When I was teenie tiny, Liz had a toy shark that I feared more than death. This meant that under sibling law, she was required to chase me with it. Frequently. Failing to do so would have invalidated her Professional Big Sister license.
One time she was chasing me it and I asked her very nicely to stop, and she did not which left me no choice but to grab a knife and repeat my request.
I know this may sound like an extreme reaction. But there really was no other rational choice. What was I supposed to do, ask nicely a second time? Like a goddamn hippy? No. Knife time.
Unfortunately I was bluffing and Liz called my bluff by grabbing a knife of her own. Which meant I was then getting chased with a shark AND a large steak knife. I started off continuing to be more scared of the shark than the knife, but that was a mistake because Liz actually made a lunge for me with the knife (I think she mixed up her shark hand/knife hand?) and managed to lightly stab our new couch. Which Liz then had to explain to our mom. I think the conversation was something like "Mom, the good news is that I missed, and the bad news is that I tried, and the worst news is that I got the couch instead.”
My mom handled it very well. My survival to adulthood hinged entirely on this weird one weird exploit in human psychology where confusing someone enough temporarily turns off their ability to be angry.
Incredibly that wasn't even our worst dumb sibling chase incident. The worst happened when I was chasing her through the house, and she ducked into our freshly mopped kitchen. She managed to cool girl skate over the puddles and make it to the other side of the room, which led to me trying to cool boy skate in her footsteps. This failed horribly, and instead resulted in me sailing headfirst into the dishwasher.
The good news was that I was able to absorb the entire blow with my left eyebrow, which I wasn't using very much anyway. The bad news was that I actually cut most that eyebrow off as a sort of fuzzy flap, which was disgusting, not to mention painful. Fortunately, with my dad being a doctor, he was able to glue most of it back on, albeit slightly crooked, such that I spent the next two years with a Resting Confused Face. Like so.
(I know this probably sounds inconvenient to you, but those were ages 6-7, so I was probably going to be confused all the time anyway. If anything, this helped me conserve precious eyebrow calories, which I was then able to use for more important tasks, such as spitting, or lurking near my dad so that when he left his Dave Barry books lying around I could swoop in and learn bad words from them. I learned most of my bad words that way.)
