I was babysitting my little sister, a chore which I was relegated to once every other weekend or so, and one for which I was paid and therefore did not complain too much about. My sister was 5 then, and was super-humanely muscular and strong for her age, and had just learned the “This is the Song that Never Ends” song from Lambchop. Despite these quirks, she was cute - though I would never admit it unless, perhaps, you put some sort of gun to my head and demanded to know the truth.
I was, myself, around 10-years-old and perhaps a bit young to be babysitting, but I was relatively mature for my age and my parents were only out for a little while. Confused by a Campbell’s label, I had just fed my sister what I thought to be a cheese soup for dinner, but what was actually cheese dip for nachos. She complained a little, but I told her to eat her soup and drink her milk, because that’s what parents tell their children on the television. I can only imagine how gassy she must have been. Evidently, there is no such thing as “cheese soup”.
My sister then began to rebel, in her usual stompy way. She wanted to watch a Teletubbies video for the fifth time that day and I’d had quite enough of those waddling midget retards to last me a lifetime. We had, in this house, a rather inexplicable button next to one of the light switches. The button was red, and large, and inlaid in metal. Above it, it said “EMERGENCY” in big block letters. It was a leftover from the previous resident, who had owned a junkyard and who was quite mad. I pointed to the button.
“If I push this button, the Brat Police are going to come and take you away, and you’ll never ever see mom and dad or the cats again,” I said. She began to cry, clutching a dirty stuffed polar bear. I immediately felt a pang of sisterly guilt, which is strange, as my sister seemed incapable of such empathetic emotions. I hugged her and promised not to push the button, never ever, if we didn’t have to watch those DAMN Teletubbies again. I emphasized the “damn” because I was ten, and when you are ten, cussing requires a concerted effort on your part.
We decided on watching Corduroy, a live-action version of the story about the bear who is missing a button, and who is mildly retarded. My sister ran and grabbed her stuffed Corduroy bear, seating him on her left side while Polar Bear sat, neglected and jealous, at her right. I sat on the couch and read a book that was slightly inappropriate for my age, and from which I was picking up the basic outline of what “sex” was. As it turns out, kissing isn’t even the half of it, which was relieving, as I didn’t want to get pregnant from some playground tryst.
That’s what I thought to myself at the time but, the truth is, I spent the majority of my time on the playground pretending that I had a gigantic and magical anthropomorphic lion as a friend. It is likely that one of the reasons I never made friends at that school was my proclivity for standing on top of play structures and roaring. The only boy who was interested in me at that time lived in a trailer and had one small TV on top of a larger, broken TV, although he did have a Super Nintendo, which made our parentally-imposed “dates” tolerable. This same boy would contact me long after I had moved, when we were both seniors in high school, and tell me he had looked me up on some social networking site and that I had “turned out hot”. By that time, I was no longer socially awkward, and was quite rude to him. So it goes.
About halfway through Corduroy, my sister began to nod off. I lifted her to her feet and gleefully announced that it was bedtime. Bedtime meant that I could watch some television before my parents got home and forced me into my own bed. I half-dragged her into her bed, as she was already basically sleeping, in the heavy-cinder-block sort of mode that children go into.
At the age of five, my sister already weighed more-or-less what I did when I was ten. She wasn’t fat, in any sense, so much as I was pathetically small for my age and she was absurdly muscled for hers. She looked like the young offspring of Superman and a Mexican Wonder Woman, as she was also quite a bit darker in complexion than I was. I had occasionally wondered if she was one of the X-Men. Once, the year before, I had put her in a box labeled “TO XAVIER’S SCHOOL FOR GIFTED YOUNGSTERS AND/OR MEXICO” and left her outside, but one of the neighbors ratted me out. Luckily, my parents were more amused by it than anything else, as we lived in a safe neighborhood then.
I put my sister into her bed, which was quite difficult because, like I said, we were approximately the same weight. She smacked her lips and crushed her dirt-and-Kool-aid gilded stuffed animals into her armpits. I covered her with her quilt and tiptoed out into the living room.
Feeling emboldened, I pulled up a chair to the freezer and extracted the ice cream, having decided I was old enough to make my own decisions about when I could eat ice cream. Even with a chair, I couldn’t reach the bowls, so I sat in front of the television with the entire carton and ate it with a spoon the size of my hand.
I was quickly engrossed in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which played on PBS then and which I had been brought up to view as the only thing on television worth watching. I didn’t get all of the jokes, but I got some of them, and even the ones I didn’t get I would laugh at because it was all so inherently silly. Sometimes, they would show a lady’s boobs, and I wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh. When my mom was home and watching it with me, she would usually say, “Whoops. Oh well,” at the boob parts, and then I would laugh.
My sister stumbled out of the bedroom, dragging her entire quilt and a pillow with her, groggy.
“Monsters. Under m’ bed,” She declared, obviously as nonplussed by the prospect of monsters as a renegade child-sized Hulk should be, but feeling some duty as an ostensibly human child to pretend that she felt the emotion ‘fear’.
I sighed. The commercial break was almost over, and DVR didn’t exist yet, so I was loathe to miss a single moment of Python.
“There’s no such thing as monsters, you dip. Go to bed,” I replied. I had a friend one year older than me, and she called everyone a “dip”, which was short for “dipshit”.
“Just come and look real quick,” she said, pleading and cranky.
I sighed again, heavier, and rolled my eyes as well. We both shuffled into the bedroom, which we shared, and I flicked on the light. Flipping up her bed skirt, I peered underneath. One of our cats was crouched under the bed, eyes reflecting green back at me. I reached in and pulled her out, though she protested and clawed at the carpet.
“It was just Bijou,” I said, putting the angry cat on top of the bed, where she proceeded to put her fur back into its proper place.
“She was chasing the monster, probably. It was there,” said my sister, not sounding particularly interested in it all herself, as if she was contractually obliged to make my life harder.
“Well, I scared it away, then. Go back to sleep,” I tucked her in, flicked out the light, and returned to the television. A different show was on, now: Red Dwarf. I liked this one, too, and settled in to watch.
Five minutes into this show, my sister appeared again, with her stuffed animals and her blankets and her pillows and perhaps the mattress dragging behind her.
“Not sleepy,” she declared, though this was obviously a lie. She was practically too tired to stand.
“Not buying it. Go back to bed.” I didn’t even take my eyes off of the television. That’s when she started to huff, and puff, and stomp her feet. As she stomped, she made small screeching noises. She glared at me, and began to tear at her quilt, as if destroying her things would bother me. I sighed and continued to ignore her.
