"Why they're called Sixes."
[footsteps approaching]
Ah hey, um...
I brought you, here, um,
l-listen, just sit down, umm...
I— [sighs] okay, um,
I wanted to tell you about my life and the
strange things I've seen but before I do,
I— you gotta understand,
my actions in the end absolutely had the reasons, okay?
Okay, alright, uh...
Got it— got it written down here...
Huh, okay, sorry... Um...
I was born to a single mother.
She was only 15 around the time I was born
and she wasn't exactly ready to be a mom.
Apparently, my dad was even less ready because his parents ended up sending him to a boarding school
so he wouldn't even have to be responsible for me or my mom.
We were mostly supported by her parents, but otherwise we were completely alone.
I started discovering my "gift" when I was about 5 years old.
My great grandmother had passed away recently,
and I felt really confused when I walked into the viewing room of the funeral parlor
and saw my gran sitting in a chair next to her own casket.
At that point, I already grasped that death meant that you were gone forever,
but, yet there she was.
My confusion was overpowered with my relief, though.
Approaching her, she... seemed different.
There, but... not quite the same.
Like when you're picturing something in your head and your eyes are open
and you're clearly seeing what's in the room, but...
...something's entirely different at the same time.
But then she whispered in my ear,
kissed my forehead, and...
...disappeared.
I walked up to my mom and asked her about the roses in Italy, as Gran instructed.
To this day, I still don't know what that meant,
but it was something important enough to make my mother fall to her knees.
She held me and it was the only real time that I remember feeling like she truly loved me.
[sighs]
...sorry, um.
Okay, um...
As I grew, my gift became a little bit more apparent.
I'd see people I wasn't supposed to see in every day situations.
A few would even notice me and follow me home.
I didn't really mind.
No one ever really imposed or tried to harm me.
They just wanted company until they figured out how to move on
or they found someone more interesting to follow around.
I'd talk about it as if it were normal and my mom never really put forth effort to stop me doing that,
but she still kind of acted embarrassed when I did it around other people.
No one ever really took it seriously,
not like mom did.
Honestly, I think she feared me for a while.
When I was about 8, things changed.
and it was all due to mom meeting a man named Mike.
He was lanky, and smelled bad, and talked too loud.
Still, he had a more stable job than mom did, so she fell right into his lap.
He wasn't a horrible guy at first, just kind of greedy.
My mom told him about my "gift" and he came up with this master plan to use me as a pay pig.
Post my name up in the phone books as the "world's youngest psychic".
I don't know if he even believed my gift was real at first,
but he definitely learned otherwise later.
But, y'know, that's how I started talking to dead people in my living room
as I was just beginning to learn multiplication.
It was fun at first, y'know,
when it wasn't the same old "tell my mom I love her" bullshit.
Then there was case when I was 13 where I was seeing a family who believed
this spirit of a 4 year old girl was haunting their house.
They claimed that they didn't intend to make the girl leave,
they just wanna learn more about her so they could make her more comfortable in their home.
When I walked into the room, there was definitely no little girl.
There was, however, a grey non-human entity crouched on their 17 year old son's back.
Its skin looked like paper, and its eyes were fully blood red.
It came in human-like shape, but it was far from human.
These non-humans, they were called Sixes, actually.
Sixes are souls that were never human.
They're created out of pure sorrow and pure hatred.
They're negative emotion embodied into an evil, spiritual being.
They can even project the actions of human spirits to confuse their hosts
and make them think they're just victims of a normal haunting.
Human souls, they can't really hurt you unless they're extremely sinister,
like, Bundy sinister.
Sixes, however, um...
Oh yeah. They can,
along with several other non-human entities that I don't really want to talk about right now,
but yeah, they— they suck every emotion out of you
and radiate so much of their own sorrow, and hatred,
until you either kill yourself or you commit a crime so horrible
you'll likely get the death penalty.
They usually go after evil, corrupt, or just plain miserable people.
They're called Sixes, by the way,
'cause you'd usually only last six months before you lost it.
[exhales loudly]
....it's gonna get a little bit personal here... umm...
I— I think I started resenting my mom when I was 16.
I had gotten tired of the job.
Obviously, as people would.
Everyone in town knew me.
All the kids at school called me a freak.
By this point, Mike had started to drink away all the money that people had paid me
to tell them their grandmother loved them
or that their dead child was in a better place.
He became violent. Angry.
He hit my mom and she just took it for a while.
And then, she started to blame me.
She— she even said this, okay,
"If you never would have started talking to fucking Casper,
maybe we wouldn't be in this situation."
Completely ignoring the fact that he—her boyfriend—was the reason, not mine.
[sighs]
Not long after that, he stopped hitting her
and started hitting me.
Then, she did too.
[long sigh]
O—only months later , I— uh
I started seeing Sixes roaming around whenever my "parents" were near.
They just...
I watched this without a word— I— I didn't say anything.
Still allowing them to escort me to jobs or whatever the heck people wanted me to do.
At first, the Sixes, they would stay far away,
I'd— I'd see them out of the window, across the street, whatever.
They creeped closer as time went on, though.
Slowly. Very, very, slowly...
The whole fear aspect was kinda being outweighed by the curiosity, though.
I'd only ever seen them on people's backs,
not just... standing there.
I became a little bit more startled when they stood at our windows.
They knew I could see them, but they disregarded me.
I said nothing to my mother the day I watched one crawl onto her back
and latch its gaping, teethed mouth onto her shoulder.
I wasn't surprised when I saw another on Mike's back later that day.
I thought about telling Mike and my mom,
calling up a specialist to help get rid of the Sixes that had only just begun to drain my sad excuse for a family,
y'know, just... get 'em all away from...
But...
Then I thought about finally being alone.
Never having to do jobs that they told me to do...
Never being subjected to a drunken lecture about my "responsibility" to "support my family"...
Never explaining my bruises away to teachers...
[crumpling paper] So, I didn't tell 'em.
I just sat back...
And I enjoyed the show.
[background noises and music]