My Brother and I Found a Slide Under the Kitchen Sink!!

My Brother and I Found a Slide Under the Kitchen Sink!!

“Chris? Chris! What is this?!” Marcus, my younger brother yelled from the kitchen, trying to get my attention.

Rolling my eyes, I stopped scrubbing the bathtub and sat back against the wall.

“What the hell do you want now?!” I responded, annoyed.

It was summer vacation, and since my parents both worked full time jobs and we lived in the middle of nowhere, they decided it was a great day to have Marcus and I clean the entire house from top to bottom. Y’know, seeing as how we, “Had nothing better to do.”

“Just come in here and see this! And don’t cus or I’ll tell mom!” Marcus yelled with his own tone of annoyance.

Sighing audibly in aggravation, I stood to my feet and left the bathroom. As I walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, I thought about how much cleaning we had left to do. Each step I took only increased my irritation with Marcus for wasting our time with something that probably didn’t even matter. Being 9 years old, he had a tendency to get…distracted, while we were doing chores. This was far from the first time he’d interrupted my cleaning that day to show me some dead bug or especially large dust bunny. But since I was a few years older than him, 3 to be exact, he often called for me to throw things he thought were gross away. I guess it was my duty as the older brother to watch over him in his eyes. I didn’t like the idea at the time, but looking back on it now, what I once viewed as annoying little sibling habits I now view as fond memories.

Anyways, after walking into the kitchen, I saw Marcus just standing in front of the sink, almost motionless.

“Marcus?” I asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

He turned to look at me, his face a little pale.

“Just come here and see already! And stop cussing!” He replied with a hurried tone.

Rolling my eyes again, I moved toward him and the sink, getting ready to put him in a headlock for wasting my time.

“I swear to god, if this is another dead spider I’m gonna-” my words caught in my throat as I my eyes finally fell upon what he wanted me to see.

The cabinet beneath the sink was where we stored much of the cleaning supplies for the kitchen. Bleach, rubber gloves, sponges, things like that. But even with the cabinet doors wide open, I didn’t see any of the usual household items we kept there. Instead, there was a gaping tube leading downward at an angle, the rim of which appeared to be a sort of red plastic material.

“Woah,” is all I could say in my shocked state.

“I told you!” Marcus said accusingly as he stood beside me.

I stepped in front of the cabinet entrance and kneeled down to get a closer look. Making sure it wasn’t an optical illusion, I raised a hand and stuck it into the tube. Unsurprisingly, it went beyond the entrance with no resistance. Pulling my appendage back and peering down the cylindrical hole, I squinted, trying to see where it led. But it was no use, the red color of the tube was visible for maybe 15 or 20 feet before being swallowed entirely by darkness.

Sitting back on my feet, I said, “It looks like a-” Marcus cut me off, “A slide! It’s a slide!” he said, a little excitement in his voice.

I nodded, bewildered, as I touched the smooth, slippery material of the cylinder’s entrance.

“But…what would a slide be doing here?” I asked, confused. “We don’t have a basement, so where would it even go?”

I looked to my brother for an answer, but behind his excited exterior, it was clear that he was as puzzled as I was.

“Maybe it was supposed to be a surprise from mom and dad?” He asked, doubt lining the edges of his question.

I shook my head, “No way. We would’ve noticed if they installed a friggin slide under the kitchen sink!”

“I guess you’re right.” Marcus’ gaze sank to the floor, seemingly unsure of how to respond to my argument.

Standing up, I walked toward my parents room. My brother turned to face me and asked, “Where are you going?”

“To grab dad’s flashlight,” I responded, already opening the door to our parents’ bedroom.

Our father had an especially powerful flashlight. But it was so excessively bright that he kept it on a shelf in their closet, unaware that my brother and I knew of its location and had used it on multiple occasions when our parents were out. I figured if we wanted to see the bottom of the slide, dad’s flashlight should do the trick.

After grabbing it, I walked back out to the kitchen where Marcus stood waiting for me. I waived the flashlight around proudly as he smirked back at me in excited curiosity.

“Okay, let’s see how far this baby goes!” I said as I kneeled down infront of the crimson slide, my own curiosity making me equally as excited as my brother.

