Barbara got back behind the camera. The lights flicked on and off in the time it took for her to get out of the shot.

The thud sound from the earlier footage began again and the room shook. The younger me dropped to the floor and stuck his face into the carpet. Mandy just kept staring at the camera, seemingly frozen.

Another thud. Mandy dropped to the ground like a bomb went off.

“Fuck you,” Mandy screamed at the camera. “I’ll fucking kill you,” she screamed again and her voice seemed to drop about 10 octaves.

“Has this happened before?” Dale asked quietly from behind the camera.

“I don’t think so,” Barbara’s voice answered back, hushed.

“You’re a fucking cheater. Mike Blake is a fucking cheater and everyone needs to know it. You probably have fucking herpes now or something from her dirty pussy,” Mandy took a few defiant steps towards the camera and pointed a flexed finger at the lens with hate burning in her eyes.

“Who is Mike Blake?” Dale asked.

“No idea,” Barbara answered back.

I knew the answer to the question. Mike Blake was my sister’s soon-to-be ex-husband she broke up with just a few months before because he was cheating with a bar slut from town.

Mandy collapsed onto the floor on the screen and younger me rose to my feet at just the same time as the lights started flickering every half-second the way they do when you take the light switch and flick it up and down as fast as you can.

“No, no, no,” my young voice cried out over the sound of my sister sobbing next to me. “That isn’t what you promised Kylie.”

I dropped to my knees in my parents’ living room. I had screamed those exact words, just about five years before when my long-time girlfriend Kylie left me just after college and moved to Austin. My seven-year-old self was screaming out the most-painful sentences of my life nearly 20 years before they happened on video tape.

I almost had to shut the tape off, but stopped myself.