As Requested

I am to tell the story of how I tried to get my brother killed when he was a baby.

I was a very imaginative child. My father, a born storyteller, often entertained me with myths and legends. When my brother was born, I was 3 1/2 years old. I got to see him for the first time and I was horrified! He was skinny, red, wrinkly, and looked nothing like my folks or myself. Right away I knew the Doctor had given us the wrong baby. Firstly, I had specifically ordered a sister (preferably blond) and this baby was all in blue. Even I knew that meant it was a boy. Secondly, it was UGLY! This surely could not be what a baby was supposed to look like. Once we brought the little creature home I was more sure than ever that this could not be my brother. He was messy, he cried a lot, and he didn't get any better looking as the months went by. One day, while looking through one of the many books of mythology and fairy tales that were lying around the house, I happened upon a picture of a baby that looked remarkably like my "brother". Dad told me the story that went along with it, about "fairy changelings". These are infant fairies that are switched with human babies at birth. I can't remember why. Anyway, the story told of how the fairy babies would be fussy and ugly and horrible. Soon they would get sick and die, since they were cut off from the magic of the Land of the Fairies. The only way to get your human baby back was early detection of the changeling. The way to tell if your baby was a changeling was to put it on a shovel and then hold the shovel over a fire. As the shovel got hot the fairy child would panic and jump up, babbling in elvish or fairy-speak or whatever. Well, I looked at my brother and he had little pointy ears and high cheekbones. That did it for me, he was definitely a changeling. I spent the next several years trying to convince my parents to put him to the shovel test. They never did, much to my frustration.

Now that I am an adult, I realize that my bro really must be my bro. His resemblance to my mother's dad is undeniable. Still, it is a family joke that he narrowly escaped being cooked by his sister.

Maybe sometime I will tell of the various tortures I devised for him over the years. After all, he needed to be punished for being a fairy impostor, didn't he?