Insanity Was A Man

2. Most Childish of the Children

I'd walked back into my room, but I heard grandma thunder down the stairs. She yelled something, but I couldn't tell what she'd said through my closed door. My mom yelled something back, and I heard something fall to the floor. Something glass, shattering. I slowly creeped to the bedroom door and pushed it open, walking a little ways into the hall.

"You've lost your goddamn mind!"

"Frank, don't talk to my mother like that! Mom, what's wrong!?"

"You're all damn clones! You've all...you're fake!"

Something else fell to the floor and shattered. Grandma came dashing back down the hall and up the stairs, running faster than I'd ever seen her run in my life.

"Grandma?" I asked, subconsciously backing away from her as she rushed passed me to her room.

"Don't talk to me!"

She slammed her door closed behind her. I just stared at it for a second, not knowing what to think. Grandma wasn't making any noises at all inside the room, and I contemplated rather or not to knock on the door and talk to her, see if she might open up to me.

Then she shrieked. She screamed as loud as she could. I could hear the pain in it, but I didn't understand. I didn't understand why she was doing this, I didn't understand why she thought this. Hell, just last week, we had been playing board games in the living room and going to see movies, now she was telling me I was a clone.

When she shouted, I jumped back, hitting the wall.

"Greg!"

My mom's voice came from the bottom of the stair case. I turned to look at her worried face. Her body was scrunched up with stress.

"Greg, go to your room. Just let her calm down. Don't mess with her, ok?"

I began to protest, but was cut off with a stern look. I sighed as I walked into my room.

And when I closed the door, I locked it.

****

I fell asleep around midnight.

When I woke up, grandma was gone.

She'd taken my dad's car, and just left. She had left behind almost all of her belongings, except her wallet and her purse. But she had also given us something before she left.

A note.

She had given us a note. A note saying that she would find us, the real us, at all cost.

When the police came knocking on the door, I only heard broken bits of the conversation. I was with my brothers in the kitchen, straining to hear.

". . .we're sorry. . .mentally unstable. . .Capgras Delusion. . .other health issues. . .launch search as soon as possible. . ."

My parents told the police would start searching for her soon. They'd start a search party, which mom and dad would be part of. And my sixteen-year-old brothers, too.

But not me.

They said I was too young. They said it would be too stressful for me. Me and my sister had to stay home with a babysitter.

No.

I wasn't going to stay home. I wasn't going to stay home while someone I loved was missing.

I wasn't going to do that.

***

I was eleven years old. I was naïve. Even more so than most my age. I was a kid, in the highest sense of the word. I believed anything. I believed I was going to be as huge of an author as JK Rowling when I was older. I thought I was going to the most respected artist in the world. I didn't just dream these things. I fully believed them. But it all didn't turn out that way, not in the slightest. I'm not an artist now. No one knows who I am. My future pretty much proved how naïve I had been. Hell, I had believed in damn leprechauns up to when I was ten. Trolls, all that mythical crap that only three year olds believe in, even though most of them even know it's fake. Grandma told me it was nothing to be ashamed of. She told me I was special. She told me I was connected to the mystical side of the world, the side of the world only the most creative artists paid any attention to.

It was one of the very few times in my life that she had lied to me.

Because I know now that it isn't true. I know now all of it is because I was the most childish of the children, who believed everything they were told and everything they thought up themselves. Everything I thought up myself, like the absurd idea that I would be able to find my grandma and prove to her I was myself. The absurd idea that I, a kid, could make things ok.