Little Wisconsin

It all started with a binge watch of a childhood classic: Danny Phantom. All that Sinny planned for her summer break was to binge watch an old cartoon before preparing for a summer internship with the local police department’s cold case squad. It was meant to be fun.

Sure she may have spent a good twentyish hours binging the show before getting sloshed with some hard lemonade, but hey, it was a sweet time . It was supposed to be fun.

Except it wasn’t so fun when she woke up in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar house, to an unfamiliar woman looking at her with concern.

Everything was unfamiliar , and the stress that flashed over her sent her into a small frenzy — a stress fever burned and she felt dizzy and weak. She hated it, especially since the last thing that she saw before passing out was the sad look in the eyes of the pale woman looming over her; she looked like she wanted to cry, as if she didn’t expect for Sinny to be there…

The woman looked like she saw a ghost.

The next time that Sinny woke up, she woke with a gasp, hands clenching her hair as the night's events replayed in her head over and over again. 

Nothing should have led to the sight in front of her, nothing made sense; because in the mirror across from her, a little girl with snow-white hair and piercing lilac eyes stared back at her. When she grimaced, the girl in the mirror mimicked her. It wasn’t until she began pulling at her eyes and teeth that she realized that she was the girl in the mirror.

At that point Sinny screamed a bloodcurdling wail.

It didn’t make her feel better that the mirror actually cracked from the volume.

And was that a purple ring—

—

The woman from earlier eventually returned and attempted to soothe her. Attempted, because whenever she came near Sinny, she would struggle to avoid her touch — it was both familiar and unfamiliar, warm and inviting but at the same time distant — inherently it felt both right and wrong, and that was a mindfuck she couldn’t handle.

“Oh, Sinny…” the woman would drawl.

She had ruddy red hair and lavender eyes that were more blue than purple. The woman had a thin and lithe frame, brought out more by the scrubs that she wore that wrapped around her frame. She seemed intimate, almost motherly…

But she wasn’t Sinny’s mother, or at least her original mother.

Sinny’s mother was dead, and that was something to celebrate.

—

Sinny didn’t bother speaking with the woman, as she seemed to come to conclusions on her own. The woman thought she had amnesia from a rare case of Scarlet Fever. She didn’t bother talking with a woman who was so hesitant to take a sick child to a hospital, especially when she obviously worked for one.

Though, she began to come around after noticing the strange tendencies that occurred in their little house in the middle of no-where. 

Whenever Sinny would linger in the halls for more than a minute, the temperature would drop. The air would chill and gradually, just gradually, she swore she could see frost develop in the coolest corners of the room.

She remembered an old rumor that spirits loved corners.

Whenever she turned her head to look at the shadows, they almost seemed playful — friendly even — as they toyed with the world around her, touching her pale hair or even whistling in the wind. Whenever she was about to trip or fall, something would reach out from the darkness to help her — catch her before she fell or flutter weightless kisses on her cuts and bruises.

The injuries never lasted for more than an hour

It was a horror experience to say the least… ghostly happenings only became commonplace as Sinny settled into her new skin. And the longer that she relaxed, the more she got used to her new circumstances, the more that Sinny began to realize that this Sinny was much different than her previous self. Color differences excluded.

They shared the same features as she had when she was a child, but this Sinny had short hair, cut straight at the ears, the longest tips never going beyond her chin. She quickly recognized that her hair was susceptible to the wind, but sometimes she swore that her hair would move and shift without air being present.

Sinny was also quite strong for her age — she could only speculate that she was somewhere in her tweens, from her body’s development and the lack of…

Ahem.

Assets.

Sinny had been a slow grower in her past life, but the girl in this one nearly never grew an inch — she was short and did not come with the growing pains that Sinny was used to as a girl who grew from 4’9 to 5’9 within her last year of middle school.

This Sinny also never seemed to fill out in the right places… she always remained bone thin and light, and what was more worrisome to herself was the fact that she was always hungry .

She felt ravenous .

