Sister Killer

When I was little my sisters, eight and eleven years my senior, used to torture me whenever our parents weren’t looking.  With a dad that worked from dusk till dawn and a mom strung out in her purple Valium haze (it was the late 70’s, after all), they had abundant opportunities to execute their evil plans.  Once, when I was just an infant, they carefully lifted my tiny slumbering body out of my crib and laid me in the hall closet, closing the door and leaving me there until I awoke in the dark and began to cry.  At their refusal to divulge my location, my mother was forced to follow the sound my increasing hysterical screams and search the entire house till she found me.  Throughout the following years later they electrocuted me, shoved my arms down the toilet, and awakened me in the middle of the night, telling me I was about to miss the bus and shoved me, in my pink footie pajamas, outside in the snow and locked the door.  One year they put cat poo in my Christmas stocking.  There was seemingly no end to their masochism.

I was about seven the Sunday morning our parents went to Two M’s Restaurant for breakfast and left me alone with the partners in crime.  Michelle, the eldest, had two mother of pearl and chrome bee-bee pistols which I was never, ever, EVER allowed to touch. EVER. I was invited into their room, and told to take one and point it at Anne, the middle sister, and pull the trigger.After much coaxing and apprehension I did, and the gun clicked.

Anne flew backwards onto her bed in a horrifying death scene, complete with chest clutching and eye rolling and breathlessly gasping out, “Just…just…rem…ember…KB…I…I…love…you…..!!” before slumping to the floor.

Mortified, I ran from the room down the hall as Michelle screeched behind me, “You killed my sister!!“.  From my hiding space behind the sofa I heard her stomping her feet to the kitchen, screaming, “I’m calling the police!!!”  “Nooo!!” I pleaded.  “I’m calling MOM AND DAD!!” “NOOOO!!” I begged from behind the orangy brown upholstery.  “I am!!!  I”m calling!! Oh Anne, my poor dead sister!!!”

She left me there, sobbing, for what seemed an eternity.  I envisioned Anne, my poor beautiful sister, lying on the floor in a pool of blood as Michelle  wept over her body.  I envisioned my parents’ faces when they returned home to find their daughter slain.  Would they believe it was an accident?  Would they believe that it had been Michelle’s idea?  That I had protested?  I sat behind the sofa and cried for my sister, for my parents, for myself.

Looking back only a few moments had passed before the two came out to inform me of their ruse.  I fell into hysterics, convinced that the ghost of my poor murdered sister was returning to haunt me for the sin I had committed against her.  I don’t know how long it took for them to convince me of the joke, but eventually they did, and I emerged from my hiding place and forgave them.

In a show of sisterly affection and peace, they waited a good hour before taping my arms to my sides and sticking my head in the toilet….