Story #163: Toys in the Attic

Story #163: Toys in the Attic (Content Tags: Supernatural elements, antagonistic toys, forced babying, messing) Sweet inklings of nostalgia dot the surface of the human mind; memories are built upon memories, from early childhood to the twilight years. Before the complex web of relationships can be weaved with other such beings, we build camaraderie with those who have no ability to reciprocate it. From a psychological perspective, one could assert that a child first learns transference with inanimate objects. In ignorance, and perhaps as a way to better understand our own emotions, we grant life to the lifeless. We assume not only sentience, but sapience of these 'friends' that we've created. In some cases, these manifest outside of objects, such as when a child has an imaginary friend. Most commonly, this behavior can be seen with how a child will interact with a toy. A doll, a stuffed animal, an action figure, et cetera. The child talks to their toy and confides in it; they play and act as though the toy is a living being that deserves some level of deference. They weep when the toy is 'hurt', they pretend to feed it or put a seatbelt around it. And then, at some point during the different stages of development, the child stops. They may still feel an attachment with the toy and keep it safe, but they no longer grant it life. The toy becomes as inanimate to them as it appears to everyone else. Some kids spite their attachment and damn it as a childish thing to put behind. With such pressure to be 'big', they turn their back on what might have been their first friend. As if all the time spent together had meant nothing, the toy is tossed, donated, or stuffed into a box and put in the attic. It's really no different than a child hiding his wet sheets. The idea that the past can simply be obscured from any scrutiny; the idea that the spirit of childhood can be killed by will alone. But if there's one thing that is universal to the human experience, then it's the knowledge that we bury our dead alive. Nothing is washed away in the gutters of adolescence, not completely. The very truths that we so stubbornly try to deny are liable to raise as revenants in the mist of our memories. These wraiths arise to haunt us when we least expect it; fluttering shapes that stalk the inside of our eyelids like eigengrau demons. They refuse to let us forget who we really are. They point to our innermost layer, our progenitor state, from when we so arrogantly deigned to play like little gods in a celestial playpen. Those who try to deny their own history, or where they came from, are always destined to be stripped to their bare components and humbled. Every adult is just a child that put on enough coats to appear as though they transformed into something new, and if all those layers were to be dissolved, then all that would be left is the honest truth. A little boy who proclaims himself to not be so little should heed this warning: Don't go looking in the attic. ---- The little attic door rattled whenever the door to the playroom opened or closed, or when the air conditioner kicked on. It was unnerving and it always had been; so much so that his friends had been reluctant to sleep over more than once. Even for a big 'mature' boy like him, he felt his blood turn cold whenever that tiny door would pop just an inch open and immediately shut. Further misery was that his bedroom was directly below the attic, meaning that if anything were to go bump in the night, then he'd be the first to hear it. Rats, raccoons, and all manner of vermin were the obvious suspects, but sometimes that pitter-patter sounded too subdued to be a stray rodent. Donny wouldn't be so easily frightened by something so pedestrian and easily explained; even if the sounds did creep him out, he wasn't about to start complaining about it. Being a big kid meant to put childish things behind him, and that included scaring himself with the overactive imagination that still oozed from his every neuron. When it was dark and he was trying to sleep, the noises would plague him. He'd imagine all manner of unholy creature that could be making that racket, instead of recognizing what was obvious. If it wasn't vermin, then it was just the house 'settling', as he'd heard his parents describe it. Not long after these noises began, as the air was growing cool, Donald would begin to notice other incongruities appearing in his life. He felt like he was being watched, or he'd get the feeling that someone was going into his room when he was gone, because things would be misplaced. At first, he'd simply blamed his mother, who had gone in his room in the past to gather laundry or check on the cleanliness of things. The boy mentioned the moved items, but his mom just told him that he was probably misremembering, as she hadn't been in there recently. The next most obvious culprit would have been his little brother, but Clarence was too inept as a liar to pull one over on his older brother. The six year old couldn't tell the most mundane of fibs without getting a big goofy grin on his face. He said he hadn't been in Donny's room, and that was deemed credible. So the mystery simply hung in the air. At least until Donny began to find things in his room that shouldn't have been there. Rapidly approaching twelve years old, Donny had long tossed many