Short Stories: The Scream Part One

  My 5 and 10 year old nephews are visiting me, and I notice parallels between these childhoods and those of my generation. In every family, there is a favourite kid. Parents always tell you there is no prized youngster, but by the time we're 12 we can figure out the order of preference. And the amount of attention paid to each child was dictated on something so terrifying, so piercing; the auditory assault known as the Scream.

  In every family there is a youngster that can emit something so shrill, it will bring an elephant to her knees. The Scream is not only so awful that it is capitalized, it is evil that must be arrested. My youngest nephew Aden has the gift of the Scream. He's starting to get to the age where he knows he can score mad attention from employing the Scream even when he's the provocateur. And little Aden is my sister's clear selected son, her baby, yada, yada, yada. Her other son Jacob is my buddy. And I'm sure our kinship has to do with being an older sibling. In lands , rich or poor, religious or atheist, free-market or communist one thing resonates and it is the Scream.

  We both know what it's like to be on the losing end of the Scream. I can tell when Jacob is victimized by the Scream. He'll be 2 metres away and not irritating the little angel when the horrifying eruption of dying turtledoves will resonate throughout home or marketplace. Jacob knows that he's getting in shit for his brother's entertainment, and it's starting to bug him. So I take his side in the sometimes-silent war over the power of the Scream. Eventually we'll become immune to the Scream and big bro is going to pummel the stuffing out of Doofus the Younger. The family will start getting annoyed with the screamer and the screamee will be able to exact revenge by torturing the little heathen with relative impunity. The Scream may appear in every family, but it runs a predictable and just course.

  This Scream will join your Scream, my mum's Scream, and all of the other Screams in the Black Hole of Lost Noises to be replaced by a new generation, a more populous generation of Screams. While global climate shifts and pollution and the possibility of failure and starvation may scare us, the most horrifying abomination to haunt future earthdwellers is the global growth of Scream.