A Collection of Thoughts

Birthdays

Vikki

I'm not sure why my thoughts keep returning to her. It was a few years ago when we were all in highschool together. Now, I think of it, it was roughly 5... Although it feels like yesterday. We both stayed in school until we were 18, which now strikes me as odd because we didn't usually go to the lessons.

Oh! I know why I'm thinking of her. Today would be her 23rd birthday exactly. I remember that she wouldn't let me buy her a present. The only reason I found out was because of a kind teacher who let it slip to the class when doing the register - she clearly didn't want anyone to know.

I don't think she'd be celebrating her birthday, she's just odd like that. You know, the only thing I ever found out about her is that she has a mum, a sister, a brother, and had a dad. She told me that when we were in the last year of school, when we were both 18. Surprisingly, her sister and brother didn't go to the same school as she did. She showed me a picture of her family when they were younger. She was eight then... which made her sister six and her brother eleven. Her sister Eliza looked a lot like her, although a few years younger. Her dad and mum were together, smiling. Her brother was grinning, he looked funny. He was the oldest child. They were a very cute family.

She said, as she handed me that picture, that she had made a mistake when she was sixteen. But she did think it was for the better. I didn't understand. A mistake for the better? She didn't go in to detail, so I didn't ask. Her family was no longer like that in the picture.

Eliza

Her birthday. I never got her a present. She never got me one. It was fine. We didn't need presents, as we could buy our own things. You see, from a young age my sister and I had both devised a money making scheme. And it worked! We were rich. The type of rich that made you want to laugh hysterically and dance in the middle of the street. We didn't do that though. That would be weird.

The plan was, that she hacked computers of very important people and made serious transactions to our joint account. The account was under my name, but if she went to open it nobody bothered questioning if we were the same person, as we both looked so alike. It was under my name because I was the person running around for her, finding out who had secret money that we could use, exploiting them... basically, I was the one who found out the information we needed and she was the one that sat behind the computer doing all the technical work.

Well one day she started an argument, saying that she should get more than I because she was the one hacking. I fired back saying that she wouldn't be able to do this without me as she had the social skills of a rotting fish.

She got me so mad. I closed of the account, transferring everything in it to a secret one that I had. She had a lot of money, but she wouldn't be able to get anything more.

So she did something that would get me equally if not more angry. She destroyed our family.

It was a few days before her 16th birthday. She took our mother away! Our mother, we had discovered, had cancer. She was terminally ill. She was going to die. I was ten when we found out that she had cancer (so she would be twelve), and thirteen (so she would be fifteen) when we discovered it would kill her. It was the very same year that she kidnapped our mother.

And then, two days later, on her sixteenth birthday, she came back and shot our father in the head.  My brother saw her running away from the house. A few minutes later I saw father in the study, his blood colouring the pages of what he had been working so hard on.

Conrad

Happy Birthday, wherever you are.

It was seven years ago, when we found dad, with a bullet through his head. It has been two days and seven years since I last saw mum. When Eliza found dad, I told her not to touch the gun and we checked out the fingerprints. There were two: hers, and dad's. So we assumed that there had been a fight, dad trying to get the gun away from himself and her trying to shoot him.

We never saw her again, and she didn't come to the funeral. We missed all of her birthdays, from her 17th to her 23rd, which is now. She probably still kept going to school, as she was very focused academically. Neither my sister or I could remember which school she went too though, and we never went looking for her. She was gone from our eyes. Anyway, she went to a different school because she didn't want to be seen with us, her family. Which meant we were long gone from her eyes.

So we've missed seven of her birthdays. But each time, I have always wished her well.