And the Killer is...

My great-uncle, Jim.

I'll start by describing my great-uncle Jim. I really wish I had a picture to post. Maybe I'll upload one sometime in the future and tag it onto the end of this post. We'll see.

Uncle Jim is old and kind of looks like Ebenezer Scrooge.



He has a potbelly, bushy eyebrows, puffy cheeks, hair on only the sides of his head, and he smokes a pipe. He's never been anything but nice to me, but for some reason I've always had this weird feeling of uncomfortable dislike towards him.

In the dream, he was my father and about ten times creepier, and an annoyingly, overbearingly conservative christian. (The kind of person who really, really bothers me.)

My great-uncle-father Jim was raising us (I know I had siblings, I'm not sure who they were) with unnecessary strictness and regularly made me feel guilty for doing things that he didn't think fit into his "moral code." Also, we were all living the other side of my family's cottage.

I was particularly frustrated with him one day when I walked into the bathroom to pee. To my disgust and astonishment, I looked in the toilet only to find a severed human leg floating in the bowl. (I guess it was a really big toilet.)

I don't know why I thought this would solve the problem, but I flushed the toilet. The water started to rise and I stepped backwards cautiously, knowing it was about to overflow.



As the toilet overflowed, several body parts poured out of it and into the water-logged bathroom. I ran out to the main room and brought my family in to see the dead body parts. We realized that Jim had committed the murder and dismembered his victim, trying to hide her by flushing her down the toilet.




(Dexter? Ice truck killer? Anyone?)

With that discovery, I completely lost it and freaked out at Jim. (The climate of the situation implied that this was the first time I or anyone else had confronted Jim.)

I started screaming about hypocrisy, demanding to know how Jim could make us feel guilty day after day for doing completely normal things when he was a murderer.

I actually remember part of what I yelled word for word.

"Do you not claim to live by the ten commandments? How about DO NOT KILL? DO NOT LIE? Or DO NOT STEAL, how about that? Because you stole that girl's life!"

And that's all.

Ps I think that last part about "do not steal" was a throw-back to when we read The Kite Runner in AP Lit - Baba's philosophy about how stealing is the only sin one can commit, and murder is "stealing" someone's life.

edit - I found Great-Uncle Jim in the background of a group picture at my graduation party last summer. He's not as fat as I remembered.