My first mother, as I call the mother of my earliest memories, was a drastic change from the mother I lived with for the majority of my childhood. When life was happy, before anything bad had touched us, my mother lovingly doted on my brother and me. She stayed home with us while our father went to work. We didn’t have a lot of extra money but the time spent with our mother made that not matter to us. Jasper and I were happy kids, even after he started school and I got to spend hours alone with mother, he still came home all smiles. Even after life went to hell, Jasper still wore a smile more often than not, a trait that almost made me hate the boy, but eventually one that I found endearing. Our happy home fell apart when the runt was born. The night she came I was too young to remember clearly, but all I know is that I was scared by the storm and no matter how loud I called for my parents the only comfort I received came from Jasper. They were too busy delivering the wolf in lambskin.
At first Jasper and I were excited to have a new baby sister, we thought another child would only make our family more complete. We were way too young to see that she would be the one to tear us all apart. The easy going, free living mother we’d known before started to leave us when the kid was only a few days old. Mom woke up to find some strange scratches on the baby. At first she wasn’t too worried, assuming they were normal self inflicted wounds you find on lots of infants, but when they kept appearing no matter what precautions were taken our mother began to go a little crazy. She watched over the kid non stop, ignoring Jasper and me to the point where he would have to fix my breakfast every morning before he went to school and whatever I ate before he got home I would have to find on my own. Dinner was handled by our father, but he kind of sucked as a cook. Mom would sit in Lexi’s room, staring at her bassinette all day and night. She started losing weight, her hair looked stringy and unwashed, and her eyes looked like they were both surrounded by dark swollen bruises.
Jasper and I thought she would die sitting there, we talked about our fears with our dad and he promised to make her stop. Later that night, after Jasper and I had already gone to bed, we were awakened by screams coming from our parents bedroom. Jazz wouldn’t let me go see what was wrong, he came to my room and huddled in my bed with me until well after the screams stopped. The next day when we woke for breakfast, our dad was sitting at the table. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night, at first we thought that he had just taken mom’s place, but then he told us that mom was sleeping and we should leave her be. He stayed home from work that day, and let Jasper stay home from school. Mom slept until dinner time, but when she got up it was almost as if we had gotten our old mother back.
She wasn’t the same, but at least she wasn’t crazy anymore and she resumed her stay at home mom duties. Jasper went back to school and life ran smoothly once again. As Lexi grew up she still got injured somehow, but it was no longer an issue. The wounds were never anything more than scrapes or scratches so they eventually became a part of our normal lives. When the kid was old enough to sleep in her own bed my room was rearranged to make room for her. I wasn’t too happy about this at first, but I knew our house was too small for there to be any other choice and she couldn’t room with Jasper because he was a boy so I accepted it as my fate and laid down the law. The only rule was that she couldn’t touch my stuff or I would have to kill her. Not that I really would have killed her, not at that point anyway, but it never hurts to put some fear in those you wish to keep in line. We had shared a room for almost three years before things went downhill. No, not downhill, things went straight to hell.
It was the night before the party, Lexi’s birthday party. We’d all been allowed to invite some friends over to celebrate with the family and we all were excited about that fact. Mom and Dad had trouble getting Lexi to go to bed, her bedtime was an hour earlier than mine or Jasper’s but we all ended up going to bed at the same time. I remember Lexi whispering to me in the dark after we’d been tucked in and having to tell her to shut up and go to sleep. When she got quiet I figured she had so I rolled over and did the same. A little while later the kid’s scream woke me up. She’d already turned on the lamp between our beds and when I opened my eyes I couldn’t believe what I saw. There should have only been the two of us in that room, but I could clearly see two things standing on either side of her bed. One was sort of glowing and looked almost nice but the other was something only the worst nightmare could conjure. It was scary and mean looking, dressed in a long black robe that only added to it’s menacing appearance. Since they didn’t seem to be concerned with me, I scrambled to the opposite end of my bed and huddled there while gripping my covers for dear life. I didn’t have to wait long before our parents burst through the door. Dad didn’t seem to notice Lexi’s visitors but Mom did. She froze in the doorway, her eyes fixed on the scary one. Dad moved to the foot of my bed and hugged me to him while mom tried to move closer to Lexi. She got almost all the way to her before the scary one knocked her to her knees. Then both the nice and mean one started speaking over the kid, as they were speaking Lexi began to scream in pain. Dad covered my face before I could watch everything as it happened, but knew at least one of them was hurting her. Dad pushed me away and stood up, he was going to try and help Lexi. Even though he couldn’t see the things, they could see him. The mean one barely waved his hand to send my strong father across the room and into the far wall. When he slumped to the floor I thought he was just knocked out, it wasn’t until later that we realized he was actually dead. After killing our father, the mean one leaned down and kissed Lexi’s head. When he leaned back up he’d left cuts in the shape of a cross on her forehead. The last thing he did before leaving was laugh, a sound I’ll never forget.
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