Sunday Short: My Family

I still remember the Wilkins case like it was yesterday. I’ve worked some dark scenes in my career, but nothing, nothing, prepared me for what I found that night.

The Wilkinses were a quiet, middle-aged couple on the outside. Friendly neighbors, active in church, the kind of people who brought pies to community events. But behind the smiles and picket fences, they were monsters. They adopted children not out of kindness, but to carve them apart and sell their organs on the black market.

We only discovered the truth because the last child they took in wasn’t ordinary. His name was Eli. Records showed he was an orphan, unclaimed, with no history anyone could trace. But the Wilkinses didn’t realize what they had brought into their home.

When I entered the Wilkins residence that night, the air was thick, humid with a stench that clung to my clothes even after I burned them. The place wasn’t a home anymore, it was a butcher’s workshop. I found surgical tables in the basement, blood-stained saws, jars filled with organs like they were pickled goods. Child-sized shoes were piled in a corner, so many of them that I had to look away.

And then I found the Wilkinses.

Or what was left of them.

Their bodies were torn apart, shredded in ways no animal could have done. Flesh raked into strips, bones splintered like dry wood. What chilled me most wasn’t the gore, but the words written in blood across the concrete wall.

“MY FAMILY.”

The letters were jagged, uneven, almost childlike in their strokes.

That’s when I knew: Eli wasn’t a victim. He was something else entirely. Something that didn’t bleed like the others, something that didn’t die.

We combed the entire property, the woods behind the house, and every crawlspace. No trace of Eli. It was like he vanished into thin air.

But I can’t shake the feeling that he’s still out there, watching, waiting. Maybe for another couple foolish enough to think they can use him. Maybe for me.

I tell myself every night that I closed that case. That the file is buried in the archives, never to be opened again. But sometimes, when I wake in the dead of night, I swear I hear small footsteps outside my door.

And I remember those words.

“MY FAMILY.”