Template:Adminpick/January 2017

I haunted them and they never knew it. Mama, Papa, and my little brother Jacob; they always looked right through me, for two years never detecting even the slightest sign of my presence. Have you ever felt the bitter outrage that boils inside you when you're being ignored? Well what happened during those years was even worse than being ignored. At least if someone ignores you, they still know you're there. My very existence remained unacknowledged, and the madness of my situation fed into itself daily. I couldn't leave the area around Papa's wheat farm, some unknown force kept me bound to that place, and an opportunity to exit had never presented itself. I didn't even know what an exit for me would look like. With no outlet to express my frustration, and nobody to communicate with, my ire and ill will grew, soon consuming the entirety of my thoughts.

If you don't yet understand, I'm dead. For the two years immediately following my death, and before I came to this place I'm at now, I was the one and only ghost on my family's farm. Perhaps, in hearing the story of my life and demise, you might learn how to avoid some of the mistakes I made. So please pay attention, because there's a lesson in here somewhere, but I'll leave it for you to figure out what it is.

It was 1950, and Papa's wheat farm had been doing well. The war had brought an economic boom, which continued well after the soldiers came home from the battlefields of Europe and the islands of the Pacific. I was twelve years old, and my brother Jacob was seven. He was fun to pick on, and it was my enjoyable hobby to get him in trouble as much as I could. I loved to intentionally leave messes, like spilled milk, that he would invariably get blamed for. Sometimes, I'd complain to Mama that he was bothering me when he wasn't really doing anything wrong at all. It felt good to see him get scolded and run off to his room, crying his denials. I'd laugh when that happened, and I'd embrace those incidents in my mind, because those were the moments when I was the good child, the one who wasn't getting into trouble.(Read more...)