of the things that he'd accrued throughout his childhood. Clothes, toys, and the like. His parents' sentimentality had meant most of those things had been put in storage, rather than that just throwing them out, regardless of how much their elder son proclaimed to have no nostalgic attachments. The last decade or so of his life had been carefully stowed in the attic. But now, he was finding uncomfortable fragments of his past and they were placed in random spots throughout his room. The first thing he'd found had been a colorful baseball cap with an insignia of the 'activity center' he'd once been a part of. Essentially it was a daycare, but for small elementary children; when he'd been younger, his mom had worked part-time there and he'd spent many afternoons there after school. He hadn't thought too deeply about it at the time. His assumption was that it'd somehow survived the purge of his 'infancy' and that it'd gotten lost in the mess of his room. But that was only the first object to resurface. He'd go on to find more troubling representations of a history he wanted to deny; a toy car here, a coloring book there, even a cartoon-adorned pair of underoos that he'd certainly remembered tossing when he was eight or nine! The matter had fled the field of coincidences and firmly supplanted itself into the realm of premeditated. That was no better shown whenever he came home from school one day and saw a Goodnite sitting on his bed. It was the same kind that he'd worn a few years ago, when he'd still wet the bed. The Goodnites, or rather the bedwetting itself, had been the last to be purged, because the timetable hadn't been up to him. He'd been nine when he'd finally stopped wetting the bed, and it'd been his biggest shame at the time. He'd hated the Goodnites, because they reminded him of what he'd once been and what he always feared to be. The garment, neatly folded on his bed, wasn't simply a Goodnite though. It was undoubtedly from the last package his parents had ever bought for him. His little brother wore them to bed now, and the designs were totally different; this stray Pull-Up was vintage. There was no greater a question than why, except maybe for who. Because if he knew who was responsible, then he could better understand why. Unless people were breaking into their house, there were only three suspects, and none of them appeared likely. Donny didn't know how to approach any of them to ask either. Feeling so much bitterness and spite toward the juvenile undergarment, he couldn't bring himself to bring any outside attention to it, even when it was a sign that something truly peculiar was afoot in this house. To point to the Goodnite as evidence would only prove its existence, and by connection, would implicate that Donny had once been that soggy little boy. He tossed it in the same drawer as the other mismatched items he'd been finding. The longer he refused to acknowledge the existence of them, the longer he could mentally keep the charade together that he was someone completely different now. He would deny his history until it threatened to corrupt his future. His parents had decided to let him stay home alone for the first time in his young life. They would only be gone for a few hours, and his grandma was watching Clarence, which would mean he was the man of the house for the evening. It was a monumental moment for a kid and Donny beamed with pride at the thought of being considered mature enough to not need a babysitter. He rode that high so hard that he decided he would take all this babyish garbage and go to stow it in the attic, just like his father would. It was a chore befitting a young adult like him! Nearing teenhood, it was time for him to start taking charge and being responsible. Donny gathered everything in a plastic tub and made the ascent upstairs to the playroom, where the attic door was. As usual, it bumped open and shut whenever Donny pulled the door to the playroom. Spooky to a baby maybe, but nothing to a grownup like him! He'd never actually been up in the attic before, since there had never been a reason for it. It wasn't a place to play around in, and until now, he hadn't had any business to attend to in there. At most, he'd handed his father things through the door as a helping hand. From what he did know, there was a hanging bulb that he could turn on to illuminate the place. Upon a first impression, he saw a graveyard of memories. Boxes, old furniture, like a tapestry across the time that they'd lived here. His and his brother's crib was even still up here, assembled and looking a lot less dusty than he would expect. That was sort of odd, wasn't it? The crib would have been put in here three years ago, and to get it in here, his father would have had to disassemble it to some degree. So why was it back together? And why was it so clean looking? It irked him, much like the odd happenings that'd been going on in his bedroom. Someone must have been coming in here without him knowing, but that didn't seem possible. The attic was directly above his bedroom, so he would have heard a person up here, and his dad worked from home, so it wasn't like this could be going on while the boy was at school. Ridiculous it might have seemed, but a supernatural explanation was looking a little more plausible by the passing moment. And then the attic door closed behind him. "Hello, *friend*. So