My brothers and I were raised listening to our mother’s childhood stories of the laughing man in the top hat and tails who would jump back and forth over her bed at night, a fancy cane tucked lightly under one arm. We also knew that her brother Jack once became two Jacks: she passed one Jack walking up the stairs, then turned the corner into the kitchen to find a second Jack drinking water in his underwear. She convinced us that eating the end of a pickle would kill us, that we could drown in a teacup, and that a glass of water on the night stand would make us fall out of bed to our deaths, its jagged shards cutting our soft necks.