Siblings

Once I woke up in the middle of the night to find that someone had taken down all of my posters while I slept. My door was open so I assumed it had been my brother or sister, both of which liked to play tricks on me.



In the morning I confronted them at breakfast, but they both said they’d had nothing to do with it. My mom took my side immediately, knowing how often they fooled me with their games. They both looked very tired, as they always did, but for some reason they looked more tired than usual, which is how I knew they were lying.

They always looked tired after one of their pranks.

When I was five, my brother once put on a ghoulish mask with empty eyes and twisted features and chased me around the house, eventually forcing me into a closet where my sister waited to grab me from behind while screaming.

My brother was older than me by ten years and my sister was older than me by six. They must have felt that because I was the youngest it was their duty to scare me.

After the mask stunt my mother punished them by withholding dessert for a week, but it didn’t seem to deter them. Eventually I stopped telling on them whenever they’d push my door open at night, loud enough for me to hear the creaking. Or when one of them (I never knew who) would whisper at the edge of my bed. It happened so often I sort of got used to it.

But my posters were something special. I was twelve at the time and had started to become very interested in science fiction. And all of the posters were of my favorite shows and movies. One of the posters was even signed by the writers of The Next Generation, something I was extremely proud of. To see my posters vanish was the last straw.

After my mother overheard about the posters she told them to back off, this time for real. My brother and sister seemed mad about this and glared at me afterwards. But my brother went off to work and my sister went off to college, and when they got back afterwards they were friendly enough. I went up to my room after school and even found that all the posters were back up on the walls. I thanked them at dinner and they raised their eyebrows at each other, but said nothing.

I showered, finished my homework, and went to sleep. Around midnight I heard my closet door slam, waking me up. I sighed and went back to sleep. In the morning I saw that the door was still closed. I was frightened. It was in the middle of the winter so I awoke when it was still dark out, and thus the closet door was just as frightening as ever.

My hands trembling I grasped the handle and pulled it open. Something lunged out at me and I screamed, falling backwards. But it was only a baseball bat and I felt stupid when my mom came into my room asking what happened.

I told her that it was nothing but she immediately went to my brother’s room and started yelling for my sister to come and speak with her. I stood by my doorway while she berated them, telling my brother that she was tired of him living at home and tormenting me, that he needed to move out.

To my surprise he started yelling back this time, saying that he would move out, that he was tired of being yelled at for things he wasn’t doing. My sister leapt to his defense and said that she was going to move out too. And they did, just a day later. After my brother moved out his last box, he stopped in the hallway and said sorry. But I just thought it was his last prank, his final attempt to confuse and bewilder me.

And for a month, things were wonderful. There were no more mysterious sounds, my closet door never slammed shut, my bedroom door stayed closed, and my posters stayed right where they were.

My friends at school made fun of me for being so scared of my siblings, but I was ok with it. These pranks had happened my entire life. It was about time they stopped.

One night my mom was out on another business trip so I was by myself, watching movies on the television in the living room. I had a bowl of popcorn and a glassful of coca cola, and was very much enjoying life.

It was during an episode of Stargate that I heard the crash in my room.

I bolted up from the couch, knocking the bowl of popcorn over onto the floor, and stared down the hallway towards my room. I heard glass break and then nothing. I turned on the hallway light and walked slowly to my room.

I slipped my hand around my doorframe and turned on my bedroom light. I walked in.

All the posters were knocked off the walls; the glass frames were broken, and I could see writing on the backs of the posters in black, dripping ink.

ALL ALONE