Sometimes she would stand in front of her mirror, eyes pinched and brows furrowed as she traced the ribs that would poke out no matter how much she ate or played. Her eyes always seemed hollow and misty — like they were dead. Sometimes her bones felt too stiff to belong to a little girl, and then some days they would feel so light as if there was no gravity pulling her down.

Sometimes she would be looking for her own reflection only to find it gone.

Little Wisconsin Masters was a strange girl… that was all that Sinny could conclude about her new life. Because irrefutably, beyond the color differences and lack of height, everything about her was the same. Same circular eyes that stared out into the nothingness, same curiosity and hunger for string cheese (it’s weird how childhood obsessions seem to carry over), and a strong protectiveness for those she identified as family.

Sinny acclimated to her new life; picked up the stuffed animals on the floor and kept the small room neat and tidy

Even though she sometimes had to clean what looked like purple goo leaking from her eyes and cuts instead of normal red blood.

Some stains never seemed to leave the carpet. She decided to blame it on some purple paint instead.

Her new mother would watch her warily. Eyes turned in kindness and warmth leaked from her smiles, but sometimes she would shiver from the cold of the room. She would present her toys with rice bags inside — easily heatable in the microwave — because even Sinny felt too cold in her own skin.

Every night the two would share hot-cocoa and marshmallows, they were always silent nights.

Sinny didn’t know if she could speak normally like a 11 year old could.

Did 11 year olds talk normally? She hadn’t seen or heard from a kid in years — she didn’t work with kids and certainly didn’t live near any within her college town.

She chose to speak as simply as she could. It was better to be seen as suspicious or anxious by not talking enough than suspicious because of her intelligence or maturity from talking too much.

—

They continued their routine as often as possible. Every night was a warm drink and a hot stuffed animal in hand before entering a heated room that looked cozy and alive under the moonlight and glowing stars on the ceiling.

But every night came with the people in the shadows, watching her curiously. Sometimes it was a girl with fiery hair, watching her, contemplating her. Other times she would hear a rumbling from a motorcycle speeding on the road a mile away. 

Laughter haunted her dreams, and a world of green would just blink into existence.

She would float there in her dreams, in a small lilac bubble enough to cover her body curled like a rose bud, waiting to bloom .

The most haunting experience was when a woman’s voice came from the shadows… she never let herself be seen, but her voice would echo in Sinny’s head for hours. It was the night after her mother came back from a travelling flea market, a small vase adorned with jewels and gold in hand.

Her ruddy haired mother told her that she could whisper her midnight wishes to it, and that they might come true.

The bottle liked to whisper to her without prompting anyway .

“What is it that your heart desires most, little girl?” it would ask, saccharine like candy, but pitched so falsely that only the wise could hear the truth — a waiting toothache.

“I want you to leave me alone.”

But every time — every night without fail — the voice would return.

Sinny gave up and carefully wrapped the bottle in gift tissue before shoving it in a present box and mailing it off to the local town archaeologist. He’d either take a fancy to it or sell it to some other trader or flea market.

Whatever the case, Sinny wouldn’t have to deal with a creepy voice asking her for her heat’s desires at bloody fucking midnight.

—

She began to notice more things as the days went by from winter to spring and towards summer. 

Sinny’s mother, Madison Keys, was not a courageous woman. But whenever Sinny had problems , she was quick to assess her for any problems. Sinny was a grown woman mentally, but sometimes her youthful body would succumb to the desires of a child — she would chase the butterflies in the vast forests, run around chasing the whispers of the shadows out of curiosity, and inevitably she would fall or trip.

The end results were always an odd coloration of blood.

One time she broke her leg, and before her eyes the tendons began to mesh back together and the bone which had nearly split in two began to puzzle itself back together before her eyes. She hadn’t even realized that it had happened, yet alone felt the pain when Madison Keys stared at her with unblinking eyes, as if it were a common day occurrence.

They had to reset the break in her leg and it hurt. 

Her mother made sure she was aware of how a broken bone should be set back in place after that — the same applied to split skin or tendons and anything else that needed to be put back normally before it rapidly healed.