Careful not to point the powerful bulb of the handheld light at either mine or Marcus’ face, I switched it on. Instantly the dark chasm beneath the sink was brightly illuminated. For a second, I thought we were about to make some big discovery, but as I directed the beam down the center of the slide, I furrowed my brow in frustration.

“What the hell?” I said in surprise as I gazed down into the abnormality. “I still can’t see the bottom.”

Puzzled, my brother stuck his head just a bit into the slide’s now brightly lit entrance. A simple, “Wow…” escaped his lips as he too stared down into the tube.

The flashlight must have illuminated more than 50 feet down into the red cylinder, but at the end of its powerful beam still sat nothing but a pitch black abyss.

Not wanting to waste the battery any longer, I turned the flashlight off and set it on the counter next to the sink.

Marcus stayed kneeling in front of the sink for a moment as I stood beside him, thinking what our next course of action should be. Both of us were determined to see how far down this mystery slide went, and to where. But as I dug through my mind for ideas, he beat me to one.

Quickly standing to his feet, Marcus proclaimed, “I know!” And without another word he darted down the hallway toward our room. A minute or two later he came back holding something behind his back, a stupid grin smeared across his face.

“What is that?” I asked with raised eyebrows.

Kicking his feet around nervously, Marcus replied, “Well, I figure, if we can’t see how far down the slide goes, maybe we can dump something noisy down it and listen for when it hits the ground on the other side!”

His explanation only increased my confusion and I asked, “What did you get that will be loud enough?”

Giggling like an oaf, Marcus side-stepped around me and toward the kitchen sink, obviously avoiding my question. “Well, um…it’s uh…” he stuttered out.

Growing slightly annoyed, I grabbed his arm and tried to pry whatever he was hiding behind his back from him to see what he had. “Just tell me what you got, dude!” I hissed through gritted teeth as I wrestled with him.

“It’s…nothing!” he screeched back as he struggled against me.

As the two of us fought, he managed to get an arm free and before I could do anything about it, he had thrown a handful of something shiny and metallic down the red tube. Once the small objects clattered against the hard plastic material and began sliding and rolling down the incline, I realized what he had giddily tossed down the slide.

Furious, I grabbed my brother by his shirt collar and nearly screamed at him, “Was that my damn coin collection, you little bastard?!”

Marcus’ laughter caught in his throat at my sudden drastic shift in demeanor. His expression changed to one of fear and he yelled back, “J-just some of it! The coins are really loud and once they hit the bottom of the slide we should be able to hear them clank against the ground! And don’t cus at me or I’ll-” I interrupted him in a childish, mocking tone, “You’ll tell mom and dad! Maybe I’ll tell them how you tossed my coin collection, you little jerk! Who do you think will be in bigger trouble then, huh?! I’ve been collecting those since I was 6, Marcus!”

My brother’s eyes welled up with tears and he let out a small, “S-Sorry…”

I glared daggers into him for a moment, then shoved him away from me, exclaiming, “Ugh, whatever!” I might have done worse if not for the fact that the little pest had actually had a decent plan. The coins should make a distinctly different sound when they fall out of the tube and onto the ground, at least assuming there was solid ground on the other side. Still, we didn’t know that for sure, and the knowledge that my brother may have just doomed a chunk of my life-long coin collection pissed me off.

“You’d better hope this works!” Is all I said to him as the two of us listened to the sound of change slipping downward into the Earth.

The noise echoed back for quite some time, maybe a good half a minute or so. But with each second they sounded further away, until we eventually heard nothing at all.

As angry as I was that I had just lost some of my prized collection, my confusion outweighed my frustration.

“H-how?” Is all the English I could muster in my shocked state.

Marcus, too, seemed baffled as he stood back up from where I’d pushed him a moment earlier. He looked at me with a mix of guilt and concern before saying, “Chris…I’m sorry…”

Looking at his face as he teared up only annoyed me more at the time. Without anything to say to him, I left the kitchen and headed for the storage room. The combination of anger and confusion over the situation clouded my better judgment, but I now had a plan to both get my coins back, as well as find out what was at the bottom of that damn slide.

A few minutes passed before I returned to where my brother still stood, looking guilty as he fearfully stared down the slide. Turning his attention back to me, he saw what I was carrying and a new confusion spread across his face.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to what I had slung over my shoulder.

