"a death in the family"

there is a book that i leave next to my laptop. "the best of best short stories 1986-1995".

from time to time when i feel like reading, i would read one or two of the short stories.

the other night, i read a very disturbing story right before i went to bed. needless to say, i didnt slip easily into sleep that night.

some of the stories in this book are plain weird. but maybe its because they were written so long ago and are quite antiquated, so i dont understand them the way someone in their time would.

but this story disturbed me quite alot, so i can see why it was chosen as one of the "best short stories". its a story that hangs onto you and doesnt easily allow itself to be forgotten.

the story begins as a girl tells her story to someone that she refers to as "doctor".
she tells him about her family and how loving the atmosphere was and of her mother's death. then how she discovered that the place her father worked at was a place used for torture, her suspicion that she wasnt the real child of her parents, that she was born of a woman that was tortured and given to her current parents to raise. in vivid detail she described how she planned and plotted her revenge for her birth parents. she deliberately ran her father down so that he was reduced to a vegetable, then she became the model of fillial piety, caring for her poor father. when she felt she had gained the trust and respect of the public, she spirited her father away to a secluded place claiming the change of pace would do her father good. there, she hooded his head with a bag he had given her for a previous birthday and tortured (by means of a blowtorch and electrocution) him until he yielded the true names of her birth parents. having obtained those names, she finished him off and left the house with all their valuables which she threw into some obscure place and called to police to make her father's death look like the work of burglars. at her father's funeral, she discovers that her parents are indeed her birth parents. her mother was initially thought to be barren, but by a miracle, managed to conceive her and when she was born, her father had been so happy, smothering her with kisses.

omg, damn disturbing right this story?? *shudders*

this is only the storyline. the story itself is wayyyy more vivid and describes her thoughts and feelings at each point of time. and it does so in way which leaves you in no doubt that the father is an evil man. then suddenly there is the twist at the end when u realize that the father never did anything wrong and it was all in her twisted warped mind only. argh!