring rain when you’d planned for sunshine, or a spelling test you’d forgotten, or brussels sprouts for dinner when you’d been thinking about pasta all day. Tomorrow, in Otto’s view, was wildly, dangerously, unacceptably unpredictable.

So one Sunday evening, Otto decided to do something about it.

He found a sturdy shoebox under his bed — the one his winter boots had come in — and he wrote on the lid in his neatest handwriting: TOMORROW. DO NOT OPEN.

Then he placed the box on his shelf, pointed at it, and said very firmly: “You stay in there.”

At first, nothing happened. Otto went to bed feeling rather pleased with himself.

But at exactly eleven minutes past midnight, the box began to glow.

Not brightly. Just a soft, warm, golden light leaking out from the gap between the lid and the box, like sunlight under a door. And with it came a smell — warm bread, cut grass, something sweet that Otto couldn’t quite name but that made him think of Saturdays.

Otto sat up in bed. “Stop that,” he said.

The glow got slightly warmer.

“I said stop.” He pulled the covers over his head. The glow came through the blanket.

He got up, marched to the shelf, and put both hands firmly on the lid — just in case tomorrow tried to escape. Under his palms he could feel something humming gently, the way a sleeping cat hums, or a refrigerator, or something that is simply very glad to be alive.

Otto snatched his hands back. “You can talk?”

“Only when someone’s paying attention,” said Tomorrow. Its voice was warm and slightly golden-sounding, like the last ten minutes of afternoon light. “Most people aren’t, you know. They’re either stuck in yesterday or worrying about me. Very few actually listen.”

Otto sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at the box. The glow had settled into a steady, gentle pulse — patient, unhurried, not trying to alarm anyone.

“But you’re frightening,” Otto said, finally, in a smaller voice than he’d intended. “You’re full of things I don’t know about.”

“Yes,” said Tomorrow. “That’s the good part.”

Otto thought about this for a long time. He thought about the time it had rained on his birthday and his father had built a den in the living room and it had been better than any garden party. He thought about the spelling test he’d forgotten, which had turned out to be on words he already knew. He thought about the brussels sprouts, which admittedly were still brussels sprouts and hadn’t gotten better, but he’d survived them.

Slowly, Otto reached out and lifted the lid of the box.

The golden light didn’t explode outward or rush past him. It simply rose — gently, like warm air above a candle — and drifted up through the ceiling and out into the sky, where it spread across the horizon in a thin line that wasn’t quite night and wasn’t quite morning yet. The beginning of something.

“Will you be alright?” Otto asked the empty box.

“I’ll be marvellous,” said Tomorrow, already fading, already becoming today. “I always am. You just have to let me.”

Otto put the empty box back on the shelf. He climbed into bed. He pulled the blanket up. Outside, the sky had that thin gold line in it — tomorrow arriving quietly, the way it always does, without fanfare, without permission, without fitting into anyone’s shoebox.

And Otto, for the first time in a long while, smiled at something he hadn’t planned — the small, warm, unorganised feeling of not knowing exactly what came next, and deciding that was perfectly fine.

He closed his eyes. Outside his window, the last goodnights of the night drifted over the rooftops and the first birdsong of morning was just deciding whether to begin. And somewhere, the first thin sliver of sunlight was pressing itself against the edge of the world, warm and patient and completely impossible to keep in a box.

Otto slept better that night than he had in months.