One Bad Joke

Everyone has that one thing that sticks with them from childhood. That one thing that stands out above everything else. This thing could be a special event, a tragic lose, or any number of possibilities. For me, it is the voices. Voices that I will remember all my life. Voices that I still hear in my mind, late at night, as I try to sleep. I first heard the voices when I was six years old and did not stop hearing them until I was twelve years old.
My family moved out to the country when I was five years old. Since my twin brother and I were getting ready to start school, and my baby sister was getting older, she was two, my parents decided we needed a bigger home. I loved the house as soon as I saw it. It was just a normal white house, with a rust red barn behind it, but to me, it was freedom. The land with it, seven acres, gave me room to play, and was a lot better than the fenced in back yard I was used to.
The next year flew by. My brother and I took to living in the country like pigs to mud. Even though we had started school, life was a dream. It seemed like nothing could go wrong; then one night, it did.
I woke to people talking. It was still dark, so I assumed it was the middle of the night. That was when I heard them for the first time; the voices that would haunt my childhood. A man's voice came first, I wasn't sure what he said. I'm still not, but from the little girl giggle that followed, I've always thought he was telling a joke. Following the little girl's giggle, a woman's voice scolded the man. Again, I could not make out the words, but I'd been scolded enough by my mother to recognize the tone. Immediately I figured that my parents and sister were still awake. I went out to our living room, where the voices came from, but the room was empty and dark. I didn't think anything of that, I just thought I had heard wrong, so I checked my sister's bedroom, she was asleep, as were my parents when I checked their room. Still, I wasn't bothered, I could have just imagined it. I went back to my bed and tried to get to sleep. Almost as soon as my head hit the pillow, I heard the voices again. I shot out of bed, still tangled in my blanket as I ran to the living room. Nothing. That was when I got scared. I woke up my dad and told him there was someone in the house; I told him about hearing the voices telling the joke. Just like any other father putting their child's fears to rest, he checked the house and, big surprise, found nothing. He told me I had dreamed it, and sent me to bed.
I hadn't imagined it though, because the next night the voices were back, and the night after that. I heard them almost every night for the next six years. I noticed that my brother, who I shared a room with, started sleeping with his blanket pulled over his head. He told me that it was to hide from the “demons” that he heard. We never talked about it after that, so I'm not sure if it was the same voices that I heard, that he was hearing. I never talked about the voices again, in fact. I didn't want people thinking I was a liar, or crazy.
I got use to the voices after a while, and I couldn't sleep unless I heard that joke being told over and over again all night. After five years of hearing them, I had made peace with the fact that I was the only one who heard the voices. Then that changed.
I was eleven years old, and my parents had divorced a year earlier. My father remarried, and his new wife and her daughters moved in with us. A couple of months later, sitting around the dinner table, my step-mom asked something that shocked me. She wanted to know if anyone else had heard what sounded like people talking, the night before. If I was shocked, my dad was more surprised. He shot me a surprised look. This told me he still remembered; I thought he had long ago forgotten about “my” voices. Before I could say anything, dad assured my step-mom that no one had heard a thing, so I stayed quiet. Dad and I never talked about what happened, and I'm sure that is the way he wanted it. It didn't matter to me though, I had validation that the voices were real, I wasn't imagining them.
About six months later, my father sold the house and we moved. On my last night in the house, I heard the voices all night. After that, I had trouble sleeping in our new house, because the voices weren't there. And although I left the voices, the voices will never leave me. I will always remember the joke that I will never get.