I Am Borship

By Ivy Smyth

I understood what it meant to play a trick on someone before I understood words thus the first trick I learned to play did not involve any. From my stroller, or my mother’s arms, I would pointedly catch the eye of strangers in public and, once I was sure they were looking, squeeze all the muscles in my tiny body so hard that I shook violently all over. Reactions varied. My mother frequently had to deny other people’s claims that her child had seizures, chills, or severe anxiety issues. They were always surprisingly concerned when told, “Oh, she’s just messing with you”.

In reality, that is exactly what I was doing. I felt immense satisfaction in controlling their facial expressions and the tone of their voice. I could make people I’d never seen before come right up to me! However, I was limited. I could not walk or speak so I worked with what I had, biding my time, and waited for the day when I would really have power. An abstract control of a reaction was not enough for me. I didn’t just want to see fear and concern on their faces; I wanted to know exactly what I was putting into their heads. As a trickster, I was certain to evolve beyond the primitive ‘shake until they think you’re going to die’ act. My true purpose was something far more evil, far more precise.

Allow me to explain the difference between a trick and a lie. Behaving in a way that resembles someone who is having a seizure when you are actually in perfect health is not a lie. Lying is when you tell your mother you did not paint all over the living room wall when you did, and you are hope against hope that she will never question that claim for as long as she lives and you will get off free. When lying, one should remain as realistic as possible, make the lie seem like nothing, make it so forgettable that it will never be considered as anything but the truth. A perfect lie does not change the atmosphere of a room. A good trick, however, should test the very boundaries of imagination and reality. One introduces a trick with the assumption that it will be found out eventually, only to add to the overall satisfaction.

Tricks were always my specialty. Tricks are to lying as borrowing is to stealing—the perfectly justifiable, temporary version. Being blessed with a vivid imagination, I could never think of a better outlet than to unleash it at others’ expenses. My younger brothers, Bus and Kyron, were the most convenient victims.

I told my brothers all sorts of ridiculous stories presented as truth. I convinced them they were secret agents for over a year. I told them my lotion was food for the monster named Fred who lived in my garbage can. I told them tree sap was an effective weapon against ghosts. By the time I was ten or so, I was testing ideas on them nearly every day. I could tell instantly whether or not the new story was worth continuing. It needed to peak interest without being farfetched to the point where it would be disregarded. Convincing people to believe complete nonsense is actually a very delicate art. As a child, I set out to master it to the best of my ability.

I knew I’d hit on a break-through the first time I mentioned Borship. He was just subtle and odd enough to be considered a possible reality. My two angel-faced siblings scrunched their little eyebrows and blinked their thick eyelashes at the mention of his name. I didn’t shove it down their throats; I started small. Borship began as someone I blamed minor disturbances on. A noise, the closing of a door, the moving of a laundry basket—those were things Borship did in his spare time.

Naturally, my brothers’ curiosity about Borship increased exponentially over time. Why don’t we ever see him? What does he look like anyway? Why does he move my laundry basket? These were questions I knew I’d have to start finding answers for if Borship was going to live. And live he must, so I got to work.

Borship, I told them, appears as a shapeless lump of blankets. Because he is a spirit, his physical form doesn’t effect what he can and cannot do. He lurks in shadows, close to the ground. He isn’t particularly bad or good, but he is very powerful.

“What happens if we pull the blankets off?” the older of my brothers, age five, wanted to know.

“Oh, don’t pull them off.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll make him angry.”

“But what will be under them?”

He presented a difficult question. I didn’t know what would be under Borship’s blankets because I had never met him. I pictured him in my head as clearly as I could. A lump of blankets seeping across the floor, making a slight hissing noise, pushing a laundry basket across the floor. The sight evoked in me a deep apprehension and for a moment I wasn’t sure if I could go through with it. Then I gulped, took firm hold of his blankety skin, and jerked it off. I had my answer.

“Another blanket.” I didn’t realize then the amazing potential opened up by this answer.

As the days went by Borship became steadily more aggressive in his interference with every-day life. He progressed from the moving of small pieces of furniture to seriously offensive business, such as finishing the chocolate-chip cookies. Sucking the chocolate from between my teeth, I would tell my brothers, “He loves chocolate. I wouldn’t complain about it if I were you.”