“Rope.” I answered shortly.

Rolling his eyes, Marcus responded, “I know it’s rope, what is it for?”

As I began tying the rope around the metal leg of our heavy kitchen table, I snarkily answered his question with another one-worded reply, “You.”

Marcus just kept glaring at me, clearly not understanding what I meant. So once I finished tying off the knot, I explained further.

“This is dad’s 100 foot rope. Since you thought it was a great idea to toss my coin collection down the slide, you’re going to go and get my coins back.”

His expression changed to one of horror and he retorted, “No! No way! I am not doing that! I won’t-” I cut him off again. “Yes you are, Marcus! That’s what you get!”

He began crying a little and shaking his head rapidly. Letting out an exasperated sigh of irritation, I tried to reason with him, “Dude, stop being a baby! You want to find out how far down the slide goes, right?”

He nodded, tears and snot beginning to dribble down his face.

“Relax! I’m going to tie the rope around your waist and hold it from up here, so you won’t fall down. You’ll have almost a hundred feet of rope, there’s no way this thing goes farther than that! And if it does, I’ll just pull you back up.”

Marcus wiped various fluids from his face, “But, I don’t wanna! It’s dark and it’s freaking me out, Chris. Please, don’t make me go in there!” He begged.

“You’ll be fine! I promise no matter what happens, I’ll hold onto the rope as tightly as possible. Besides, you owe me for losing my coin collection.” I argued.

I watched him quietly sob for a moment before sighing once more. Grabbing his shoulders and bending down to his level, I tried to reassure him, “C’mon Marcus, just think of it like you’re an explorer! You’re going to go somewhere mysterious and bring back treasure!”

He angrily shoved me off him and yelled, “I’m not friggin five, Chris!”

Glaring at him, I yelled back, “Fine, you might not be five, but you act like you are!”

It was obvious from the way his face contorted that my words stung him, but I kept going anyway.

“You’re such a wimp! You don’t want to go down the slide because you’re a little baby who has to have his hand held all the time! How do you expect people to respect you if you can’t even go down a damn slide on your own!” I yelled.

For a moment, Marcus looked like he was going to cry again, and an overwhelming amount of guilt came over me. I’d never talked to my brother that way before. Sure, we didn’t always get along perfectly, but he was still my little brother and I loved him. Giving him crap once in a while was one thing, but I started to realize I’d taken things too far.

I opened my mouth to apologize, but before I could, Marcus snatched the rope from my hand and began tying it around his waist. Watching him in surprise, I simply asked, “Marcus?” But this time, he cut me off, “Shut up, Chris! I’ll do it, okay?!”

Shame shot up my neck and I realized in that moment how badly I wanted to call the whole thing off, but with Marcus’ newly found bravery, I felt like it would only be further insulting to him to do so now.

“Here, let me tie it for you-” I began, but my brother pulled away.

“No! I’ve already got it. And you suck at tying knots anyway!”

I laughed and decided to let him have that one seeing as how I’d treated him earlier.

Once the rope was tied snuggly around his waist, Marcus grabbed dad’s flashlight and knelt down before the entrance to the ominous slide, his back facing it. Feeling a little proud of him, I cheered him on.

“Alright man, you’ve got this.”

He rolled his eyes and said, “Duh!”

With that, he began slowly making his way backwards down the slide.

I watched his face as he grew further and further into the darkness as I slowly fed him more and more of the rope. A cold dread began to crawl up my spine as the coil of rope beside me slowly decreased. But seeing Marcus shining the bright flashlight from where he was brought me at least some comfort.

“How are you doing, Marcus?!” I called down the long red tube after him. For a moment, there was no response, and anxiety began to spread like sweat across my back. But to my great relief, my brother soon replied.

“I’m okay!” his voice echoed back up the slide, sounding far away.

Glancing over to check how much rope was left, and seeing that it wasn’t much, I grew more nervous. My mind began swimming with awful scenarios. Marcus must have gone down at least 75, maybe 80 feet by now. I could barely even make out the pinprick of light from our dad’s flashlight from how far down he’d climbed, and my paranoia was only getting worse with each second that passed.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I called down to Marcus once more. “Hey! Marcus?! I-I think you should come back up now! The rope is almost out!”

