Big News
By: Jordan Seifert

Undoubtedly, it was the worst day of my life. At age 23, both my parents died in an accident; that wasn’t the worst day of my life. Shortly thereafter, my 10 year old sister was put into my care; and although I knew it would be a massive undertaking, that was definitely not the worst day of my life. But on an unusually cold May afternoon, my sister had taken the bus to her babysitters house, no different than any other day. She was only there for two hours on weekdays to fill in the gap from where she got off school and I finished work.

The company kept me late, and I hadn’t thought to call ahead. I could already hear the inevitable carrying on buzzing in my ear.
“Yoooouuuu’re late, mister. Don’t you think Susanne has better things to do than sit around watching meee?” I sighed and stepped out of the car, locking the door behind me. Kertweet. It had been an extremely late spring. I could still see puddles from where the last mounds of snow had been only days before. Bushes and shrubbery came into view after an entire winter of hiding. The empty halls echoed as I climbed the stairs to the third floor. Less than sixty steps and I was completely out of breath. I took a breather and made a mental note to myself. ‘Gotta work on that.’ I knocked on the door and shuffled back and forth, tapping my toes against the floor. I filled my cheeks with air and let it all pass through my partially sealed lips.

“Fbbbbbb.” I waited to be punished. Nobody came to shout at me, or tug on my leg, or run past me right to the car. Frustrated, I knocked again, louder this time. And again, nobody came. The knob was unlocked. My voice ran through the air alongside the creaking hinge of the old door.

“You guys here?… Uh, hello?” I stepped inside, and a wave of horror came over me.

Blood was splattered up and down the walls. My heart began beating in and out of my chest, and I could feel my pupils dilating--pushing so hard against my irises that I could feel them start to snap. A trail of organs was splayed out across the floor. Others were bunched in corners, or hung off furniture. Scattered limbs decorated the room, nailed against the walls. A small hand, my sister’s hand, was stuck to the ceiling. Several feet of silver duct tape held it in place, running off across the ceiling like a cracked window. I raced to find a phone, fingers fumbling over the digits. I screamed for neighbours, but nobody came. As I waited for the police, trapped in isolated thoughts and feelings, a soft voice passed through my head over and over like a flickering light.
“This is the worst day of your life. Your sister is dead. This is the worst day of your life. Your sister is dead.”

Two days passed, both of them proving me wrong. Both of them had been worse than the day that came before it. I found myself going from place to place with little idea of how I got there, only moving through loosely connected thoughts. I snapped back to the real world to find myself on my porch. Some reporter was shoving a microphone in my face.

“Mr. Peters? Are you okay?” He ignored whatever I said--So did I. A camera man captured everything as he asked me what I knew, how I felt, what I was going to do. I had no real plan. I had no idea for what I actually intended on doing. I’d wait and see what the police did.
“I’ll kill him,” I answered. “ I’m going to find him, or her, and kill him.” The reporter looked at me wide-eyed. Even knowing how terrible the crime was, most people could only understand it through the filter of human dignity. They couldn’t process how it really felt. I stepped back in my house and collapsed shoulder-first into the door, slamming it shut.

I had closed all the blinds, put up large blankets over the windows like curtains to keep the lights out. Rushing thoughts flooded my brain, pulsating against the sides of my head like a terrible migraine. Any and all light irritated it, but I still found myself watching the news, squinting to try and maybe ease the pain. Ugly stories flipped by the same way they always did. Another murder had occurred in another part of the city, and I realized that I couldn’t process how his family felt at that moment. I was trapped in my own world. I hadn’t come to any greater understanding. I’d just been damaged. My sister lit up the screen. It was weird to think that a picture that meant the whole world to me, that sparked so much inside me, was being used as a prop to tell a story on TV. Nobody really cared. They needed a picture of her so people could see what had been broken. I needed it so that I would have something--anything--remaining of my sister. But they were right. I could only see what was broken. And then there I was, on the screen, muttering big words and sounding how I wished I’d felt.
“I’ll kill him. I’m going to find him, or her, and kill him.” They cut away from the interview segment and back to the studio. A reporters name filled the bottom of the screen. Kari Langdon.
“But unfortunately,” she said, “he was killed first.”

“What?” I thought, the words cutting through me. Like a massive explosion in my brain, all the other thoughts tumbled away, split to bits, and I became entirely focused on what was on the screen. My body went stiff as I watched them roll footage. The room on the TV was exactly the same as the room where I was sitting. Something was there with me on the tape. It stood seven feet tall, its smooth skin pitch black. It’s arms, legs and chest were as thick as worn branches, no more than a couple of inches in diameter. Its blank eyes were large and off center on its face, like oversized eggs pointing inwards towards one another. Its only other discernable feature was a tiny, expressionless slit mouth. Inhuman, it wobbled over top of me, dancing, stabbing me repeatedly in the face and throat with a jagged knife, sawing my limbs from my body. I saw blood go everywhere.

From the darkness of the house, down a hallway, in a room... I heard a noise.