—

It was when she had her fourth broken bone from “running too hard” as Madison put it, that she decided to talk about the elephant in the room.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Do normal kids get hurt like I do?”

“Sweetheart, I don’t think other little girls run at 60 miles per hour.”

That just about cleared the air on that issue.

— 

Years passed, but it was a pattern nonetheless.

It became routine whenever something odd happened. Sinny would ask a question about if the things that happened around her or to her were normal , and like the good mother she was, Madison would always redirect the conversation.

Madison never said the word no . She never called her daughter names, and if anything she tried to assure Sinny that despite her differences she was a normal and healthy little girl.

Sinny knew that if she was actually a child, she would have whole-heartedly believed her. Except she knew from experience that a human had a faster heart rate and didn’t bleed lilac . Regular little girls weren’t friends with the crows and the ravens that frequented the garden, and certainly normal little girls didn’t scare off all the strays except for the ones that welcomed death.

Only the ones that welcomed death welcomed her.

Sometimes that scared her.

Sometimes it made her smile.

There was a reason why Sinny was Mommy’s special little girl .

— 

It was a hot summer afternoon when the accident happened. Sinny has been so used to living in the distant woods, had acclimated to the humidity and heat near the treelines, but her mother never had. Sometimes she would see her cough and heave, sweat bullets raining down her chin as the temperatures soared.

Sinny felt guilty, because she knew that the reason why the woman moved out far from the city despite her urban job was because of her daughter. She moved them out of sight and out of mind out of the fear of public outcry — a little girl that looked like a ghost, who bled purple blood and had hair the color of bone.

She knew the rooms were colder when she stayed with them, so she only hoped to cool down her mother’s bedroom while she slept. Her mother even enjoyed it at first, appreciating the cold.

At first.

Sinny quickly realized that she was making the room too cold after frost began to develop on the windows and then on her mother’s skin. But despite the fear, despite the pain she had to have been feeling as her limbs grew black and her lips turned a frosty blue, Madison Keys never panicked.

She stayed cool and calm, looked her daughter straight in the eyes and told her:

“You were trying to do a good thing, remember that. Whatever happens is not your fault, little snowflake.”

She couldn’t stop the frost as it encased the room either.

She couldn’t feel the cold, but she would surely see the ice that built in layers on her mother’s dead smile.

Sinny was horrified, tired and weak. Snots and tears, stained purple leaked and spread across the ice. Screams echoed from her throat as she cried for the woman in front of her to wake up.

The adult inside her knew that Madison Keys was dead.

But Sinny just wanted mommy to wake up .

Sinny never felt so fucked before as the cold receded with her panic. A dead woman with a smile colored like ash and eyes like stone watched her. The woman’s exact reflection just tinted a greenish blue rose from the bed at the same time with a weak smile.

“Go get the folder from the wardrobe, honey. You’ll know where to go after that.”

The ghost didn’t fade for the next two weeks.

Sinny sat in that room every day watching the corpse thaw.

She learned about her supposed father, how she came to be from her mother who watched a young man with horrible acne grow into an ambitious man.

She flipped through the newspaper clippings that her mother kept on the man, who quickly climbed ranks in the world after his release from the hospital; he became a billionaire, owned his own company and various stocks that only further amassed his wealth.

His name was Vlad Masters.

It was then as the police sirens whirred in the distance, finally arriving to conduct a welfare check on the house of a missing nurse and her homeschooled daughter that Sinny Masters realized what world she had been taken to.

She woke up several years ago in the world of Danny Phantom as the daughter of a Maddie Fenton lookalike and Vlad Masters.

The ghost of Madison Keys only faded as the policeman busted through the door to see a famished Sinny Masters hunched over her mother’s thawing and decayed corpse. The only scream that echoed that day was that of the poor police officer as he radioed in.

“10-78, I repeat 10-78. Officer Baskin requesting backup! I have a possible 140 and 123. There is a minor on scene, I repeat there is a minor on scene!”