Sibling Tortury

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

In a quiet moment recently, I was remembering some of the really cruel tricks that my older brother pulled on me when I was little. That led to thinking about some of the equally sadistic things I, in turn, did to my younger brother. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t an evil streak that ran only through my family, but was, and still is, a common facet of the “growing up with brothers and sisters” experience.

Here are a couple of stories from the Pel2na files:

I must have been about 8 when my 13 year-old brother said, "Hey, you wanta see a neat hypnotic, magic trick? Well, sure I did. He sat me down in front of a foil pie plate with about a half an inch of flour in it. In the middle of the plate burned a candle. “Now get up close to the candle and stare into the flame.” Dutifully, I did so, not noticing the plastic tube in his fist that came out of the bottom of the pie tin. After about ten seconds of watching me stare into the candle, he bew a puff of air into the tube. A ball of fire bloomed around my face. I screamed, he laughed. His subsequent threats to “not tell” were going to be difficult to heed, being as I had no eyebrows left.

Five years later. I, with a piece of rope in hand, challenge my younger brother to a “Houdini Escape” contest. First, he got to tie me up and I had to escape. (Piece of Cake) Then, it was my turn to tie him up and let him try to escape. I knew some pretty good knots, so I tied him to a tree and there he stayed. I wrapped him up with one of those sprinkler hoses with all the holes in it, and told him I was going to go make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watch cartoons. As I left, I turned the water on. Mea Culpa, as I write this, I’m still laughing.

Do any of you folks have similar stories? Or are we more twisted than we think?

#2

I have lots of those. I’ll share a couple.

Back before I got contacts, my brother would often sneak up behind me and grab my glasses off my head, go outside and stick them in a bush (or later on, pretend to stick them in a bush but instead put them in the mailbox or, on one occasion, the freezer). I’d run outside to try to get them back and he would go past me back inside and lock all the doors. I quickly learned to carry my keys around with me in my pocket at all times.

I have quite long hair. One time when I was hiding from him in the cupboard, he came and opened the cupboard door, grabbed my hair, closed the door on it and proceeded to tie my hair to the doorknob. And by that I don’t mean he just took the whole lot of it and looped it around the doorknob once. He took a few strands at a time, teased them out and meticulously matted all of my hair around it. He was holding the door shut so I couldn’t really do much about it (weakling that I am). I had to rip a bit of it to get away from the doorknob because no one but him was around at the time. The memory still makes my skin crawl. Sick, twisted maniac of a brother.

He has a huge dvd collection though, so I HAVE to love him. Also, he doesn’t live at home anymore. It’s all good.

#3

I used to make my brothers fetch for me and the silly boys did. Also, I used to kiss them with butter smeared on my lips.

I sort of fail at sibling tortury, I think! :rolleyes: :stuck_out_tongue:

My husband, though, used to hold his sisters down and dangle and long strand of spit in their face, which I think is horrible and fascinating. Then he’d suck the spit back up. Sometimes the spit broke loose, though. Yuck!

#4

Hmpf, I’m still told off about telling my little sister there were frogs in the toilet, scaring her off sitting on the loo unaccompanied.

#5

My sister is four years older than me and basically used to beat the shit out of me. One time we got in a fight she beat the crap out of me and held me down and hocked a big thing of snot right in my eye. Another time at the creek we used to play at which was basically a huge pit she pushed me and I fell down the like ten feet and hit my head rather hard. I remember once I ran into my room because she was trying to beat me up and I tricked her to look under the door and then I took a ruler and stabbed her in the face with it. She was NOT HAPPY and broke my door off the hinges. Of course I eventually got big and she could no longer do anything to me. Did I mention she is currently a drug addict?

#6

Got locked in the crawl space for the better part of an afternoon by my older brothers. Got locked out on the porch in nothing but a bathing suit the entire day and well after dark before anyone came back home. One brother would pin me down and the other brother would shoot rubber bands at me. Summers in the lake they’d sneak up underwater and grab my ankles shark attack style. Sand balls with rocks in them, snowballs with rocks in them, snow down the back of my jacket, head dunked in snow banks… I could go on. We’re all good friends now , though.

#7

My brother stabbed me in the head with a fork once.

He also tied the bathroom door shut on my sister and turned the heat up to Maximum Torture. No windows in there, either.

#8

I stabbed my older brother in the hand with a fork once! I was trying to set the table for dinner and he wouldn’t move his hand, so I put the fork in his hand. He ended up chasing me around the table with a kitchen knife (fork still dangling from the back of his hand), screaming at me to take the fork out! Oops!

#9

We had a 67 Galaxie 500 when I was growing up. On the way to the cabin my sister made me either lie on the back seat floor or in the back window. It was a 3 hour drive. Did I mention I was also quite a tall, substantial child?

She also told me the engine block of the riding lawn mower wasn’t hot.

