Stories of the Untold...

They Were Called Sixes

I want to tell you about my life and the strange things I've seen and before I do, I want you to understand that my actions in the end had reasons.

I was born to a single mother. She was only 15 around the time I was born and she wasn't exactly ready to be a mother. Apparently, my dad was even less ready because his parents ened up sending him to boarding school so he wouldn't have to be responsible for me and my mother. We were mostly supported by her parents, but otherwise we were completely alone.

I started discovering my "gift" when I was about 5 years old. My great grandmother had passed away. I felt really confused when I walked into the viewing room of the funeral parlor and saw my gran sitting in a chair next to her own casket. At that point, I already grasped that death meant that you were gone forever, and yet there she was.

My confusion was overpowered with my relief. Approaching her, she seemed different. There, but not quite the same. Like when you're picturing something in your head. Your eyes are open and you're clearly seeing what's in the room, but something entirely different at the same time. She whispered in my ear, kissed my forehead, and disappeared. I walked up to my mom and asked her about the roses in Italy, as Gran had instructed. To this day, I still don't know what that meant, but it was something important enough to make my mother fall to her knees. She held me and it was the only time that I remember feeling like she truly loved me.

As I grew, my gift became a little more apparent. I'd see people I wasn't supposed to see in every day situations. A few would even notice and follow me home. I didn't mind. None of them ever imposed or tried to harm me. They just wanted company until they figured out how to move on or they found someone that was more interesting to follow around. I'd talk about it as if it were normal. My mother put forth no effort to stop me, but still acted embarrassed when I did it around other people. No one took it seriously, though. Not like mom did. Honestly, I think she feared me for a while.

When I was about 8, things changed, and it was all due to mom meeting a man named Mike. He was lanky, he smelled bad, and talked too loud. Still, he had a more stable job than mom did, so she fell right into his lap. He wasn't a horrible guy at first, just kind of greedy. My mom told him about my "gift" and he came up with the master plan to use me as a pay pig. Post my name up in phone books as the "world's youngest psychic". I don't know if he even believed my gift was real at first, but he learned otherwise eventually. That's how I started talking to dead people in a living when I was just beginning to learn multiplication. It was fun at first, when it wasn't the same old "tell my mom I love her" bullshit.

There was case when I was 13 where I was seeing a family who believed the spirit of a 4 year old girl was haunting their house. They claimed that they didn't intend to make the girl leave, they just wanted to learn more about her so they could make her more comfortable in their home. When I walked into the house, there was definitely no little girl. There was, however, a grey non-human entity crouched on their 17 year old son's back. Its skin looked like paper, and its eyes were fully blood red. It came in human-like shape, but it was far from human.

These non-humans were something I called sixes. Sixes are souls that were never human. They're created out of pure sorrow and hatred. They're negative emotion embodied into an evil, spiritual being. They can project the actions of human spirits to confuse their hosts. Make them think they're just victims of a normal haunting. Human souls cannot hurt you unless they're extremely sinister (like Bundy sinister). Sixes, however, can (along with several other non-human entities). They suck every emotion out of you and radiate so much of their own sorrow and hatred until you either kill yourself or commit a crime so horrible that you'll likely get the death penalty. They usually go after evil, corrupt, or just plain miserable people.

They were called sixes because you'd usually only last six months before you lost it.

I think I started resenting my mother when I was 16. I had gotten tired of the job. Everyone in town knew me. All the kids at school called me a freak. By this point, Mike had started to drink away all the money that people had paid me to tell them that their grandmother loved them or that their dead child was in a better place. He became violent. Angry. He hit my mother and she just took it for a while. Then, she started to blame me. "If you never would have started talking to fucking Casper, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation." Completely ignoring the fact that he was her boyfriend, not mine. Not long after that, he stopped hitting her and started hitting me. Then, she did, too.

Only months later did I start seeing Sixes roaming around whenever my "parents" were near. I watched this without a word. Still allowing them to escort me to jobs. At first, the sixes would stay far away. I'd see them out the window, across the street. They creeped closer as time went on. Very slowly. My curiosity heavily outweighed my fear. I had only ever seen them on peoples backs. I became a bit more startled when they stood at our windows. They knew I could see them, but they disregarded me. I said nothing to my mother the day I watched one crawl onto her back and latch its gaping, teethed mouth onto her shoulder. I wasn't surprised when I saw another on Mikes back later that day.

I thought about telling Mike and my mother. Calling up a specialist to help get rid of the sixes that had only just begun to drain my sad excuse for a family. Then, I thought about finally being alone. Never having to do jobs that they told me to do. Never being subjected to a drunken lecture about my "responsibility" to "support my family". Never explaining my bruises away to teachers.

So, I didn't tell them. I just sat back and enjoyed the show.