GRIM

I’ve known Grim for only a few short years, and never hoped to know him at all. I first met him in 2020, right after Karline died. He walked up and down my road, looking up into our windows as he did. His proximity to our home made me uncomfortable, but he was just walking along, so I tried not to think about it too much.

Grim called me after the death of my grandmother, to which I did not reply. I had too much going on, juggling two under two, and I felt I had been polite before. Why would anyone want to be friends with him? Doesn’t he know I have kids? He surely knew I had kids.

But then, he knocked on my door in August of 2022. I locked the door and told him to fuck off, but he walked right through the wall. Without warning or reason, he grabbed me and cupped the left breast with his skeletal hand. We stood there awkwardly until the chemo poisoned his touch.

Months later, he hurled a rock through my window with Claire’s name on it. He sat on my porch and hung around my property until the early fall of 2023. Bored with my isolation, Grim got up one September day to walk down the same road that brought him to me for the assault the year before. “YES!” I pulled my fist toward me in a victorious jeer. About bloody time he got the absolute hell off my property and back into The Shadow Days from where he came.
Oh, I was so dumb. I was so naive.

It was last May, and I awoke again to the pain in my head. As I pulled into the hospital parking lot, I saw him there on the bench. But he could’ve been there for anyone, it’s a hospital!

It was raining, but he stopped me when I got to the other side of the crosswalk outside the ER doors. It froze me.

When he was only feet away, he reached for my hand and led me down the road to the curb outside the emergency room. He kissed my forehead and lay me, stomach side down, on the pavement. Was I just hit by a car? What was happening? Too stunned to retort, I was paralyzed as he opened my mouth and pressed the sidewalk into the opening of my mouth, then violently smashed his steel-toed boot through my skull. He proceeded to curbstomp me until I regained consciousness in the ER bed. The metastatic echo reverberated through my lymphatic system and poisoned my skeleton. My bones shriveled from the impact.

Grim stayed with me all through the hospital. He left the toilet seat up and piss on the floor, he tickled me in the MRI machine, and indulged in any way to make me uncomfortable. When Gable drove me home, he sat in the backseat slurping a milkshake. I told him he can’t be around the kids, or I’ll set him on fire, and that has worked so far.

But as soon as I bid the kids goodnight, he waits for me outside their door. I roll my eyes when I catch his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He digs through my pantry while I’m doing the dishes and practices his jump scares when I’m in the basement doing laundry. Obnoxious. Truly, a piece of work.

And for a while, I was only slightly annoyed with him. I felt there was no use fighting him, so I chased away any further thoughts of it. He hadn’t left the house for the whole summer and even started leaving his scythe in my guest room. But I came home from my latest PET scan to silence. A completely empty house, with no trace of his belongings anywhere. He turned up later in the evening without telling me of his whereabouts, but not before punching me in the ribcage. Always so violent, is he.

A month ago, I met with Dr. May to discuss the results. I came home giddy from good news and a renewed will to live, which I knew would leave him down in the dumps. I ascended the stairwell to my guest room and found him sitting on the bed staring at his skeletal feet. Was this demon… sad? Disappointed, it turns out. Things had changed, and though he thought he was bringing me with him, he was going to leave that very night.
I guess we’re friends now, or at least, we don’t hate each other. He is violent and evil, but he is in charge of death, so I guess that makes sense. I saged the house shortly after he left, and will continue to do so as a safeguard.

Anyway, I haven’t seen him in a month. It’s only a matter of time before he comes back, but please do be on alert.