“What?!” Marcus called back, sounding farther away than ever before.

“I said, it’s time to abort the mission! I’m pulling you up now!”

“No, wait!” He yelled, practically from the other side of the planet. “I think I can almost see the bottom!”

By this point, the rope was completely taut, and my fear far outweighed my curiosity. It didn’t help that I could only barely hear him from how far down he was. I no longer cared about what lay at the bottom of this abomination. I just wanted my brother safely back.

“It doesn’t matter, just come back up! Now, Marcus!” I yelled down at him, trying not to sound too panicked.

He yelled something back, but it was inaudible. Not wanting to argue further with him, I gripped the rope and yelled at him once again to climb back up and forget about the whole thing. But just as the last words left my mouth, I heard a strange hissing sound from behind me. Then, without warning, I found myself nearly being pulled down into the slide face first as the rope began falling quickly into its depths. A short scream of abject terror blasted through the claustrophobic cylinder as Marcus began plummeting down into the darkness, well beyond what I could see. I scrambled to catch the rapidly shortening rope but due to the horrible burning it inflicted upon my hands I wasn’t able to get a good grip on it until nearly its end.

Through gritted teeth, I called out in pain for my brother, “Marcus!” I heard screaming and crying echoing back through the slide as my brother called for help. Faintly, I was able to make out, “Chris! What’s happening?! Pull me back up!”

“I’m…trying!” I yelled through a pained expression.

My legs strained as I pushed against the entrance to the slide with all the strength I could muster. I pulled at the rope as hard as I could, but the harsh burns on my hands stung agonizingly from my tight grip. More faint screams and pleading could be heard from Marcus as he thrashed around in the slide. I could practically feel his desperation reverberate up through the rope as he tried to climb his way back through the dark, blood tinted tube. But after what felt like an eternity, I could feel the rope slowly slipping through my now sweat coated hands.

“Marcus! Hurry!” I screamed in despair, my cheeks stinging with tears from a mix of pain and terror.

“Chris!” is the only word I could make out among the otherwise inaudible sounds that shot up the slide.

With each passing second I could feel the rope slipping more and more from my ever-weakening grip. The pain of my burns was excruciating and my muscles ached intensely, but I refused to give up. This whole thing was my fault, and I couldn’t bear the thought of my brother plummeting down this seemingly endless slide because of me. All that said, each passing second the pain grew stronger, and my resolve weaker. By now, so much of the rope had slipped through my bloody grip that only a few inches of it remained.

At long last, however, my brother’s terrified expression became visible in the darkness. He was almost back up now.

“Chris!” he sobbed as his hands clawed up the rope and his legs thrashed about, struggling to get a grip against the smooth, slippery plastic inside of the slide.

“Marcus!” I cried in return, the pain in my hands reaching an unbearable level as I did my best to hold on.

Marcus continued his way back toward me, sobbing uncontrollably all the while. His panicked movement made it all the more difficult to keep my grip upon the last inch of rope.

“Don’t let go!” he screamed.

“I-agh…I won’t!” I strained through gritted teeth.

He was almost back at the top, and I wasn’t going to let him fall now. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself. The statement repeating in my mind like a mantra over and over again. But just as he was nearing me, maybe just about 10 feet or so away, I suddenly began to feel an increase in weight on the rope. At first, I thought it was just because my body was getting weak. But when I gazed through blurred vision down at the extra rope that should have been hanging slackly behind Marcus, I could see that it was now taut. It was as if it was caught on something deeper in the slide, or being pulled by something.

Panic rose in my chest as I pleaded with Marcus to hurry. But after another second, I felt a strong pull against the few inches of rope I had remaining. Although it didn’t cause me to immediately lose my grip, it did cause Marcus to trip within the slide, and the shock that echoed up the few feet of rope left between us was just enough to cause the last bit of it to slip from out of my now blood-soaked grip.

The most horrible, gut-wrenching scream shattered through the slide as I watched my brother’s terror-stricken face fade into the blackness. A broken scream of my own gnawed its way out of my sobbing throat.

“Marcus!” Was all I could manage as I listened to his awful screams as they slowly got farther and farther down into the bowels of the horrible red tube.

