I woke up this morning to a dead body in my kitchen, I told my parents about it and along with my younger sibling, we cleaned up the mess. The blood was everywhere, and so were discarded pieces of her. My cousin was dead and when all was said and done, it was clear that I had done it.
Softly we wrapped her in a sheet, took her to the town square and our neighbors and friends helped us bury her. Slowly but surely everything that happened last night started to come back, I went into her room, broke down her door, told her the most horrible things and than finally took her life. Than I placed her body in the kitchen for everyone to see, including myself.
Family is everything.
They take care of us when we are young and we take care of them when they are old. I practically grew up with my cousin, we played together during the day and hid together at night.
While not every family is perfect, there are no doubts many people have benefitted from the love and affection of their family members and been hurt by them as well. That’s how it is in my town, family can heal you and family can hurt you. The only difference is, it’s completely predictable when each of those things will happen.
The Town of Maple Heaven was founded around an unending water source, a spring water fountain from the ground, that hasn’t stopped flowing for the last one hundred and seventy years since it was found. Pure and clean, it provided enough sustenance to grow crops and keep people healthy. The five founding families that discovered it set up a camp and now we have a semi modern town to live in.
It’s an unassuming place, with the only difference between this town and others, being that we don’t let visitors stay past the sunset.
We have our reasons.
Once the sun sets in our town, the flowing spring water goes from clear to muddy and than things get strange.
Last night my family and I, like the other families in our town, locked ourselves in our rooms and barricaded the doors. We slowly waited for it to happen. You see there are monsters in our town, however unlike traditional folklore, these monsters don’t come from outside. They come from our own homes.
Every night, as the water turns brown, the air turns ice cold. The wind picks up and you hear the crying from every house as people wait to see, who will transition.
It’s always one of us.
We can’t predict who will transition, all we know is that it will happen to one person in every family. I slowly started to forget who I was, who my family was and as the tears fell from my eyes. I stood up and opened the door.
Yesterday my cousin and I did chores together, we sat and told each other jokes together and we spoke about what we would do if we ever got to leave the town. Unfortunately we knew that wasn’t a possibility. Everyone who leaves, always wakes up back here.
Last night I broke into her room, screamed at her about her shortcomings and failures and than took her life.
I remembered her begging me not to do it, I remembered her trying to talk some sense into me. I remembered the entire event perfectly. As the sun rose, I was myself again.
Last night was unfortunate, no one had died in our town for so long because we learnt how to protect ourselves from our families, but she couldn’t protect herself from me.
In my town we are the monsters, one of us every night, completely at random. We turn into monsters and hunt down our family members. We still don’t know why it happens, but it does. In the morning we have to go back to life as normal.
As the sun sets tonight I wonder which of my loving family members will be a monster. I hope it’s not me again.