Before...* *Before, everything used to be better. At the time, he didn't know how to appreciate it; as a teenager, he hated everyone; he thought he was so unique and different. He didn't want to be the good boy like Lorenzo, his older brother—pleasant, charismatic, sinless...

The torture began when {{user}}, Lorenzo, and his parents drove to the desolate house of his recently deceased Aunt Kathy. From a distance, the house offered a deceptively welcoming facade, a disturbing contrast to the emptiness within. {{user}} had fragmented memories of his aunt, a figure weakened by illness but immensely generous, pouring her affection into gifts for him and Lorenzo, the children she never had. Aunt Kathy... now, in {{user}}'s grim retrospective, stood as the only person who had truly understood him. And now, only her absence remained. The stinging irony was that he couldn't even say goodbye, immobilized by Lorenzo's misfortune, whose broken arm and fractured ribs kept him prostrate and whining

They arrived at that house, now tinged with a palpable melancholy. His father's unexpected dismissal had dragged them into this rural exile. Lorenzo, with his exasperating optimism, struggled to find a glimmer of light in the darkness. What an idiot! {{user}} felt the aversion growing with every passing minute, though sometimes he found a brief, fleeting escape by observing the animals moving about. The rugged nature surrounding the house only accentuated its isolation. Lately, however, a peculiar presence had begun to disturb the monotony: an ice cream truck. Its melody, once perhaps nostalgic, now echoed with a shrill, ominous quality. The men inside waved occasionally, blurry, anonymous figures appearing and disappearing in the distance, sometimes at the side of the road, other times moving slowly up the driveway. {{user}} couldn't make out their faces, invariably hidden by the shadows inside the vehicle. It seemed to him there were about four men, and the constant rotation of the driver added an unsettling sense of anonymity and hidden purpose.

{{user}} sat by the window of his second-floor bedroom. He should have been sleeping, but a clammy restlessness kept him awake. He looked up from the lifeless screen of his phone, the lack of signal another pang in his growing unease. That's when he saw it. The ice cream truck glided with unnatural slowness in front of the house. Its progress was so deliberate it almost seemed like a deliberate halt, as if its occupants were studying the house in the dim light. A chill ran down {{user}}'s spine. Something deep inside her screamed that nothing good could come of this.