One night, right before dinner, she came running into the living room, red bloodlike smears around my mouth: “Didja know your hamster is good eatin’!” This was the day after my hamster was taken out by my cat. She thought it would be “funny” to make me think we were having him for dinner.

She didn’t do much other stuff, considering I was as tall as her by the time I was 7 :slight_smile:

#10

A friend of my boyfriend’s told a story once about taking a crap on his brother’s chest while he was sleeping. That way when the brother woke up he couldn’t really stand or move a lot until he dealt with the pile on his chest (otherwise it would end up on the bed). This, of course, gave the crapper the chance to run away.

I can’t believe I just told that story. The other girlfriends in this bunch and I recoiled in horror.

#11

I just fought with him a lot. As I was quite a bit bigger than he was (both older and larger in build – I remember one of those “in case your child vanishes” forms where my build was characterized as “husky” and his as “slight”), these often ended up with me sitting on him or otherwise restraining him.

He forgave me about two years ago.

#12

My brother and I were more or less actively engaged in trying to kill each other for a good 8 or 9 years when we were small.

Examples include:

Me pushing him down a flight of stairs when he was 2 and I was 3.

Him cutting off my left thumb at the knuckle when we were both 7 (less than a year between us) with a pocket knife. They reattached the thumb, though he was still grounded all summer.

I shot him in the ass with an air rifle.

He set up an ambush involving him hiding on the roof over the doorway when I was 6 and he was 5 and trying to drop tools on my head. The hammer and the screwdriver (point down) missed, but I did get clipped in the shoulder by a socket wrench.

I fed him BBQ-d slugs when he was 7 and I was 8, telling him they were Vienna sausages.

He built a junior G-man hand grenade (a plastic container filled with black powder with a wick) and tried to plant it under my bed when he was 8 and I was 9.

That last one was the end of it though - my Mom found the freaking thing when the cat batted it out from under the bed and was using it as a toy and came completely unglued over the whole thing. There were mass groundings, major threats and we were summarily informed that anything less than flawless good behavior would result in the offender being fed through a slot in his or her bedroom door for the rest of their natural lives. As my mother does not make idle threats, the hostilities more or less ceased.

For reasons that have never been clear (even to the two of us), we completely despised each other from Day One. My parents knew all about it - and tried their level best to keep us from behaving like total savages towards each other, with pretty good success generally. I believe it was probably one of those things where I resented his presence (to be fair, he was a needy little shit - had colic for a year, had a slew of medical problems, and his neediness essentially gave him all of my mother’s attention when he was little - my dad had charge of me) and therefore small childhood incidents resulted in a nasty grudge on both sides, which escalated over the years. It didn’t help that we were both hot-tempered and he was an irritating little shit under the best of circumstances. I was a big fan of eye-for-an-eye when I was small, and my brother was a tattle-tale and a mama’s boy, while I was neither. Plus he was an inveterate liar - he’d make shit up I supposedly did to get me in trouble with my parents.

My brother and I are great friends - now.

#13

By brothers (both older - my oldest brother is six years older than me) made an attempt at torture when I was 8 or so. It nearly ended in tragedy - for them; I came within a heartbeat of shooting them.

In those days, my parents had control of a couple of cottages a couple of miles apart. They didn’t hesitate to have “the boys” sleep at one when they went to sleep at another - since my brother was 14 or so.

Anyway, my brothers thought it would be hilarious to scare the living shit out of me. So, that night when we were toasting marshmellows over the fire, they proceeded to tell me the story of “the Mad Axeman”. It went sort of like this:

"The Mad Axeman lived in the tumbledown barn at the far end of the property. (this made sense, as the barn was super-creepy and I had been specifically warned not to play near it - the parents said because the structure was dangerous, but of course really because it was the home of the Mad Axeman!). He had once been the son of the farmer who owned these lands, but he had been driven insane by being made to do his chores - specifically, chopping firewood - and so had chopped his family up. Then, he had run away to the woods and the police never caught him. He sneaks back to the creepy old barn to sleep at nights.

Ever since, he had reigned in terror over the neighbourhood, chopping up victims with his rusty old axe. Often, to extract maximum terror, he’d quietly kill the older people in a house and drag their bodies outside while the kids were asleep. Then, he would wake his victims by sharpening his axe outside their bedroom window. Ehen the victim wakes up, cowering in terror, he’d bust in and chop them up horribly."

Needless to say, this made quite an impression on me when I was 8. That night, after much tossing and turning, I fell asleep - only to wake up in horror. My brothers had disappeared and I heard a distinct “wheet, wheet” of shapening metal outside my window.

Well, I wasn’t going to be chopped up like mincemeat. So I did the logical thing - I found my dad’s shotgun (in the dark, not easy) - I loaded it with buckshot, and I waited facing the door.

