Goober

I'm playing a computer game. It's a simulation of a family soap opera, kind of like The OC. I'm playing the part of the teenage son. The current plot involves a psycho killer lurking in the neighborhood. One day I find a knife on the kitchen counter, but because the game is set to PG-mode, the "blood" on the knife is just peanut butter. A day or two later, there's party going on in the house, and I'm just wandering around by myself looking for clues. I find another, bigger knife in the kitchen, this time covered with huge globs of peanut butter and jelly.

I hear the front door open. Mom and Dad are home. They walk into the house together, laughing, arms around each other. As I watch from the kitchen, the broom closet door swings open, and a crazy-eyed, scruffy vagrant stumbles out, muttering to himself, looking disoriented. He pushes past my parents and walks out of the house. Mom and Dad are quiet as this happens, but as soon as he walks out their eyes are wide with terror and they move away from the door. Seconds later the nut returns, emits a feral growl and begins slashing away at Dad with a ten-inch knife.

I lose awareness of my body, and am helpless to do anything but watch and listen to my parents' screams. The knife goes in and out of Dad's body over and over again, each time at a different, novel angle, and prompting a subtly different scream or gurgle from my father, but because of the game's child-protection there is no blood. The blade comes out of Dad's body clean and shiny each time, even when it goes all the way through his neck and comes out the other side.

The slasher, up until now wearing some sort of shabby sweatsuit, suddenly runs into a closet and emerges a second later in an ill-fitting Superman costume. He yells that he wants to feel my father's "death-spasms," then resumes his attack. Hysterical with fear and rage, my mother tries to fend him off by bludgeoning him with household appliances. At one point he stumbles and falls head-first into the toilet, but he keeps getting back up with some kind of bezerker, possibly drug-induced endurance. After several minutes of this, I see my father's body start to seize up and shake uncontrollably.