That’s when she reached Tantrum Level Red. She’d been at yellow before, but a sleepy five-year-old is easily capable of skipping orange altogether and reaching red alert before you can snap your fingers. She reached up for a painted ceramic rabbit I had made in an art class several years ago. I wasn’t very good at art, so the few things that turned out well were displayed prominently. For every painted rabbit, there was a pinch pot that had somehow sagged on one side and was crumbling in a box somewhere. So she reached for that rabbit, and she threw it to the ground. It shattered everywhere, one of it’s painted golden eyes landing directly in front of me.
I said I was relatively mature for my age, but relative maturity only goes so far. She had destroyed my magnum opus, and I could not turn a blind eye to that. I leapt to my feet.
“Brat! I hate you! You’re the worst little brat in the world!” I yelled, my fists clenched into bony little balls. She stood smugly, knowing that I couldn’t hurt her. Even if I’d been capable of taking a swing at a five-year-old, she was a mutant, and could pin me to the ground in seconds. Not only that, my parents would probably not even think it a punishable offense, and would tell me I could make another rabbit someday, or some other bullshit.
That’s when I remembered the button. The EMERGENCY button. I’d never pushed it. My parents had forbidden it, as they were unsure whether or not it was still connected to some emergency service. I don’t think that I believed anything would happen, but just pressing it would be enough to scare The Unholy Brat back into her bed. So I ran to the button and hovered my finger above it.
“That’s IT! The police are going to come now and take you away, you brat!” She folded her arms. I’d threatened it many times, and this fight had escalated beyond the sort of one where a threat would faze her. So, I pushed it. Nothing happened. I had, at the least, expected some sort of alarm to go off.
Her jaw dropped.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ll go to bed right away an’ I’ll make you a new rabbit an’ everything!” she started to cry big, sleepy tears. I felt a tug of guilt, but not enough to back down.
“I don’t want a NEW rabbit. I want MY rabbit, but you broke it, and now you’re going to go to jail.” I said. She began to pick up the pieces of my rabbit, trying to fit them together like a puzzle.
“I can glue it!” she said, still crying. I sighed. The rage was passing, and in the back of my head I knew that my parents would be home soon. If she wasn’t in bed when my parents arrived, and especially if she was crying, I would be the one to get in trouble.
“Alright. I’ll tell them not to come and take you to jail on TWO CONDITIONS,” I said, and she nodded quickly. “Number one, you have to glue my rabbit back together tomorrow. Number two, you have to go to bed now, and you can’t get out for the rest of the night.” I paused. It wasn’t very often that I got leverage like this. “Three conditions, actually. You can’t tell mom and dad that I pushed the button. Four conditions. No more Teletubbies for a WEEK.” She nodded forcefully at all of these conditions. I helped her gather up her bedding and stuffed creatures, and put her back into bed.
I was picking up the pieces of my rabbit from the floor when I heard a heavy pounding at the front door. No one came to the front door unless they didn’t know us at all, like Jehovah’s Witnesses and delivery people. Everyone else used the side door. I’d been told I shouldn’t answer the door for strangers when my parents weren’t home, but it had never been an issue until now.
I pulled up a kitchen chair to the door and peered through the glass window at the top. There were several men outside, dressed all in black. One of them held a badge up to the window. I couldn’t quite read what it said, but they certainly looked like policemen. You’re always supposed to open the door for policemen.
So I did.
“Where is the problem?” asked one of the policemen. Actually, now that I had the door open, they didn’t look very much like policemen. They had on mirrored aviators, like policemen, but it was pitch dark out, and all three had identical moustaches.
“Problem?” I asked. It occurred to me that this might be about the red button. “Did you push the EMERGENCY button?” asked a second man, and now I was quite certain that these were not policemen, because I could see a tentacle peeking out of his sleeve and curling around his belt loop. They smelled strongly of boiled eggs.
“Um, uh, well – “ I couldn’t decide what to do. They always tell you what to do about strangers, but strangers don’t usually have tentacles.
“What was the EMERGENCY?” asked the third man. They all had strange accents and identical voices. None of them were looking down at me when they spoke, instead staring straight ahead into the house.
“It wasn’t an emergency, really. Just, well, my sister wouldn’t go to bed and she broke something and she was being a brat and I just wanted to scare her a little –“
“Where is your sister now?” interrupted the first man. Behind his aviators, I could see a faint red glow.
“In her bed, asleep. It’s okay, there wasn’t really an emergency, I didn’t think that button did-“ the three men, who were much taller than my father and had to duck slightly to enter the house, pushed me out of the way and headed towards the bedroom.
“There’s no emergency! It was a mistake!” I yelled after them. I looked out the door. No police car. No car at all, in fact. I ran to the kitchen and picked up the phone. This was before cell phones were common, so I couldn’t call my parents. I considered the police, but I wasn’t sure how to explain that there were already police-like things at my house. Finally, I rang my next-door neighbor. He was ornery and hated kids, but he was a veteran like my father and owned a gun, and so I’d been instructed to call him in an emergency
The phone rang once. Twice, three times. Finally, he picked up, gruffly yelling, “What is it? Hello? Do you have any idea-r what time it is?” I quickly explained what was happening, that there were strange men in my house, though I wisely left out the bit about the tentacles and the red glowing eyes.
The neighbor told me to get a big knife from a drawer and hide under the kitchen table. I hung up and did so.
About a minute after I hung up, the neighbor came storming through my front door, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and holding a shotgun. I pointed down the hallway. He moved quietly down the hall, shotgun leveled. I heard him storm into the bedroom. There was more banging of doors throughout the house. Eventually, the neighbor came back into the kitchen and began to make phone calls. I fell asleep under the table, still clutching the knife.
All I remember of the next morning was lots of policemen asking me lots of questions. My mom cried, but my dad just looked empty, like when he talks about The War. I tried to tell them about the glowing red eyes and the tentacles, but they decided that I had been half-asleep or that I went into shock. They found my sister’s bedroom window open, but they never found her. The day after that, my dad installed locks on all of the windows in the house. Me parents never blamed me, even though I told them about pressing the EMERGENCY button. They didn’t really think it was related. After much pleading from me, my dad removed the button, and informed me that it wasn’t even wired to anything. Eventually, we moved.
My mom glued my rabbit back together, and now it has a lazy eye. It sits proudly on the mantelpiece, next to a picture of my sister. I don’t even think it’s that nice anymore.

