On the evening before my 18th birthday, my family had all gathered in the living room to reminisce of the day they had all completed their set of senses. My aunties were tearfully telling stories of the beauty the new world held for them and the uncles, cousins and grandparents were cracking jokes over who overreacted in the most ridiculous way. Like, Stevie for example- they woke up with a brand new sense of smell and had a weird phase of deeply inhaling everyone and everything around them until someone finally mentioned it made them uncomfortable.

You'd think we'd be used to the odd behaviors since this was the 7th generation of "lost senses". However, there are still the random cases of abnormalities and variations which kept folks on their toes until their final hours of being 17. My family had had their share of the unexpected, Uncle Birch was born with all senses except hearing. Instead of waking up with the ability to hear people, he can only hear and speak to birds. I kind of envy him sometimes. Or my Grandma Clementine, who never gained her sense of touch but by touching others was able to transfer sensations she was experiencing. A strange thing to be grateful for when she fell sick later on in life.

The jokes and emotional re-tellings were a distraction technique of sorts for my family. There was a taste testing game, pin the tail on the donkey, bowls of "guts" (spaghetti, like they do in those haunted houses) and later- an outdoor family game of Marco Polo, we all learned different bird calls to make sure Uncle Birch felt included. The need for the distraction came from the fact that I was born with all 5 senses. Other families normally kept these instances on the down-low, but there were well known rumors of this happening that families generally accepted to be true.

Military interest in those with a confirmed 6th sense had escalated since the people of Lost Senses began to take over the population. Not all were applicable for military use, so those deemed "useless" were kept for experimentation. Attempts to make the useless into something useful. It's okay to roll your eyes over that one, it's bullshit. Anyways, on my last night of having 5 senses, I listened to the stories and played the games with my family. My responses to the endless question, "what do you hope you get?" were mechanical. I didn't hope for anything extraordinary. I closed my eyes and dreamed of lies to tell about what I woke up to.

When I woke up the next morning, I kept my eyes closed. The sensation of the bed still felt the same, the smells of my room still felt the same. I scrunched the sheets beneath me into my hands and let out a sigh of relief. "Whatever it is, isn't too disrupting- maybe I will pull this off" I started to think before I was interrupted by a terrible, off-key singing in my head. I couldn't place the voice but knew it wasn't my own. Fuck, fuck fuck. I shot up in bed and tilted my head with one ear up. The voices and images started to flood in.

"Why did he stop making me breakfast? Has he been weird lately? Is it not in my head?" Someone looking down at a kitchen counter with an empty bowl in their hands.

"I'm gonna shit my pants, please stop talking. Look happy! Oh my god, just clench and start moving closer-" Someone talking and smiling excitedly in front of me but I can't hear anything that they say.

"Once I get to work, don't forget to put the key back in their desk. Why do we keep doing this?" Heavy breathing and vision bouncing up and down on a run to the car.

Okay, some type of ESP, I thought to myself. But the chance to calm myself down never came, a blip on a screen popped up and the vision swung to the left to show someone in uniform.

"We've got one".