I sat there in stunned silence until I could no longer hear any sound from the slide. Then, my senses coming back to me, I ran to grab the phone off the wall and called my father. I tried to explain in panicked, jumbled sobs what had happened as my poor dad did his best to make out my words. He kept asking where Marcus was but didn't understand what I meant when I said, “He fell down the slide.”

I walked back into the kitchen still carrying the phone as I tried desperately to make my father understand the situation, but when I stepped back in front of the sink, my words caught in my throat and caused me to nearly choke on my tongue. The underside of the sink no longer housed the bright, painfully red playground equipment. Instead, what sat mockingly beneath the familiar repetitive dripping appliance, was the equally familiar sight of a cabinet filled with nothing more than a variety of mundane cleaning supplies.

I stood there, unable to process what I was looking at as my father yelled for an explanation on the other side of the phone. I couldn’t bring myself to respond to him and after a moment of silence on my end, he at last yelled in a panicked voice, “I’m coming home,” and I heard the line go dead.

When he arrived home about 20 minutes later, my dad found me standing in the very same spot I’d been when the call ended, just staring into the cabinet with wide eyes filled with terror and confusion. He grabbed my shoulders and demanded I tell him where my brother was. When I didn’t reply, his angry demeanor crumpled into one of desperation, and he began begging me to tell him where Marcus was. My father wasn’t the type of man to show much emotion beyond anger, but something in his concerned and scared tone caused my eyes to swell with tears. Although I cried, I still could not find the words to explain to him the circumstances that led to his being home early. I could not cohesively form an explanation for what had taken his youngest son, so instead, I raised my arm and simply pointed into the underside of the kitchen sink.

This pale attempt at answering the question, “Where the hell is Marcus?!” was not taken well by my father, and while I knew he didn’t mean to, his anger and panic got the better of him. He slapped me hard across my snot soaked face and stormed off to search through our home. I stayed glued to the spot before the sink as I listened to my father rip apart the house, calling for my brother. Moments later, he rushed past me to the back door, and I heard him calling for Marcus more in the backyard.

I wanted to follow him, to tell him he wouldn’t find Marcus out there, to tell him again that my brother had fallen into the slide. But the sting on my cheek convinced me it would be a bad idea.

After dad searched for a bit longer, he finally returned to the back door and rushed to the phone. He picked it off the ground from where I’d dropped it, ignoring me entirely, and called the police. When they arrived, they searched the premises more thoroughly for any sign of my brother, going through every nook and cranny of the house to no avail. My father did however notice that his flashlight and rope were missing, and that’s when he came to me and once again begged for answers. When he began to get hysterical, a police officer pulled him away and said that they would talk to me.

They sat me down at the dining room table and questioned me. Initially, I was of course hesitant. My father didn’t believe me about the slide, so why would they? But after some coaxing, they managed to convince me to tell the story, the whole story. After I was finished, they simply stared at me. Even my twelve year old brain was able to see plainly that the looks they gave me were accusatory. They tried to spin some story about how my brother had taken my coin collection, and that I became angry enough to steal my father’s rope and tie him up in the wilderness somewhere to die. They demanded I tell them his whereabouts, but of course, I didn’t know where he was.

As a result of my story and the missing rope, flashlight, and coin collection, I was detained on suspicion of kidnapping my brother, and a widespread search ensued around the wilderness surrounding our home. When there was no body found, the police decided they didn’t have enough evidence to keep me, and I was released back into my parents’ custody.

Sadly, the lack of evidence wasn’t enough to sway my parents that I’d done nothing wrong, and they went on resenting me until I moved out about 6 years later. To this day I have almost zero contact with them, and I know it’s because they still think I had something to do with Marcus’ disappearance. I hated them for a long while, but now that I’m nearing my thirties and have children of my own, I think I understand why they blame me. After all, who else was there to blame? My brother is still missing and even I blame myself for that. I shouldn’t have made him climb into that damned slide. We should have just left it alone and waited for our parents to get home, or even just ignored our chores and gone outside to play or something. But I can’t change the past, all I can do is look toward the future. I have a family now, and my own children are the most important part of my life. If all this has taught me anything, it’s that my children will never go down a slide, especially not one under the kitchen sink.