sjsprWriting

I.

I met it when I was ten.

Mother and father had always wanted another child, and – after so many years of waiting – they got exactly that.

“Honey, this is your brother. I want you to treat him well, okay?” Mother would say. I’d stare at it, amazed at how it looked like us. Smelled like us. Talked like us.

It was seven years old.

“Is it yours?” I asked.

“We adopted him, so he is part of our family now,” Mother smiled.

“You be nice now,” Father pressed.

I didn’t know what to do at that moment.

I only knew I didn’t like my brother.

II.

By the time it turned eleven, my hatred had only grown. Mother and father adored it; did everything possible for it.

They didn’t know what I knew.

The whirring noises it would make at night. The red tint in its irises. How its limbs would move in obscure angles.

I wouldn’t sleep, merely observing it as it moved about in the still of the darkness. Sometimes it would squeak and screech ever so quietly.

But I was there.

I was there to see when it would tear off its human skin, and by morning go back to being completely normal.