I found a cardboard box filled with Super 8 films in the attic of my family home after my father passed away. Thinking they were the films he was always taking while my sister and I were growing up, I set them aside with other family treasures and removed them from the house before the auction company came in and sold all the other junk he had accumulated over the years.
The box sat untouched in the spare bedroom of my home for almost a year before I purchased a Super 8 projector on eBay and cleared off a bedroom wall to use as a movie screen. One Saturday night, with nothing better to do because my Match.com date cancelled at the last minute, I opened a beer and sat back to watch myself grow up in front of the camera.
At first, that’s exactly what I watched: For two-and-a-half minutes my five-year-old sister in her one-piece pink bathing suit gamboled about the backyard, my mother tried her best to keep a hula hoop aloft for more than two gyrations of her ample hips, I tormented our cockapoo with a blue squirt gun, and my father appeared only in the shadow he cast when the late afternoon sun was behind him.
When the film ended, I rewound it and replaced it with another randomly selected from the box.
I spat out my beer when the film started.
My mother, naked and covered in blood, stared at me from the bedroom wall. She held a butcher knife in one hand and a detached, dark-haired scrotum in the other.
***
I phoned my sister, but she didn’t answer, and I spent the next twenty minutes pacing my living room, listening to the sound of the projector even though the two-and-a-half minute film of my mother and her prize had long since run its course. When I finally returned to the bedroom, the projector was displaying a bright white square against the bedroom wall and the film was spinning around on the take-up reel.
After rewinding the film, I set it aside and reached into the box for another. I spent the rest of the night drinking beer and watching my father’s home movies. The reels were unlabeled and unorganized, and each time I started a new one I held my breath until I saw my sister in a prom dress, a younger version of myself sporting a mullet, or my mother carrying a birthday cake.
I watched two-dozen innocuous home movies—my family growing older or younger with each one—until my mother reappeared on the wall, naked, bloody, and holding the same butcher knife but a different scrotum. During the next two-and-a-half minutes, my mother set the knife aside, removed both testicles from the scrotum, rolled them in batter, and deep-fried them. The film ended as she removed the battered testicles from the FryDaddy.
After rewinding the film, I set it aside.
***
By sunrise, I had watched every film in the box and had set aside only three. I watched the three films a second time and then a third, seeking whatever information I could glean from them. I had no doubt the woman was my mother, and I felt certain all three films were shot in the basement of my childhood home. I could not pinpoint when the films had been shot, but the ample hips my mother sported in the first film grew wider and her hair grew grayer when I arranged the three films in what I assumed was chronological order.
No one else appeared in the films, though I believed my father had wielded the camera. Two scrotums had come from dark-haired men, the other from a blond. Other than a mole on one of the dark-haired scrotums, no other identifying information remained from my mother’s apparent butchery.
I had given up my search for meaning and was about to slip into bed when my sister returned my phone call from the previous evening. I felt uneasy telling her what I had found, but she needed to know.
Tammy didn’t believe me. “If this is your idea of a joke, Cole, it’s a sick one.”
“You can see the films for yourself,” I told her. “Maybe you can help me decide what to do with them.”
***
My sister drove down that afternoon. By the time she arrived, I had managed a few hours of sleep, but had not bothered to shower. I smelled of beer and sleep sweat, and she wrinkled her nose as soon I was near enough to hug her.
“So,” she said, “show me these movies of yours.”
I led her into the spare bedroom, closed the curtains, and projected the first one on the bedroom wall. I had mixed up the films, so I showed them out of order, the oldest one last.
She turned white as a sheet. “Those are Uncle Teddy’s.”
Uncle Teddy had been a kindly gentleman who lived at the end of our block and who always took an interest in the neighborhood children. He disappeared when I was seven and my sister was nine. I turned to her. “How would you—?”
She stared back at me without answering, and it took a moment for what she had implied to dawn on me. “Uncle Teddy?”
“I’m certain I wasn’t the only little girl he preyed on.”
“How come I never heard about this?”
“Mom made me promise to never tell anyone as long as I lived,” Tammy said. “Uncle Teddy disappeared a few days later, and I haven’t told another soul about what he did to me until now.”
“You think Mom and Dad—?”
“What do you think?”
“But who were the other two?”
***
My sister is more comfortable using computers than I am, and two hours later we thought we had the answer. Theodore Wilson—Uncle Teddy—had been found in a drainage ditch two miles outside of town, but newspaper reports of the day made no mention of alterations to his anatomy. Two years later a local priest accused of excessive familiarity with his altar boys was found in a different ditch. Again, newspaper reports made no mention of anatomical alterations. Five years later a grade-school teacher, out on bail after being arrested for assaulting two of his students, earned a place on our list when a newspaper article intimated that he had been castrated prior to death.
If our parents had a hand in any additional deaths, we found no evidence of it, and the deaths of all three men remained unsolved cold cases.
“We can solve these cases,” I suggested.
“Why?” my sister asked. “Uncle Teddy certainly deserved what he got, and justice was served in every case.”
***
Super 8 film melts quickly, and we stood over my charcoal grill watching all three films melt into an acetate ball soon unrecognizable as film.
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