Kevin was about 7 years old when he was playing with his twin sister on the hills behind their house. The hills were beautiful, but the sick trees that were scattered across the hilltops made the landscape sad. They were like leafless trees with only three or four thick branches that came to severe points at the ends. Kevin’s father believed that some species of tree had probably been stricken with a disease that made them grow and then turn into the hard things they became, but no one had a real explanation for it anywhere in the country where they gradually appeared to sadden a scene and make it feel doomed.
Kevin and his sister were playing a game that is similar to horseshoes or bocce ball, but they used a pinecone as their marker that they tried to get various sizes of rocks close to while standing at a distance. They didn’t have very much by way of material possessions, but they enjoyed their game, even Kevin though he was not very good at it.
“You should give up,” his sister said. They stood next to one another on the flattest plane of grass they could find, and her rock had just landed a few inches from the pinecone.
“Leave me alone,” Kevin said, eyes focused on the pinecone as he swung a rock back and forth in his right hand next to his body, before he let it go and watched it sail through the air. He overshot it and it tumbled away down a hill.
His sister laughed. “I’m just better at this than you are.”
Kevin told her to shut up under her breath as he jogged in the direction of his rock. He stutter stepped down the hill that was steep and at the bottom was a tangle of bushes and wild grasses. He lost his footing suddenly, then tumbled down. He yelled and his sister jogged over calling down at him,
“You still alive?” She could see him laying in the bushes but he wasn’t moving. She almost panicked but then she saw him move and he slowly rolled over onto his back. His sister could see blood streaming down one side of his face.
“I’m alright.” Kevin said.
“You’re bleeding.” his sister said. She watched as Kevin slowly stood, brushing himself off and he looked down to see where he had hit his head. He couldn’t figure it out, but he saw a small device that looked almost like a small key chain flashlight, as wide as his nostril. Kevin bent to pick it up. He slid it into his nose while his back was still to his sister. It was the best way to avoid her ridicule for the fall; he had to give her something else to laugh about. But before he could turn to show her, he felt the small flashlight device slip further up his nose, and it was not a gentle process. He felt it pushing through, like it was burrowing and digging into the flesh and he fell again on his back screaming in agony.
It was like a bullet had been blasted up into his nose with such stealth precision that it only tunneled up, hot and fast, to rest flat along the top of his brain, nesting against the inside of his skull. He felt the pressure of his brain matter expanding to accommodate the new company and he felt that it was morphing and changing inside of him until it stopped. Then he felt it expand around the surface of his brain, snaking like new neural connections, burrowing deep into it and sparking to life as flashes of electricity jumped from brain matter to the tendrils of the device.
His sister had made it down the hill as this happened and she knelt next to him screaming and crying hysterically as her brother’s body contorted into odd positions. She wanted to get help, but she had a feeling that no one could. The two are twins and it is true that some share a special connection with one another that allows them to feel and understand one another in ways that others cannot, and she could feel that he was lost. Whatever had him, had a stronghold and was taking her brother from her before her eyes. And she was powerless to stop it.
Suddenly, Kevin’s body was still and when his sister noticed, she stopped screaming. She stared silently at his face. His eyes still closed, Kevin spoke a strange language that his sister had never heard before. Then he opened his eyes and blinked up at her like he was waking up from a nap.
“What are you crying about?” he asked her.
“You were dying… “ she managed through shock.
Kevin stood and brushed himself off. He wasn’t fully aware of what had happened to him, but he was glad that it had. Something was different, and he liked it.
Kevin realized that he could make his imagination real when he was in school one day. Kevin was bullied at school because his only friend was his sister and he struggled to fit in with the other boys. His bully, a boy named Patrick, would often find him in the hallway and punch him until someone stopped it. After the thing crawled into his brain, he saw Patrick in the hallway as he was returning to his class from the bathroom and Patrick’s eyes had a gleam of mischief that Kevin recognized. Kevin imagined a scene that he had imagined many times before: a safe like he had seen in cartoons crushing his bully into a flat circle. It happened faster than Kevin could register, the safe appeared over his bully and crushed him, but it was not funny to see it happen in real life. The boy’s blood and viscera splattered the walls and there was a dark red pool of blood that spread the floor. Kevin turned and went in the other direction so that someone else could find and clean the mess.
Kevin didn’t say anything as his sister told their parents about the grotesque accident; how the boy was crushed by something that no one could find. After dinner, he went into the backyard by himself to see if he could make a safe appear out of thin air. Sure enough, he could and that wasn’t all that he could make. He made all of his favorite foods, and they tasted just like he imagined they would. He stuffed himself for about ten minutes straight, and then he vomited it all up into a pile next to him. Eventually he saw the thick chunks in the vomit disappear.
Kevin had a special power. And he decided that he would keep it to himself.
But he was never good at keeping anything from his sister. Kevin’s relationship with his sister was strained after he confirmed his new ability. They barely spent time together after school and he would lock himself in his room.
His sister stalked him slowly one weekend afternoon. She watched her brother skip over the picturesque hills toward the lake. She thought maybe he would sit next to the lake and dip his feet inside, but he skipped passed it. She watched as a her brother slipped into a thick patch of woods and she followed him at a distance. And then she saw him come to a clearing in the trees and she gasped audibly enough for Kevin to hear her. He turned and saw his sister with wide eyes.
Kevin was holding two bloody squirrels, one in each hand. There were piles of dead animals at his feet. It was a bloodbath.
“I found a gun,” Kevin said nervously.
“You killed all of those animals?” she asked.
Kevin didn’t move. His sister ran back to the house where she told her parents what she had seen, all of the carnage that he had created in the woods. Kevin had been imagining various lengths of guns that he used to practice his aim and he hadn’t really noticed the number of dead animals in his clearing until he went there and decided to clean them up.
Kevin received therapy. His parents were worried that their son was a serial killer. And because Kevin was scared when he sat in front of his psychiatrist, he told him about his ability to make his imagination real. And even though Kevin did it, he made things appear for the psychiatrist, Kevin was committed for delusions and for homicidal ideation. He didn’t use his ability to free himself, maybe he was too young to think of a creative escape, maybe the medication dulled his brain activity enough to contain him, but Kevin lost everything that he loved then. Including any sentiment for the family that had locked him up and called him dangerous.
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