Tortuous

Today’s word is tortuous which is an adjective that means:

1. Marked by repeated turns and bends;

2. Not straightforward; devious;

3. Highly involved or intricate.

This is from the series called The Package, part 5.

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“What is that?” her brother asked as she pulled the brown bag out of her coat pocket and set it on her father’s workbench.

“I found it near the bakery,” she said. “I don’t know what is inside.”

She carefully opened the bag and looked inside while her brother raised up on his toes to look inside, too. They both saw the bag contained a square light blue cardboard box, similar to the kind of box that her mother kept in the top left drawer of their dining room buffet; her mother would get an envelope from that box every Sunday and her father would put some money inside to give the church when the collection plate was passed during mass. She pulled the box out of the bag, looked at it from all angles, and then slowly, carefully, tortuously as far as her brother was concerned, lifted the top flap, and saw there were a lot of small envelopes inside.

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