On this episode, Zack tells a story centered around three siblings and the lengths they go to handle a neighborhood problem. Our discussion after involves the age-old question: how far would YOU go to protect one of your siblings?
Welcome to Smirk. A podcast that covers society and culture through a storytelling lens. Part creative writing, part discussion, and always interesting. Each week our hosts brings a story to the show, a story they wrote themselves, which is immediately followed by discussion on the author’s moral or theme.
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Want to read Zack’s story “Siblings” in full? Think you can identify the moral or theme for this episode? Read it below, and then take a listen to the podcast.
Siblings
Chris, Chaz, and Jake were three brothers. Pretty close in age, we’ll call them 14, 12, and 11 respectively. Making Chris the eldest, Jake the youngest, and Chaz right in the middle. Guess their folks just couldn’t pump the brakes.
Now on days after school, the brothers three would often explore as kids do. The bike paths, the abandoned warehouse near their home, the woods nearby. They would often be out until the sun went down, sometimes even later. Their parents never much seemed to mind. Of course, they got in their fair share of shenanigans. Trouble here, trouble there. Mom rarely found out, siblings tend to have pretty tight lips when it comes to one another’s secrets.
One day, Jake tells his big bros of this monster of a kid that he knows. Jake hung out with this kid once in the tree house behind his house. But the little psycho started grabbing frogs from the nearby river and torturing them. Ripping limbs off, cutting them up, real serial killer in training shit. So, the brothers hatch a plan (callback!).
They know the route to the kid’s house through the nearby woods. They had spent so much time in them, they know how to get around the whole neighborhood no trouble at all. Combined with the knowledge that Serial Killer was going to be at his martial arts class that day(smart move teaching that kid more ways to destroy things), getting in was no bother. So they sneak their way into the kid’s treehouse and do the only thing teenage boys think to do to avenge frogs.
They wreck shop of the place. Breaking everything in it using Serial Killer’s own baseball bat. They smash everything, including all the windows(rich kids get the best tree houses). Eventually their ruckus draws attention from the neighbors. They claim the cops have been called, so the brothers bail. Chris and Chaz leave immediately, but Jake’s running behind. The Brainiac decided to just jump down. Probably would’ve been okay if Jake hadn’t landed on a shard of glass from a broken window. It went right through the shoe and into his foot.
Chris and Chaz are solid brothers, and limp their little bro all the way home. Luckily the folks are out, so they sneak into the bathroom and get to work. Chris manages to safely pull the glass out, and Chaz manages to bandage the wound with what was in the house. They clean up the mess well, this isn’t their first rodeo after all. Through a combination of re-appropriation of lunch money and five-finger discounts, they manage to keep new bandages incoming. Jake’s foot bleeds a lot and hurts like hell, but keeping a big wound a secret always comes with a price.
The parents were never the wiser.
Now, listen to the full episode as we dissect Zack’s story.