Shiny Existence

(Sexual violence, physical violence, gore, or abuse)

Bobby is not your ordinary eighteen-year-old boy. Beautiful deep blue eyes and blonde hair he looks like your typical all-American boy, but nothing is ever as it seems. Delicate in his stature, Bobby is smaller than all the other boys his age and does not quite fit in. Quiet and shy, he observes his peers without ever engaging in order to keep the others from discovering who he really is. This timid creature sits upon a deep well of torment and dissociation other children of his age could not begin to comprehend. 

Bobby reflects on his story beginning when he is four. Living in the standardized American version of what family is, he lived with his mother, father, and older sister. His sister Annie, aged nine, was a brutish little girl carrying a chip on her shoulder Bobby could not quite yet understand, but he soon would. Annie, with her flowing locks of curly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, is cold and distant to the point of being unapproachable. Frankly, Bobby fears her. 

One day while Bobby and Annie are playing in the yard independent of each other, Annie seemingly disappears from the face of the earth. This is the day Bobby’s life and his understanding of the world change forever. Countless hours of fruitless efforts to locate her leave Bobby’s parents in a permanent state of denial. To this day Bobby has no idea what happened to Annie. In his parents’ abdication of her absence, they turn their sights to Bobby.  

Bobby’s mother, Alice, thrusts him into his sister’s role without skipping a beat. Etched in his mind, he hears Alice say, “Now remember this is special playtime with Mommy…it is our special secret.” Alice begins curling his hair, painting his nails, adorning his face with intricate make-up akin to that of Tammy Faye, and dressing him in Annie’s demure dresses. Bobby feels odd, but not in the way you would think. At four years old he now feels whole, complete, in a way he did not know anything had been missing before. 

Nevertheless, he also senses the reasons for Alice doing these things to him are not quite genuine. There is something about the look in Alice’s eyes that makes the hair on Bobby’s arms stand on end. Alice had always been very insistent her “playtime” with Bobby take place in Annie’s bedroom. He had never been allowed in her room before so his first time in there he felt out of place. Immediately upon crossing the threshold into her room, he felt uneasy and unsafe being in her room and yet he could not pinpoint why. 

Her room is painted a lovely shade of pale pink, like the shade of a young girl’s blushing cheeks. The stuffed animals are placed just so as though they are for decoration and not for play. Then Bobby notices Annie’s vanity station containing an obscenely large mirror that takes up almost the entire wall. He remembers how out of place this mirror looked and how every time he looked into it he felt as though part of him were being siphoned through it. In fact, the whole room felt like an entirely different world from the rest of the house.

Bobby shudders at the recollection of being in this room and the discomfort that came from his mother’s love and affection he received there. From all outward appearances Alice was a kind and loving mother who cared for and provided for Bobby in every way imaginable. Revered in their community, Alice portrayed this gilded image of the perfect mother and wife. But what no one knew, including Bobby, was that Alice’s glistening shiny exterior hid her twisted core like the cover page of a play. Alice used her children as living dolls for her husband’s amusement.

Harry, her husband, had groomed Alice as his own personal plaything since she herself was eighteen. A tawdry sad excuse for a man, Harry controlled his world hidden behind the tacky mirror peering into Annie’s bedroom. Controlling his wife and children as though he were a master puppeteer and their only existence in this world is for his entertainment and amusement. Being a failure at everything else in his life, Harry had finally “won” a commanding presence in his own real-life play. It was not until Bobby happened upon the hidden room behind the mirror that this young boy of four instinctually knew the reason for his uneasiness…daddy has been watching him and mommy all along.

Snapping himself back into reality, Bobby puts on his starched pressed collared shirt and chinos and heads to his first day of Psychology 101 at Timber College. He sits in the back row away from everyone else observing them as he had once been observed. Watching and listening he begins daydreaming. Writing the most sinister of plays in his head, his classmates become unwitting characters in a contorted scene of the cruelest sort. Torturous scenes of bondage, rape, flaying carnage to peel back the skin of those around him to uncover what lies beneath the surface of a person.

Then he hears it; a voice he thought he would never hear again. It is Annie. Sitting in the front row engaged and full of life, she is no longer the cold and distant child he remembered. He comes to attention on the edge of his seat and glares down at her from above with overflowing rage and an amalgamation of emotions. He smiles the most menacing of smiles as he now has a real-life play to direct.

When class ends, he stalks her like a wolf hunts prey. As Annie turns down the alley to head home, Bobby creeps up behind her, covers her mouth, and drags her to a place no one knows. He slogs her down a set of stairs through a musty corridor and opens a creaky iron door. He sits her down in the darkness and she screams when he lights the flame. It is a perfect rendition of Annie’s bedroom, right down to the obscene mirror. Bobby comes into Annie’s view, and she is horrified to see he looks exactly like their mother. 