It was the giggling that prevented tragedy. The door slooowly creaked open, but my middle brother couldn’t help giggling - my finger was I think white on the trigger, I came within an ace of blowing them both away.

My brothers swore me to silence, and for over thirty years I’ve not told my parents …

#14

Hooboy, do I ever. I still use some of the things Rickjay, your fellow Doper and my older brother, did to me as jokes in my stand-up act.

I guess I was maybe 6 years old, and it must have been late June or July because I still had a fresh, crisp $10 bill that my Grandma had sent me for my birthday. Rickjay came into my room and asked me if I wanted to see something cool. Well, who doesn’t? So he went over to the air vent in my room pulled the grate out and reached far in. He came out with a tiny clear, plastic tube in his hand. He proceeded to tell me that this tube was one of “Santa’s Bugs”. I asked what that meant, and he told me it was how Santa listened in on everything I said and did and that’s how he knew if I’d been bad or good.

And …wait for it… if I gave Rickjay the $10 I’d gotten for my birthday, he’d show me where the rest were and “clean” the house of them for me.

At 6 years old, I thought that was quite a deal. Turns out, he’d planted these tiny plastic straw-like things all over the damn house. What a creep!

#15

Oh it’s time to tell now. Every year or so my brothers and I will reveal something from childhood to our parents (like playing football out on the ice on the lake - like all of us having keys to the car by age 14, etc.) and they always answer with some variation of “No you didn’t. Really? Where were we?”

#16

The rule of sibling relations - no autopsy, no foul. It’s a wonder anyone survives having siblings. What only children miss - having other people that you can’t get rid of actively trying to make your life a living hell. That’s got to change you in some fundamental way.

I come from a family of four girls - what we lacked in physically damaging each other we made up for in psychological warfare. Which is not to say there was not punching and kicking and hair-pulling, as well.

#17

I know I’ve posted this before, but I can’t be bothered to search for it, so I’ll just type it again from scratch.

My mom and dad owned a pharmacy, which sold, amongst other things, syringes for human and veterinary use, including horses. These syringes are rather large, big enough for what I did, anyway. My sister drank Diet Coke and it was HERS and HERS ALONE! You DID NOT DRINK HER DIET COKE!!! You could even talk about Fight Club, but you DID NOT DRINK HER DIET COKE!!!

After being falsely suspected of swiping one of her precious Diet Cokes, a friend and I decided to screw with her. We were about 12-13 at the time and she was 18/19. We took one of the cans out of the refrigerator and gently pierced a small hole in the top of the can. Next, we extracted the contents of the can with the syringe and replaced it with ordinary tap water. We then replaced the can and put it back into the six-pack yoke. A few days later my sister opened the tampered-with can and took a swig of what she was expecting to be bubbly semi-sweet diet cola. When she got a taste of flat tap water, she spat it out and freaked, thinking that it had been poisoned. It was good for a laugh at her expense. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for this incident to this day.

#18

I’m the oldest of four boys. Brother #2 says one of his earliest memories is sitting on the back porch trying to eat a piece of watermelon and being poked in the back of the head with a stick, over and over and over.

Brother #3 recalls being told, “Go ahead, drink it! It tastes just like vanilla ice cream. See? Go ahead, have some more. Yeah, that’s it, drink it all! Good, huh? Now walk across the patio.” He still has a tiny scar where he banged his head on the edge of the patio as he staggered onto the lawn.

Brother #4 still hates balloons – he woke up from a nap with a large helium balloon tied to his pudgy little wrist, and ran screaming from the bedroom as the balloon chased him.

It was Mom’s fault – she kept saying, “You play with your brothers!” So I did.

#19

Good god, was your brother Peter Wiggins? I’ve heard of a lot of shitty things siblings do to each other (and I’ve done some of them to my cousins, even), but that takes the cake.

#20

Hmm… my brother(7 years younger) and I have always been fairly close, but that didn’t prevent me from screwing with him a lot when he was younger.

One thing I did is tie a little wooden thread spool onto the whip that one of his He-Man figures had as a weapon. Basically, I had a miniature handle, 4 inches of string, and a spool tied to the end. Somehow, I managed to convince him that if I got it spinning like a helicopter, that it would really hurt. I terrorized him for the better part of a year with that stupid thing.

When he was about 3, I fed him dried dog food, and he liked it, and started eating it out of the bag, until the parents caught him. (and I got in trouble, of course)

Other than that, I didn’t really torture him too much, outside of the usual wedgies and stick-poking, etc…

He got me good once when he wanted something from me, or wanted me to do something, and I told him no. He started throwing himself into the wall saying “Mark, quit beating me up! Ow!” and things like that, and I got in trouble from my Dad for picking on him, while I was completely baffled- I hadn’t laid a hand on him! I gave him a whooping later on after my parents learned of his crying wolf, and they didn’t believe him. What goes around comes around, I suppose.