It was times like these, when I used Borship a little too selfishly, that made my brothers suspicious. I panicked when told by three-year-old Kyron, “It’s not Borship! You do things and you say it’s Borship!” I found myself in the difficult situation where one must prove the truth to be false. Borship was my most successful trick so far. He had lasted for weeks without much question but he was slipping. Or rather, I was slipping. I felt a sort of responsibility weighing upon my shoulders that came from something outside of myself. Borship needed to live on, not just to satisfy me, but because Borship himself had the right to exist. Never before had I felt such a connection, such loyalty to a figment of my own imagination. It was time to consider desperate measures.

Claustrophobia, my worst fear by far, settled uncomfortably in my stomach as I breathed my own recycled air. I could taste the blankets as my breath heated them up, as if they were being stuffed forcefully down my throat. But I did not choke and I did not cough—I had work to do. Blindly, I gripped the carpet with my fingers and toes, inching myself forward at what I imagined to be a steady, eerie pace. My forehead was pressed painfully against my knees so that overall my body would appear as a shapeless lump. I was cramped, I was nauseous, I was terribly tired, but most of all I was burning up under five blankets.

In the event that one of my brothers woke up and noticed Borship, in the flesh, slithering about the hall at night, he said nothing of it. Still, I did not feel I acted in vain. Though the impatience and lack of satisfaction swirled violently within me, I told myself I was right to take it slow. Besides, there was something comfortable in silently haunting the halls every night. The real Borship wouldn’t be so selfish as to continuously draw attention to himself. He would be aloof and indifferent to the agenda of the humans of the house. That is what I pretended to be. As Borship, I imagined I had my own agenda to roam as I pleased every night and if a young boy happened to awake and catch sight of me… well, that was no concern of mine, was it? After all, it wasn’t as if I could just slither right into my brothers’ room and confront them face to face.

On the night that I first slithered into my brothers’ room to confront them face to face, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Certainly, I was taking a huge risk. Since my nighttime wanderings had begun, Borship was once again considered a legitimate excuse for the moving of objects, strange noises, and the disappearance of delicious snacks. But being noticed and respected as Borship wasn’t enough in the long term. I wanted to witness a true, immediate reaction to my creation. My sense of sophisticated subtlety had all but vanished. What remained was an apprehension, which I chose to ignore. I knew I was possibly blowing my cover forever but it was a night too calm for my taste and I was feeling reckless. I wrapped myself in a few more blankets than usual, then got to slithering.

The response was far better than I anticipated. Exhaustion and the darkness took a much larger toll on their bravery than I had predicted. Being under several layers of cotton, wool, and satin, I couldn’t see them. However, I felt the hushed atmosphere of the room. I heard Gus whisper, “Look, look!” to Kyron. Nobody approached me. There was a creaking of bedsprings as the two moved closer to each other. I felt a deep surge of affection for my brothers. Leave it to them to be adorably gullible when I had thought all hope was lost! My head became so light with excitement I thought it might fly away. I was so elated I couldn’t have stayed in that room another minute, even if I had wanted to. As it was, I made a very slow turn with my aching appendages and crept out of the room.

That first night of direct contact marked the dawning of a new age. Borship had become more than I ever could have had the audacity to dream. Again and again I sacrificed sleep to bring Borship to life with a new, intoxicating enthusiasm. The spirit got bolder and bolder over time. Gradually, Borship made a regular occurrence of interacting with his surroundings while my brothers watched with moderate curiosity. Eventually it began to bother me that this was so easily accepted. It wasn’t that my brothers didn’t believe in Borship. Quite the contrary—I couldn’t stand how well it all went over. Borship would have to do more than just make cute appearances if he was going to continue to be a source of great entertainment to myself. In order to shine, Borship needed to provoke some sort of resistance. Yet again, I felt the need to push limits and put both Borship and myself at risk.

Borship began to make regular daytime appearances. He was a feature of the house, regarded by my parents with a sort of indifferent tolerance, which kept my secret safe from adult explanations. I soon learned that nothing looks scarier in sunlight. The sight of Borship lounging in the kitchen failed to produce terrified screams or even hushed whispers. No one batted an eye to find Borship occupying a bathroom he or she walked into. Rather than being afraid, my brothers seemed excited by Borship and almost proud of the open presence of a spirit in their home. I suppose it made them feel special. It made me feel uneasy.

No one could truly believe they shared their house with a specter and be so light-hearted about it. I knew that somewhere along the way I had lost them. They were playing along but their hearts weren’t in the game. I was the only one who should have been playing anybody! Was this really how it was all going to end? The legacy of Borship fizzling out lamely like an old sparkler? I could not stand for this! I had always known it wouldn’t last forever but if my heart were to be so torn apart at least I needed some closure. I was with Borship almost as much as myself in those days. I couldn’t just suddenly let that go and say goodbye to this part of me forever.

