Jimmy Reddir

At first it was their pet rabbit.

Next, their dog was discovered in the backyard, at the end of the narrow passageway next to a broken kitchen window. The immobile body lay on top of a trashcan and was covered in splinters, blood, and bruises; clearly defenestrated.

Then came the letter that finally caught the Winston family's attention.

The white letter came through the mail one afternoon, folded into an intricate paper plane. If it had not been in the old, blue mailbox, Charlie Winston would had thought it was the neighbor's toy. Charlie had grunted, returned to the house, and tossed the mail on the breakfast table, until his wife took notice of it. Mrs. Winston had assumed it was her son's artwork, and beaten the boy for whatever reason she could come up with. As always, the little boy did not talk or cry, and the reaction triggered Mrs. Winston even more that she broke the beating stick and left a long, trailing red mark on her son's back. Charlie did not order to stop the beating, but rather silently headed to the table and unfolded the letter as pieces of alphabets were revealed. He lifted an eyebrow in interest and motioned his wife over.

The woman stood beside the man. They stared at the laconic letter.

Each alphabet was typed in black and different fonts, seemingly cut off from a magazine. They were lined up perfectly. There was no suggestions as to who the letter was for, or who it was from. In a disturbingly organized manner, the letter held just one upper-cased word:

DIE

Charlie snorted and tore the paper in shreds with uncontrollable anger. Mrs. Winston opened her mouth slightly and closed it again. Her manicured nails hung onto the tip of Charlie's sleeve as colours drained from her face. She eyed the phone, but her husband shook his head, returned to his bedroom, and plummeted on the bed, as if nothing had happened. Charlie did not know that this was not the end to the whole thing; it was the penultimate letter.

Mrs. Winston, in order to contain her worries and anxiety, took a broom from the closet and continued beating the brat.

The boy didn't bear a name, although in his mind, he branded himself as Jimmy. He had golden hair and strikingly beautiful blue eyes, while the Winston couple both had black hair and brown eyes. Sometimes his teachers wondered when they sensed no resemblance between the boy and his parents, but they weren't determined to find out the answer; and sometimes his teachers saw a bright red mark on Jimmy's forearm, but they refused to think the worst. Jimmy was abandoned by his birth parents at the age of seven, and since then, he never spoke a word, although no one knew whether he ever did or not. Nobody knew who his actual parents were, but at the same time, nobody cared for the abnormal kid.

When he was adopted by the Winston family, he wasn't the only child. He had a stepsister who was six years older than him, and she had just celebrated her fifteenth birthday. The two siblings received the same treatments, except that perhaps, Julia got it worse than he did. Every birthday, Julia would get a new beating stick and fall asleep with blood stains on her shirt. It was a blessing to Jimmy that the couple did not know when his birthday was.

The Winstons did not want their kids dead, because they enjoyed the simple pleasure of torturing others. Some would call them monsters, and they came to have a liking for that.

The day after the black letter, Julia went to school just like she normally did, but was found dead in the driveway that evening.

The teenage girl was allegedly stabbed forty-nine times on the limbs and torso. Her hair was dyed red with blood, and the death blow was on the head, from a brick nearby. Charlie was the one to spot the corpse when he went home from work that day, along with another white paper plane in Julia's mouth. The layout and format were all the same—that is, ignoring the blood smudge—, but the letters formed three different words this time: