The things living in my house are not my real family. They look and sound like them, but I’m sure they’re not. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out.
It all started a few weeks ago. I awoke from deep sleep to my mom standing over my bed with a hot stack of fresh pancakes.
“HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN!” was written in blue icing on top.
“Happy birthday, Jonathan! I figured I’d make something a little extra sweet for you on your special day,” Mom cheered.
I was bewildered. First of all, it wasn’t my birthday. I celebrated my birthday two months back. I’m a Virgo, and it was well into Scorpio season. Secondly, I hate pancakes with a passion.
“Is this a joke?” I said. “Mom, you know my birthday was months ago.”
She stared blankly at me for a moment, almost as if she were looking through me. Then she broke out into a loud, uncharacteristic cackle.
“That’s a good one, honey,” she said. “I’m your mother. I birthed you. I think I would remember what day that was.”
She set the pancakes on my bedside table and left my room. At first, I was worried she had suffered a stroke or some kind of fugue state, but over the next couple of weeks, there were more weird incidences.
Some were benign enough, like my unathletic father insisting he was a marathon runner, my unartistic Mom transforming our guest room into an art studio, or my sister repeatedly calling the dog the wrong name. Other incidents were more serious, like when my father, who insists that pepperoni is the only acceptable pizza topping, ordered pineapple instead.
I stopped trying to correct them because the same thing happened every time. They’d give me a strange, empty look for a moment, then a chuckle, a pat on the head, and an insistence that I was mistaken.
It started to take its toll on me as I grew increasingly wary of my family. I’m a naturally skeptical person, so I figured there had to be some explanation I could find on the internet. Then, in an obscure medical journal, I stumbled on the entry for capgras syndrome — a condition where the subject believes those around them have been body-snatched and replaced with imposters. Bingo. Ironically, this set me at ease. Sure, I might be nuts, but at least there was some natural explanation. That was until things got even weirder.
A rash appeared on my foot that I couldn’t sate with ointment, and I discovered little pinpricks inside my armpits. Sometimes I would awake with my body red and hot all over, almost like an excruciating sunburn that I could feel deep in my bones. Afterward, I would awake confused and less familiar with my surroundings. My bookcase was in the wrong place, my clothes had been replaced, and my family’s behavior was nearly unrecognizable.
These tiny mutilations continued until I awoke one morning from another dreamless sleep to find a cut behind my ear. It wasn’t some tiny scratch but an incision that had been sutured. I felt a small piece of metal just underneath my skin. I finally had enough. I couldn’t explain any of this away by blaming my mental health. I was certain imposters had taken over my home, and I wouldn’t let them get away with it.
I set up a series of cameras around my house to capture the activity going on that next night. I nervously succumbed to light sleep but was awoken by a loud thud on the roof hours later. I scrambled to my computer to check the surveillance equipment.
I toggled through the cameras in each room of our large house until I came upon my sister. She stood stock still in the kitchen, eyes glazed over like she was in a trance. I could barely make out a shadowy figure in the corner of the screen before it hurried into the other room. Next, I switched to the hallway monitors. My father was talking to something off-camera.
My blood ran cold as a pale, spindly creature stepped into view. It had its back to the camera, but I could make out two tentacles for arms and two legs which seemed impossibly slender. They were pallid and smooth head to toe with few identifiable features, almost like Gumby, but with a large bulbous head. Its legs did not bend, so its gait was uneven and clumsy as it shuffled toward my father.
Its tentacle glowed as it raised it to my father’s forehead. Moments later, my father went into a glassy-eyed trance, just like my sister. I toggled to the main bedroom to find another one of the creatures hypnotizing my mother, who was lying in bed. I panicked and leaped up from my computer — hell-bent on jumping out my window and making a break for it.
However, as I turned, I was faced with one of the creatures looming over me. It had large, black eyes that took up most of its face and a small, thin-lipped mouth.
I wasn’t scared as it raised its glowing tentacle to my forehead. Instead, a warm light enveloped me before everything went black.
I awoke in a pristinely white room, strapped to a metal gurney. Sharp instruments were on the tables to my left and right. My head was viciously pounding as I tugged desperately against the straps securing my arms and legs. The air smelled vaguely of ammonia and sweat, but not exactly. I couldn’t place it, but the place seemed familiar.
The door in front of me opened, and three creatures shambled in silently.
“What do you want with me?!” I screamed. “Please just kill me. I don’t want to suffer! I know you’re intelligent beings! Can’t you see I’m just like you?”
The beings looked at one another quizzically. Then, finally, the one in the center approached the table, reached out with its tentacle, and stroked my head.
“Of course we do, honey,” the creature said in my mother’s voice.
“H-how did you do that?” I stammered. “You sound just like her.”
“Oh dear,” she chuckled. “You really did get fried, didn’t you?”
The other two approached the gurney on either side.
“You see,” one said in my sister’s voice. “We don’t sound like your family.”
“We are your family,” the other said in my father’s voice.
Suddenly they shapeshifted into perfect replications of my family. I stared, mouth agape in shock.
“I told you we erased his mind too much!” my newly transformed sister said. “You’d better hope the backup memories work!”
“I’m confident they will,” Dad said. “You’ve been through a lot, but it’s almost over. So now, relax while we reboot your real memories.”
They stuck a needle in my arm, and all of my memories came flooding back to me. My true form is not that of a human but a noble race of creatures cast away from their homeland in exile. They sent me to assess the viability of Earth as a new home for our pilgrims. My job was to dispose of and take the place of the household’s most trusted family member. In this case, it was poor Jonathan.
Once in place, I acted as an unwitting antenna, collecting data for my family, who monitored the situation from the skies above. This process was repeated across Earth with hundreds of families until every pilgrim had a home.
Shapeshifting is easy, but I am no actor. So to sell the ruse, we harvested Jonathan’s memories and imported them into my consciousness. Naturally, this required the wiping of my real memory first. Admittedly, it’s a shoddy process that degrades over time and requires frequent reexaminations and surgeries to maintain, hence the restless nights.
Everything seemed unfamiliar to me because it was. I was the imposter — a stranger living out of place in a human family behaving perfectly normally.
“Mother. Father. Sister…” I whispered with tears in my eyes. “I missed you so much.”
“As we did you,” father said, smiling in his human form. “Through your work, we are ready to inhabit the Earth together as a family.”
We descended once again to the planet that we would now call home. It felt good to lie in my cozy bed and close my eyes, knowing I’d wake up to my real family again in the morning.
Millerwiller 