A can started opening downstairs, and Triksi galloped out of the room, toward the kitchen. Her claws clicked like a typewriter on the floor tiles when she got there. Brendon, still in his bedroom, laughed a little bit. Then strange things started to happen. For one thing, he suddenly noticed he was a little bit taller. Even though he was a top-notch lacrosse player, Brendon started to feel stronger, more virile. His clothes became larger and less fashionable. Was he imagining things?
Looking into his mirror, Brendon was surprised to see a middle-aged man staring back at him, and then he was even more surprised to watch his hair start to lose its color and then out. Wrinkles were forming on his face, and he reached up to touch them. He almost startled himself when he felt his rougher, papery-like skin brushing against itself. His strength was starting to fade, and he yawned, wishing he could take a nap, but he had to see what ended up happening to him. Around the room, Brendon wasn't the only thing changing. The posters for rappers disappeared and were replaced with shelves holding vintage oldies records. The dates on his lacrosse trophies changed to be about sixty years earlier. His childhood photos faded to black-and-white, and new frames materialized around the room showing pictures of the middle-aged man he'd briefly observed in the mirror.
'Did one of those hippie dropouts slip me some of that newfangled LSD?' he thought, thinking of the stoners who hang out behind his school in the afternoons on his way home and try to get everybody to do drugs. Why does that feel like days gone by, when he just got home maybe a half hour ago?
Brendon's back starts to hurt, so he hunches over, and then a cane appears in his hand. His vision is too blurry to see the shrunken old man in the mirror, so he squints and adjusts his thick bifocals. A voice calls up from downstairs. It sounds like Mom. It just sounds like garbled mumbling, though.
"WHAT?" he yells back, barely able to hear even his own trembling voice at the top of his lungs.
"I SAID, COME IN HERE, UNCLE BRENDON. YOUR GAME SHOWS ARE ON."
'Uncle Brendon? What the heck?' he thinks to himself, unable to even comprehend why his mother would call him that. 'Oh, right, she's my youngest niece. Wait, what? Why do I have memories of me and Gramma Julie being kids together?'
It was all coming back to him now, in ways that he knew it shouldn't. He WAS a top-notch lacrosse player, back in his youth (but wasn't that just today?!). Jenny isn't his sister, he's her great uncle, and they both need someone at the house to take care of them and compensate for Jenny's deadbeat dad while Brendon's niece Olivia is at work. Brendon lives here because the pain and forgetfulness were just getting too unbearable, so he left his job as an appliance repair worker almost a decade ago and hasn't lived alone for probably two years now. 'Is that what this is? My memory problems?' he asked himself. 'Did I forget to take my medicine today?'
"UNCLE BRENDON?"
"Be there in a minute, Liv."
He put one foot in front of the other, and one cane in front of the feet, starting his long trek to the living room, still confused.