​The Nursery

When I was eight years old my brother went missing from the nursery where he slept and was gone for four hours. At the end of the four hours, my parents in tears and me hiding in a corner where it was dark and quiet because I was scared by how much they were crying, our maid screamed out from the nursery and we went to see that he was back, smiling and gurgling, a little blue knit cap on his head, like he had been there the whole time. But he hadn’t, he was gone, my mother had opened the door in the morning and he was gone and the window was open and his cap was lying on the floor. Now the window was closed and my brother was back and everyone was happy except for me. I wasn’t happy because I knew what had really happened. My brother wasn’t back at all, but was still wherever he had been taken, because that’s what happened, he was taken in the night and something else had been put in his place. This something else looked like my brother and smiled like him and made the same stupid wet noises he made, but it wasn’t him, and I could tell because his eyes were light when they used to be dark, and he flinched away from the fireplace, and sometimes he said things in a different language, and once when he was older I saw him walk by the floor-to-ceiling mirror in my parent’s bedroom and his reflection trailed him by a few inches, imitating his movements after the fact, trying to catch up. I don’t know what took my brother or what happened to him or what this thing that sleeps in his room is, but I read about cuckoos in my dad’s book about birds and I know that things like this happen, that babies are taken and replaced, and my brother was probably lying dead and bones on a forest floor somewhere while this thing slept in his bed and ate his food and took the love that should’ve been his. Now I’m thirteen and my brother is six, and ever since he learned how to talk I’ve been working on my plan. My plan is, I’m going to tell my parents that grandma called when they were asleep and that she was very sick and they needed to meet her at the hospital. When they went to see her, and left me and my brother at home with the maid like they did last time, I’d trick her into going in the basement closet by saying I’d spilled something down there and then I’d push a chair up under the knob so she was stuck. Then I’d get my brother and I’d tie him up with the strings I snipped off from the blinds in our guest room, and I’d put him in front of the fire and hold him there and ask him where my brother was and keep pushing him closer and closer until he started to burn, and then he’d show me his true face and speak in his real voice and tell me everything I needed to know. And even if my brother was dead and eaten and had been all these years, at least my parents would finally know the truth like I did, and they wouldn’t keep loving the wrong thing and taking care of him and thinking everything was normal and happy when they should’ve been crying instead.