good to see you again!" Donny froze. He wasn't sure who was talking to him, but it sounded like a childish voice that was vaguely familiar. It wasn't a voice he'd ever remembered hearing with his ears, but he'd heard it in his mind. "W-who's there?" The boy fearfully squeaked. "Don't you remember me, Donny? What's five years? I know you've gotten good at forgetting, but how could you ever forget me?" There was a soft pitter-patter on the creaky wooden floor and a figure emerged from the darkness. Not just literally, but figuratively too; for as Donny laid his eyes on the mysterious intruder, he was forced to expel memories from deep down within. It was his first friend, who he'd 'made' from presuming life from the nonliving. A patchwork companion who was composed of stuffing and the wild imagination of youth. It was Fuzzy, or by the full name he'd bestowed upon him, it was Fuzzy-Bottom Mc'Stuffins. His childhood teddy bear, who he'd gotten as a present for his third birthday, and who he'd condemned after his seventh birthday for being too 'babyish'. "How are you...This can't be real!" "What's not real about seeing an old friend? I see you got my invitations." The bear noted, gesturing at the little box that Donny had brought up here with him. "I knew you just needed a push to remember." "T-to remember...? You're the one whose been putting all this junk in my room?" Fuzzy cocked his head to the side, "Junk? Why do you think that? Maybe you think you've gotten bigger than you really have. You sure seemed to think you were big when you got rid of me." "W-well, teddy bears are for babies, and I was getting bigger, so..." Was he really having to defend his actions to a literal toy? "That was right after you got your big kid undies for real. You got rid of your diapers and you got rid of a lot more too." There was the past that Donny had been trying to escape. It was the history that he turned his back to and deluded himself into thinking it'd never been that way. The truth was, that Donny had been struggling to prove his maturity for as long as he could remember. Sadly, he'd always been smaller than his peers, which had been difficult deal with, since it automatically made people think he was younger than he was. And then there were the diapers. It was his greatest shame, but he hadn't been fully pottytrained until around his seventh birthday. That was also why he'd taken such issue with bedwetting and Goodnites, as they had been a cruel reminder of his past immaturity. The late pottytraining had been a huge component in why he was so insecure now; why Fuzzy had found himself buried prematurely. "Don't worry, buddy. I think I know what the problem is." The boy could suddenly feel furry paws wrapping around his legs. He looked down and saw that Fuzzy wasn't the only stuffed animal that was walking and talking. This wasn't one rogue agent who had turned on him; this was a full blown mutiny! He wiggled and squirmed in an attempt to dislodge them, which should have been easy with how light the toys were, but whatever had made them move around had also made them much stronger. They brought him to his knees and Fuzzy approached. "It was those awful undies that warped your poor mind. They made you think you were too big for us, so they need to go." The Teddy bear began to pull off the boy's shorts and tsked at the sight of his prestigious briefs. He turned to a box and dug around; after a few moments, he tilted back toward his captive with a white rectangle in his hands. "Let's get you back to how you used to be." Donny was wide-eyed, but he didn't think the diaper could possibly fit. He might not be big, but he was definitely bigger now than he'd been while in diapers! But as Fuzzy laid it under him and began the diapering process, it became obvious that the diaper *would* fit, as if it'd either gotten bigger or he had gotten smaller. Once the diaper was fastened snugly around him, the stuffed animals began to dress him in an old footed sleeper from the same box. He tried to fuss, to call for help in the empty house, but they just stuffed a pacifier in his mouth. He would wind up put in the crib, padded and pajama-clad, with Fuzzy jumping in to join him. "Look at you, so comfy! Now you just need to get rid of all those ugly big kid thoughts in your head." Forced to not only accept his past, but to return right to it, Donny could only suck on the pacifier and feel as his thoughts became muddled by the toy's words. He knew he was supposed to be a big kid, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to know what that meant. What he did know was that his tummy was hurting. He didn't want to do it, but he couldn't stop himself. Donny was pushing. Donny was making a BM in his diaper, as if he'd really just stepped several years in the past, and Fuzzy was watching him with a cheerful approval. "What a good boy! I bet you won't be using that silly potty again, huh?" The warm mass pushed itself right into the back of his diaper and Donny wanted to feel disgusted, but it just made him feel uncomfortably blissful. Drool seeped around the pacifier and his eyelids wilted; he sat right down in the mushy pile, feeling it smear all across his bottom. The past had caught up with him. For all his attempts to disown it, he was now reliving it, and it was unlikely that Fuzzy would let him grow up too fast again.