by Meghan R. Coleman

Created on: May 22, 2008

When my parents decided to have children, my dad said, "If we are going to have one, we are going to have another so they won't be alone." So after they had me, they had my brother thirteen months later.

After having what they wanted, they were happy until the ups and downs of normal life became mostly the downs.

One afternoon while my brother was doing his usual search for a new pet, an everyday escapade, he came upon a frog. These can be bought at many pet stores, but he preferred the ones he caught himself. He put the frog in a five gallon bucket half full of water.

This poor creature just floated there in the sun, in a plastic cage of dirt water. While my brother went back out to his playground of untamed creatures, the frog continued to float there, probably wondering if he was going to be a soup because of the reaction to the sun on its soft amphibian skin.

While the sun started to set, my brother was returning home from his search for lizards and such. He came through the back door of our house, and glanced into his bucket. In the bucket, there was still water, but not a frog. In place of a frog there was a wood chip the size of a saltine cracker, floating there were he felt the frog should be. That frog was not there, and because the frog wasn't there, neither was my brother's sense of calm.

He came into the house, not as a normal human being upset because his pet escaped, but as someone you could only picture in a book or movie because of the severeness of his actions. He threw things violently around the house. At this time, not tables or chairs because he was still his smaller version at the age of ten, but boots and books. My mother and I came to the disturbance, to see my brother throwing these things. What was wrong we wondered, not asking because instead we stood in awe of this display. My brother acknowledged our presence and demanded to know who put the piece of wood in the bucket. I didn't know, and as I was wondering it myself, my mother explained that it was her. She told my brother that she felt sorry for the frog, and put the piece of wood in there and moved the bucket out of the sun. This explanation was not satisfactory to my brother. This fueled his fire enough to where he decided to grab a knife out of the kitchen. After grasping the five-inch kitchen knife we normally use for cutting our steaks, he threatened to stab himself in the chest. At the horror of this to a sister and a mother, we screamed, and my mother sprinted towards him. There

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