Author's Note: I used to write short stories a lot. This one happens to be about 1,500 words in length, but I usually write stories about 2,000 to 3,000 words in length. This particular one is about... well. Kids! On a literary level, I'd like to dub it the "characterization reflection". Have you ever met someone who resembles a distorted version of you physically and mentally? Let me know, and please enjoy! January 16, 2007.

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When I was a kid, I loved to make tunnels out of couch pillows.

The best house to make them in was my Aunt Terry’s. She had these perfectly square pillows. There were about a million of them bunched on every couch and chair in the house. I used to run around with my brother Jake and take all the pillows and ecstatically build a tunnel that would stretch from Aunt Terry’s living room into her kitchen. We would move through this crazy tunnel like war soldiers crawling on our bellies and, sometimes, I could smell my brother’s sweaty feet. We would sneak a cookie and pretend like someone’s coming after us. Sometimes I would get too excited and I would hurry my brother up and nudge and push him. He’d tip over like a cow and then fall down, and part of the tunnel would blast open. It was mountains of fun, except for the times when we were angry at each other for breaking down the tunnel.

Then we’d always stop by the parlor to have a little chit-chat with my mom and my aunt, so they would never suspect that we were stealing cookies.

I couldn’t forget the day when Aunt Terry got children.

They weren’t exactly her own. They were “Gubernent-ishood,” she had told my brother and I.

I looked at my mother, who was stirring her coffee. “Ma, what does ‘Gubernent-ishood’ mean?”

“You’re stupid,” my brother didn’t even give my mom a chance to speak. “Someone gave Aunt Terry children because she doesn’t have children of her own!”

“That’s right,” Aunt Terry smiled benevolently, talking in her sweetest baby-talk voice. She patted my brother on the head for being the smartest boy in the world. He had a dumb-looking bowl haircut from kindergarten all the way until sixth grade.

“Who gave you them?” I asked impatiently. “Where are they? Are they in that box?”

My mom and Aunt Terry looked at each other and laughed.

My mom then took a sip of her coffee and said in a rushed whisper, “Why don’t you go check? Go check,”

My brother looked from her, and then to our aunt. She smiled. He ran over to the box and eagerly opened it. He pulled on a sleeve, and for a moment, I thought there were children inside.

He pulled out mom’s old sweater that my other aunt had gotten her last Christmas. It had white furry balls the size of rabbit tails all over it and it was different shades of red. My brother frowned.

Ma and Aunt Terry laughed. So did I.

“Ha ha ha. You’re stupid, you’re stupid!” I teased him and ran off. He chased after me. I ran up the stairs, sliding my hand over the banister even though I had acquired a sort of phobia of splinters. When my father still had time shares with a pretty place up in Lake Tahoe, I would take a trip with him, my mom, and my brother up there, and I would run through the buildings, sliding my hands quickly over the banister. One time, I got a real big splinter lodged into my palm. My mom had to take out her tweezers and pull the bugger out. I had an innate fear of getting splinters in my hands after that. But I had an even bigger fear of falling down the stairs. I galloped up quickly, using the same leg to mount each stair while hoisting the other along. Aunt Terry’s stairs were very high and very thick. My brother just ran up the carpeted part of the stairs on all fours, snarling like a cougar rapidly catching up to me. I tripped onto the landing and stumbled laughing through the hallway. I squealed excitedly and ran, and ran, and ran, trying to reach the master bedroom at the end of the hall because it was the only room with a lock on it. I would always use it as my hiding spot whenever we played hide-and-and-go-seek, and Jake would always call me a cheater for locking the door. I passed by the empty rooms of the house that my aunt would always fill with guests, looking over my shoulder to see Jake stalking down the hall angrily and clunkily like a miniature Frankenstein. When I looked ahead, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and stopped dead in my tracks. I can’t remember if I screamed or not when I first saw her.

Even Jake stopped his tirade.

We stared at this strange, ghostly girl in the house. I was about to turn around and run back down the stairs and tell Aunt Terry that there was a strange girl in the house, but my brother came up to the girl and asked, “Are you the new kid Aunt Terry has?”

She looked from him to me. She said nothing. Maybe she couldn’t understand him.

She had black, black eyes and straight black hair, and her arms were stiff and straight at her sides.

“He thought you were gonna come in a box,” I laughed at him. He punched me. I made an exclamation and laughed and so did he, but she didn’t even flinch. I looked at Jake and then at her, “What’s your name?”

“Yeah, what’s your name?”

The girl seemed confused.

I looked at Jake again, then at her for a while longer before speaking up. “Do you want to play with us? Do you want to help us build a tunnel? Ma and Aunt Terry don’t know we steal cookies but we steal them all the time and eat them at the fort. Fort Babbelgook. And then after that we go on more mishuns to get more cookies. We’ve stolen like five hundred,”

“Five million, stupid,” Jake corrected.

“Yeah,” I said. “So do you want to play with us?”

The black-eyed girl eyed us eerily and then turned around without a word and went back into the room. We followed her inside. She was drawing something scary and unidentifiable on the tiny table in front of her. I looked down at it. I liked to draw a lot too, but I always hated it when I was trying to draw a mermaid, but my parents and relatives would think it was a fish. One of my uncles would always ask, “What is that? A pretty princess?” and whether I said yes or no, he would still follow it up with: “It’s beautiful!” The only reason why I wasn’t so mad at him for knowing whether I was drawing a cat or a girl was because he would interrupt me to ask, “It’s so beautiful, can I buy it?” He would really buy it. Until this day I never knew where any of the drawings went.

The girl used a black crayon, a purple crayon, a red marker, and a black marker. There was also a green stencil that she didn’t know how to use. The picture looked scary, so I kept my mouth shut.

“What is that?” Jake looked at it with a wrinkled nose. The girl looked up at him and didn’t respond.

I was beginning to become afraid of her. I backed into the bed. I felt something grab my ankle. I don’t remember whether I screamed or not when I first saw him. I stumbled back and saw a ghoulish face under the bed. He had an impish smile and weird, small teeth. But there was something about his face that frightened me and I couldn’t put my finger on it. He crawled out from under the bed and went, “Baaaaaah! Ughka uhnnnaaaa-aaa.” It seemed as if he choked on every word when he spoke. Or like he was talking with a mouth full of Jello.

Frightened, I hid behind my brother.

“Baaaaah!” my brother imitated him, “Durrrrr. Dur, dur.”

I watched him “interact” with this child in between side-glancing at the girl who was angrily drawing circle-circle-circles over and over again with the purple crayon.

Jake was laughing as the Jello boy responded. The Jello boy threw his arms up and let out an ear piercing scream.

I cupped my hands over my ears. I stared at the little girl, circle-circling now with the black marker, coloring on the table, beginning to mark up her arms and her legs, and then suddenly, she ran up to the Jello boy and marked up his face. He started to cry and he clawed at his mouth and eyes as if she had used acid all over his face. He fell down and writhed on the floor like a tortured animal. She began to hit him with the marker. Jake stared in horror. I looked away. Then, I felt like I wanted to cry so I ran out of the room and down stairs as fast as I could, leaving my brother with my aunt’s new “Gubernent” kids.

Why would anyone give my aunt kids like those? That’s the first thing I thought when I hit the bottom of the stairs. Instead of heading into the parlor, I kicked a part of the tunnel open and crawled through, finding a good, dark solid place to hide. They were so scary. Who would ever make kids like that and give them to someone else as a present?

It reminded me of the sweaters my other auntie would give my ma every Christmas.

I was very young, and could not see lucrative benefits in keeping ugly sweaters or scary children.