Back to the Future

I arrived home from work and was met at the door by Daughter, wrapped in a blanket and looking Mystical. Brother is dead, she said. Follow me.

We went into her room, which was very dark, and she closed the door. She went to a spot in the corner of the room and turned on some blinking red and blue light thing (actually, I had never seen it before) and we sat on her bed for a few minutes. We're traveling into the future, she said. Two hundred years. Aaaaand...we're there.

She got up and turned off the light, and led me into her brother's room. In his bed under the blankets was a mounded shape, and on his pillow a skull with glasses on. (I would have been more alarmed by the skull except he bought it at the Globe Theater in London a couple of years back. Alas, poor Yorrick. The glasses were a surprisingly moving touch, though.) He's dead in the future! Daughter informs me.

We reverse the process, blinking lights and all. When we return to Son's room, he pops out of the closet and asks why it took us so long to find him.

While the whole thing was endearing, it was also triste. I don't like being met at the door by one child telling me the other is dead. She was wrapped in a blanket (it was noon, mind you) and Hubby looked like he had been crying. Turns out, he had not been awake for long (must be nice, right?). But there was an awful instant where I thought she must actually be telling the truth. Compared to that, Yorrick was a blast.