We all know that Legos are a son of a bitch to step on barefooted. Now imagine stepping on jacks. The old metal kind from decades ago, when you’d bounce a ball and pick up as many as you could.

This story hurts me to tell. Physically hurts.

When we were young, my older sister, Becky, and I decided to make a haunted house in our basement for Halloween. We’d been give tape recorders for Christmas — the best gift, hands down, I was ever given as a child — so I recorded spooky sounds. Think “ooohooooh ahhh eeh eeh” and witch cackles. Seriously. I discovered I still have the tape and listened to it in the past six months.

We hung plastic spiders, which you couldn’t see because we turned out all the lights. And I think strings brushed you as you walked past — spider webs, duh. And then we set out obstacles on the floor. Including a jack trap.

And then we made my dad come down and go through our haunted house. And he was barefoot. I feel terrible to this day. I can hear the sounds he cried out when he stepped on the jacks, and then how uncharacteristically calm he was as he told us that jacks on the floor were not a great idea. I think that might be why I feel so terrible. The calm. He was hurting in a new way than I’d experienced from him.