Thread moved from fiction to critque to published work to consolidate comments under the Journal ready for a vote.

Very nice work, btw

Holy crap this is awesome.

I'm putting this up for a vote ASAP.

The one thing I would suggest in an edit would be to increase the paragraph spacing so it reads a bit more cleanly - aka full line between each break in the text. This seems to be more necessary towards the end of the work where the dialogue heats up - it took a second read to catch the tentacles and the glowing red eyes when the "policemen" show up.

There is a helluva lot to love about this piece. First off, the description of the narrator's childhood life is incredibly engaging. The bits about the early boyfriend and the imaginary lion are hilarious. While it's horror/fantasy, I didn't realize it until the narrator pressed the emergency button - which speaks to the skill of your writing.

This actually reminds me not of a particular piece, but rather the types of stories selected for the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collection (of which I have many years in my personal library).

With this aesthetic, I sort of saw a cross between Neil Gaiman and the X-files. I was actually left a little disappointed by the ending... I wanted the narrator to go find her sister, mainly because you've opened up an interesting and vivid imaginary world I'd like to explore, and your characters are fantastic and engaging company.

Plus, that muscular little sis needs to be kickin some tentacle ass

All in excellent work, and it's got my vote.

Thanks! Keep 'em coming!

PS Still laughing at "TO XAVIER’S SCHOOL FOR GIFTED YOUNGSTERS AND/OR MEXICO"

awsum. great shades of Tina Fey and Youth in Revolt and perhaps Monty Python as well? But totally unique. Brilliant.

IF i had to nitpick, I would suggest reworking this line

"but feeling some duty as an ostensibly human child to pretend that she felt the emotion ‘fear’"

since the lil' one gets genuinely frustrated, and there's a bit of innocence about her that I like that becomes thwarted when I think about her putting on airs or affecting emotions.

still, you do a great job of speaking in the kid's voice. which is somehow so true in its maturity to being a kid.

amazing. thanks for the read. i'll remember this one for a long time.

av