As a consequence of these desperate and deranged fears of mine, Borship himself became somewhat manic-depressive. He no longer snuck tastes of the best cookies—he gorged himself on them. He muttered insults at family members in his rumbling voice and repeatedly invaded everyone’s privacy. Not being long for this world, he was out to have a good time at anyone and everyone’s expense, without further care of anything. Deep inside myself, I knew this was the worst sort of fizzling. Not only was there no bang, there was also no dignity. I was laying my frustration and my inability to accept change out for the whole world to see. It should have been humiliating and part of me recognized that. The rest of me was too distraught to mind.

“I AM BORSHIP.”

My three-year-old brother fixed me with his coolest stare—I knew this because I was peeking through a gap in the blankets, no longer the meticulous mastermind I had once been. In the spirit realm, Borship was the equivalent of a washed-up, old, raving drunk.

“I AM BORSHIP AND I AM ANGRY”

No quaking in terror. No petrified eyes. No tears. No cries for help. No respect.

“Go away,” is what I had coming to me and what I eventually got. I couldn’t stand this. Cornering the three-year-old alone was my most tasteless last resort., and it had failed miserably. Then something so unbelievable, so painfully degrading and pathetic happened. My tiny brother toddled over to the sorry lump on his bedroom floor, took a firm hold, and yanked with all his might.

Borship then let out a girlish shriek turned at the last second into a furious roar. Of course, I donned more than one blanket and was not truly exposed but that detracted none from the immense violation I felt under the toddler’s scrutinizing glare. This was by far the most hideous defeat I could have imagined. It wasn’t that my scam had been recognized; it was a terrifying realization that it just didn’t matter anymore. Borship didn’t matter. How long would I be able to last without him? We slunk away into my bedroom, not caring who saw us together. As I shed the layers of Borship onto my floor, I thought of it as a goodbye falling so short of what Borship, who had once been destined for greatness, deserved.

I don’t remember if I actually cried or not, but it made no difference. That terrible lost feeling was still there in my chest as I allowed the weight of aimlessness to settle about me. Utterly insignificant, all I could think was what now?

The worst part of Borship’s departure was that nobody questioned or wondered about his absence. Had I bothered to hold a funeral service, no one would have come. I myself felt incomplete; a piece of me had gone away with Borship. I curled into a ball under piles of blankets in bed every night and felt nothing. There was no spark, no sense of magic or transformation. Without support from outsiders, Borship didn’t exist at all. I could not escape the feeling that it was not just I who suffered but Borship as well, wherever he was. I had failed him.

The empty feeling carried over several weeks. On one such dead day, I was doing work alone in the laundry room. At that point, It wasn’t so much that Borship was on my mind as it was that he was gone and I couldn’t find anything to replace him with. The nothingness felt so heavy to me and I just didn’t have the heart to start a new project. I did normal things and kept my stories to myself.

I contemplated the normality of laundry as I went to hang towels on a rack next to the door of the room. It opened, completely concealing me behind it from view of whoever had entered. The old me would have taken advantage of such a situation but, alas, the idea did not even occur to me. Instead, I observed my five-year-old brother from my involuntary hiding place without any intention of interfering with the peace of his every-day life.

To this day, I still have no idea why Gus was in the laundry room in the first place. From what I saw, he had no purpose there other than to stare innocently at the washing machine, waiting for something to happen. As I shifted positions, a towel slipped from the rack and made a clearly audible wooshing sound on it’s way down. My little brother wheeled around, looking for the source of the noise, and I was able to catch sight of the expression in his eyes.

Could it be…

…fear? Awe? Pure beauty? I was entranced. I watched his full lips quiver and then he spoke.

“Borship?” It wasn’t a question but so much as a fearful greeting. A strange feeling began to spread through my body, starting in my legs and traveling to my head, bringing with it such a rush of tingly blood that I nearly lost my balance. My brother stayed in the room a moment longer with that same stricken look and shaky manner before scampering away. I sunk weakly to the floor.

A true goodbye for a true friend should always be this way. That is what I was thinking down there. I couldn’t move. I felt so full of something, of everything that had ever been stripped from me. It didn’t matter that Borship had left me because I now knew that his fate was something beyond myself. An unfamiliar sort of spark, a different color than before, ignited within me.

He lives.