 All those years ago when she snuck off into the woods at the age of nine, changed her name, and enrolled herself in school Annie thought she had escaped her hell for good. She could not have been more wrong. Now as she sits here in the damp musky recreation of her childhood hell, she scowls at Bobby knowing she will meet her end here and will never be found. Bobby unsheathes his knife and begins twirling it in the flickering light of the flame. 

Annie looks at him and says, “I am not going to even bother begging you for my life nor attempt at commiserating our pain together. All I ask is you understand why I disappeared. I would have taken you with me if I could have but I barely made it on my own. I am sorry I left you there for them to use you in the intimate ways I know they did, but I could not bear it any longer. The plastic gilded cage of an existence our parents weaved for us was going to kill me, as I see it already has you. Just know you can escape them too if you so desire, but you must want to just as I wanted to.”

Bobby chews on her words as the knife performs acrobatics in his hands, he sets it down, and he approaches Annie. For a brief moment she believes her words may have touched him, but all it took was one look in his eyes to know they did not. She has seen that look before in her mother’s eyes and resolves herself to the most harrowing last moments of her life. Bobby snarls his lips at her knowing by the look on her face she knows what is coming to her. He turns, retrieves the knife, and skips toward her in a way that makes one’s blood curdle. 

 Bobby takes the knife and inflicts small cuts as he continues to skip by her singing the song he wrote special just for her on repeat. The song he wrote her goes a little something like this, 

“Oh, little Annie where have you gone? 

  Mommy wants to play but you fled at dawn. 

  Now it’s my turn and I want to cry.

  Instead, I’ll settle for watching you die.”

Annie tries to swallow the tears welling in her eyes but to no avail. Bobby is inflicting an ancient Chinese form of torture and execution upon Annie known as Lingchi, or death by a thousand cuts. As she sits there bound in the flickering darkness, she lets out a wailing scream that stops Bobby in his tracks. He looks at her and says, “Oh poor dear Annie, am I hurting you? Tsk, tsk, tsk, I thought you were stronger than this. It’s no matter though, I have another class so you can cry and scream here in the darkness. No one will hear you.”

Bobby meticulously removes his mother’s dress and cleans his face. He reemerges from behind the mirror as the same picture-perfect all-American boy who sat behind her in class. He skips through the doorway and snuffs out the light creaking the door shut behind him. Annie hears a loud clank and thud of the door being bolted and locked as she hangs her head and cries. Now that Bobby is gone, she collects herself and tries to figure a way out of here; she’s escaped this hell once before and she is determined to do it again.

As Bobby sits in calculus, a pretty-little thing catches his eye. She has brown hair and emerald-green eyes and a petite tiny frame. He smiles a shy smile at her being mindful of his demeanor and facial expressions so as to not give away his dirty bleeding little secret in the tunnels under the school. She introduces herself after class, “Hi I’m Mary.” Bobby hangs his head blushing responding, “Hi I’m Bobby. It is a pleasure to meet you.” “The pleasure is all mine. You’re kinda shy, aren’t you?” Mary replies. “Just a little,” Bobby says with a smile. “If you will please excuse me Mary, I have a previous engagement I cannot be late for. See you next class?” Mary retorts smirking slyly, “Not if I see you before then.” Bobby smiles and hurries away.

Slinking off to the tunnel, Bobby unlocks the creaky door and opens it. He lights the flame and finds Annie to be exactly where he left her, as he anticipated. Try as hard as she could, she could not break free from the restraints Bobby had her in. He walks behind the mirror and adorns himself in his mother’s dress and makeup. As he reemerges though, there is a shadowy figure standing in the doorway just beyond the reach of the light.  Bobby stands there without saying a word clutching his knife in his hand. The figure approaches. He is stunned to see it is Mary.

Mary saunters over to him, looking behind her over her shoulder at Annie, and looks back to Bobby in his regalia. Bobby still speechless, Mary looks at him and says, “I knew there was something special about you. No boy who is as handsome as you are is as shy as you are.” Frozen where he stands, Bobby does not know what to do. Annie is looking at Mary yearning and pleading with her eyes for help, but what happens next shocks them both. Mary takes the knife from Bobby’s hand and walks over to Annie inflicting a cut upon Annie’s shoulder. Annie yelps and Bobby becomes filled with lust. He pulls out another knife from behind the mirror and they both skip around Annie inflicting cuts as Bobby sings his song.

When the last drop of life has dripped from Annie’s body, Mary and Bobby turn to one another and begin to ravage each other next to her lifeless body. Bobby and Mary now bonded to each other with a mutual understanding, put themselves back together in the flawless way they each do, and emerge from the tunnel and slip back into society unnoticed. Inseparable from that moment on, Bobby and Mary wed after they graduate college. They have earned the respect and admiration from their classmates and professors as being the perfect couple and perfect individuals. Now it is their turn to master the living puppets they create in their world.