When I was a kid, I remember playing the Telephone Game. The one where we sat in a circle while the teacher thought of a silly statement to whisper into little Johnny’s ear. Something silly but always a little off, a little unsettling. The teacher might whisper, “The pony is planning for a picnic.” Johnny would then repeat this, or whatever he thought he heard, to the person sitting next to him. She would then repeat in a whisper what she thought she heard to the person next to her, and so on and so on until the very last person in the circle would break the whispering and say the distorted message he heard out loud: “Jack and Jill fell into a pail of water, but the little engine that could did not.” It might just seem like fun and games, but this past weekend it occurred to me that this game might have been trying to teach us all a lesson.

The lesson is when you hear something weird or that just doesn’t sound right, don’t hold it in. Disperse it, lighten the load, tell someone else. Each time you tell someone your uncomfortable story, that person will have to process it and prescribe meaning to it, so that you no longer have to be the sole person thinking about it. If you tell enough people, you could even afford to stop thinking about it all together, which is useful, especially if the stories you have to share are grim.

And these are just the types of stories my sister likes to tell best.

This Thanksgiving, I heard all about the crazies and the zanies and the truly disturbed, and many of them were stories she had heard on the 11 o’clock news. While eating slices of turkey and mashed potatoes, I nearly choked when she told me about the guy who jumped out from behind a clothing rack in her local Target and ejaculated in front of a woman pushing a baby stroller. I thought about asking her to resume telling the story after I had finished my gravy, but then I couldn’t wait to know — what did she do???

Then there was the third cousin of her best friend’s boyfriend who was a pharmacist and who was held up at gunpoint for $4,000 worth of Oxycodone just the other week. And the weird part, get this, was that he was walking around the store shopping and reading Us Weekly in a full on ski mask with gloves and a terrible red plaid shirt (not the cool kind either, but the scary anti-social unabomber kind) for a full half hour and no one thought to say anything to him, like, “I wouldn’t believe everything you read in those magazines.” No, no one did anything of the sort, they just let him read the magazines and proceed to hold up a very considerate (so I hear) pharmacist.

There are the truly gruesome stories, like the one about the pregnant woman from the city two cities away from hers who went to meet someone off of Craig’s List out of an interest for a used car seat for sale. When the pregnant lady arrived, the seller killed her, cut open her womb and took the baby as her own. These are the stories that get to me, that leave terrible red images in my head, ones that I cannot leave alone. I will try, in vain, to tell Alan in order to get rid of some of the terribleness, but he cannot stand for any story which involves the slightest brutality to women or children, so to tell him a story involving both would mean he would lock himself in the bathroom. So I must quietly suffer until there is someone new to tell, someone who has not been sitting next to my sister and the pumpkin pie.

On Sunday, as we drove home at 3 AM along the dark, quiet, eerie freeway, she decided to tell me about the recent evil spirit that had taken hold of so and so’s mother-in-law, and when she tells me I can feel my arm hairs raise. I think about how frightening it would be if she were to all of a sudden become possessed herself, and what I would do if she did, all while stuck in a car on a dark, quiet, eerie freeway alone with her. And in the the most serious way I could, I looked at her and demanded, “Why did you have to tell me that?”