I was an only child for a few years. In the late 70s, my parents gave birth to a pair of twins, Melissa and Michelle. We grew up together, and I loved them. But we were different. I was more of a tomboy, while my sisters were more girly. Despite our differences, we still got along swell.
In the early 80s, probably 1984, my sisters were obsessed with this cartoon that they saw on the television. Every afternoon after school, my sisters would run into the living room to watch their show. It was a cartoon featuring a doll as the main character, teaching kids about life skill such as manners, grammar rules, conversation skills, and stuff like that. I tried watching it with them a few times, but I never understood the appeal. So I never paid much attention to them as they blankly watched their show.
As time went on, my sisters began to feel more distant from the world. They talked to my parents and I less and less, stopped working on whatever assignments were given to them in class, and spent more and more time on the couch. However distant they were from the real world, they always followed the directions from the show to a T.
A few days after my sisters seemed detached from reality, I saw a missing poster for a girl in my town, Laura. Laura was a few grades above me, but we had a class together. The last I heard from her she had gotten a part time job at a local cartoon studio, the same studio that aired my sisters favorite cartoon. One day she went to work, and wasn’t seen since.
After a few weeks of my sisters ignoring my family and I more and more, the incident happened. It was a Wednesday night in November, and my parents were fighting with my sisters to put them to bed. My sisters surprisingly went to bed, which was shocking because usually they would argue with my parents to stay up on the couch.
The morning after, my parents went to wake up my sisters as they normally did. Though, something was amiss. The door was locked. My sisters never locked their door, it was a rule in my house that nobody could lock their doors. It took half an hour of banging on the door, and eventually we had to pry the door off of it’s hinges.
When we opened the door, Melissa was laying on the bed, her body against the wall. When we turned her body around, there was one of the kitchen knives plunged into her chest. Furthermore, her mouth was carved into a smile.
It was horrifying. It was traumatizing. I didn’t know what to think. How could I think in that situation? There was a bloody piece of paper in Melissa’s hand. There were two messages, reading the same content, but in two different ink colors.
The note read; “The doll has showed me what to do.”
Upon reading that note, we realized that we didn’t know where Michelle was. There were bloody footsteps leading to the shattered window. There were more bloody footsteps outside, but they eventually faded out.
Michelle never came back. The Saturday after both of my sisters died, I was watching TV to try and feel something. And then the show with the doll came on the screen. I was very tempted to turn off the TV and walk away, but I decided to stick around and watch it, for my sisters memory.
What I saw was horrifying. It was a song segment about table manners. The doll was sitting at the table, and began demonstrating table manners to a cute little tune.
It told viewers to put the napkin in their lap, bring drinks to their face, close their mouth when they chew. That was all the normal stuff, but it was the end of the song that made my heart drop.
“When you grab the knife, put it in your right hand. With your right hand-“ The contrast on the screen boosted by a large margin, and the visuals were distorted, “-kill your family.”