For the first part of my life, I lived in a tiny, two bedroom flat which I shared with my mom. My dad walked out long ago so he was never really in the picture. I was a messed up kid. I had all these weird imaginary friends. The all had weird names like Cillnomo or Billybobnickel (I wish I was making this up).
And then… there was Annie. I don’t remember when I came up with Annie. She just sort of appeared one day. She was the most strange of all my imaginary friends. For one thing, she had no face. Well, I don’t know if she had a face. From what I can remember, she always had her hair totally covering it. She also lived in the closet and only came out at night. My mom thought it was just another phase and I’d soon grow out of it when I started school or came up with a new imaginary friend. But I didn’t.
Apparently, I behaved very strangely around the time I met Annie. I started staying up all night, leaving my closet door open, playing weird games like “Hangman Barbie” which involved tying a piece of wool around my dolls neck and dangling it out the window. I swear to god, I don’t know where I came up with this “game”. I mean, I was four. I didn’t know what a hangman even was… Things started to get worse. I would eat my dinner in my room, go wandering about the house at night, my mom even started finding knives in my room. Not little plastic baby knives but massive fucking steak knives, which was really screwed up because I was a small kid. There was no way I could have reached the cutlery drawer.
Then, my mom started noticing how thin I was. One day, she started to notice this god awful smell coming from my closet. She opened it and found all the food I was eating in my room, dumped on the closet floor. When she asked me why I did it I apparently told her; “Annie was hungry, mommy.”
Then my mom found the drawings. They were of totally awful things. People getting run over by cars, people getting stabbed, buildings full of people with bright yellow flames surrounding them. Then, there was the drawing I did of Annie. She was always covered in red. All over her pretty green dress, her light brown hair, everywhere… just covered in bright red crayon.
Apparently, when asked about these drawings I told my mom; “They’re Annie’s pretty pictures!” My mom took me to see the doctor, thinking I must have something wrong with me if I was behaving like I was. The doctor told me to describe exactly who this “Annie” was. “Annie is the girl who lives in my closet! She hasn’t got a mommy or a daddy. They went to sleep and left Annie. She says that one day I’ll go to sleep with her and I can meet them! It’ll be really fun!” Literally, word for word what I told the doctor. My mom still has the medical records. It was around that time that I moved house. My mom had got a new boyfriend and was moving in with him. I never mentioned Annie again.
Recently, I got interested in my family’s history, you know genealogy and stuff. A couple of days ago, I was looking up the history of my old house. It was an old tenement house that had been turned into flats so it was really old. Five years before my mom and I had moved in, a family was murdered in my flat. That was probably why it was so cheap. A man had shot his wife and six year old daughter then killed himself. The little girl had not died. She had been shot in the stomach, fatal but not enough to kill instantly. She had laid there, next to the bodies of her dead mother and father for over 14 hours before eventually dying of blood loss.
Her name was Annie.
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Credits to: annieisinthecloset
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