Story: Three Scenes in a Life

This is a very short story I wrote that is going to be critiqued in my fiction class tonight.

1.                  The new kid, Spencer, had moved in next door. Little Sammy was excited that he

would be able to play with someone his age, though he found it weird that he hadn’t seen the family move in and that his grandma hadn’t met his new friend’s parents.

All his information came directly from Spencer. He told Sammy that they had moved into the house in the middle of the night; that they had a big dog, though there was never any barking; that inside his home all the walls were black, but Spencer never invited him to come over and look. Spencer also said that the reason Sammy had never met his parents was because they worked at night and slept during the day.

Being a quiet kid, Sammy took in everything Spencer said, never doubting, never disbelieving.

After all, it was nice to make a friend after “the incident.”  

2.         Spencer was always the more outgoing one, telling Sammy, the other guys, and any girl that would listen all these stories of his trips around the world before moving here. He went on and on about how he had gone to see the Eiffel Tower, how he had floated in the Dead Sea, that he had once fed a camel in Saudi Arabia, how he had smoked with friends in Amsterdam, and that he was learning to fly a plane to go on more adventures.

Though Sammy knew Spencer had moved in at eight and could not possibly remember all that at such a young age, he never questioned his friend. Spencer’s stories sometimes overshadowed their relationship because all Spencer wanted to do was talk about his Indiana Jones-like adventures to girls, but Sammy, being a loyal friend, never complained.

It was nice and refreshing to finally be able to walk around school without the other guys calling him names, without the girls shying away from him, even if everyone still remembered what had happened to his parents when he was a child.  

3.         Sammy looked at his sickly orange bottle of pills, his name imprinted on the label around the middle. On the yellow paper his therapist had given him was something much more distressing – his diagnosis.

He had been going to his therapist since his junior year in college for stress, but only recently had she realized that there was something else entirely wrong with him. Sammy glanced at the sheet to see the capital letters of SPLIT PERSONALITY DISORDER.

He couldn’t believe that Spencer hadn’t been real. All those years, his friend had just been inside his head. And all those years ago, Spencer had manifested, according to his therapist, because he had seen his parents murdered.

Sammy stared into the mirror across the living room and could almost see Spencer in the reflection.

(Found via Flickr)