Bad Seed 1

Mr. and Mrs. Wilson never thought that anything like this would happen to them. They were the last people you would ever expect to be involved in anything like this. They were just too normal.

Mr. Wilson worked in an office. He was a faceless man in a faceless job, spilling drops into a pond that no one would even recognize from their ripples. Mrs. Wilson was average, having gained her normalcy from years of effort and restraint. She, and her husband, did everything they could to be average and invisible and simple, but like many other tragic people, it was this very effort that lead to their downfall and demise.

The Wilsons had two sons. That's what they would tell you if you asked. Two sons of around the same age, two boys opposite in build, skill, and attitude. If anyone had cared enough to look closely, they might have written it off to the fact that every family has "one of those" in it, but no one took the time to. It was none of their business. The funny thing is that they would've been more right than they knew, in a way. Every family did have one like that, someone who was made for trouble, but in this case, it wasn't the boy. It was his mother.

Mrs. Wilson smiled every day, and brought sunshine and bright, shining perfection into her home, and would never tell a soul about the darkness that hid in her past or the sister who had tried so many times to bring it into her present. It had been years since Mrs. Wilson had seen her sister, having not given her an address or phone number when she moved out of the city and into her slice of the suburbs. She, and the rest of Mrs. Wilson's family, had not been invited to the wedding. She, and the rest of Mrs. Wilson's family, had not been listed on any records. She, and the rest of Mrs. Wilson's family, had never truly existed outside of some hazy nightmare of no longer real, if you had ever had the gall to pry into the history with Mrs. Wilson herself, thank you very much. Civilized people never spoke of such things, so it wasn't difficult to hide it.

She had buried her sister, buried her deep, but even so, bad seeds always find their way up through the soil, as Mrs. Wilson discovered on a dull, grey Tuesday.

Mr. Wilson had been smiling as he settled the knot of a tie against his throat, and Mrs. Wilson had been absently humming as she pulled a clean, cotton shirt over her screaming toddler's head. He was a fussy child, and always had been, but wasn't that normal in itself. They were sleepwalking and too preoccupied to notice that something had slipped into the mail alongside the electric bill and the invitation to the neighborhood barbecue.

Mr. Wilson had already gone to work by the time his wife saw the stamped letter. When she saw it though, she had her first craving for a nicotine hit in years.

When her husband came home, she was determined to say nothing  of the letter, of the notice, they had received that day, of her sister, or the husband that she hadn't known had existed until he was already dead, or the baby who was missing still. Mrs. Wilson's parents had died long ago from the after-effects of a life spent poor and stupid. Still, there had to be others who they could call about the funeral arrangements. Thank god her husband never paid too much attention to the news.

She asked him about work, and told him about how the neighbor had been having troubles with her daughters and how their baby boy had learned a new word today. That night, they went to bed normal, and happy and unaware that it would be their last "normal" night for some time.

"You must have the wrong number. My wife doesn't have a sister."

The words jerked Mrs. Wilson out of bed. She had overslept, something that was never done in the win the Wilson house. Her husband was sitting in bed, eyes bleary from sleep, with the phone pressed to his ear. He tried to stifle a yawn, but Mrs. Wilson could see that something that had been said was worrying him. A small line had appeared, creased between his eyebrows, as he turned from the phone.

"Penny?" he ventured uncertainly, "There's a man on the phone, some government agency. They say they need to talk to you."

Penny Wilson did not want to talk to anybody about anything regarding her sister. Penny Wilson wanted to pretend that "Circe Andrews" and "Penelope Andrews"had never been a real person, that there had never been a dingy trailer that could never really be made clean or a father who smelled of smoke and cheap vodka. Penny Wilson wanted to crawl under the covers and block out the world and wait for it to all go away. She wanted to run again. Penny Wilson didn't have that option though. A person of authority was on the phone, asking to talk to her, and the normal thing to do was to answer the nice person's questions until they went away. The Wilsons were normal people.

Or at least, they had been.