When I was younger, I lived with my father and his mother. I was the only child, and my father was very protective of me. My grandmother, on the other hand, hated me. At first, she would just yell at me and shove me around when dad was at work. It escalated, quickly after he started working longer hours to make ends meet. I rarely saw my father at that point. For 4 years, she did things I can’t even bring myself to really think about, not enough to write it. For those 4 years, I prayed and prayed for release. I prayed and wished for her to die. To God, to whoever would listen. My dad probably would have believed me if I’d had a chance to talk to him, but she’d made me feel as though I were an abomination over the years that, I couldn’t bear it anymore. After she killed my kitten and made me bury it, at the age of 13, I attempted suicide by hanging myself inside my closet.

Apparently, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing and the bar in the closet that I tied myself to fell on my head and knocked me the fuck out. I pulled myself up and headed to sneak into the bathroom without the monster cunt to catch me and give me another beating. As I left my bedroom, I caught a whiff of something very fucking rancid, like vomit, burning flesh, and blood, mixed together, warm. I knew all of these smells fairly well, considering what my grandmother did to me, and I thought for a moment it might have been my imagination, or her making something disgusting for me to eat to torture me more. While I recognized the seperate smells in a way, I’d never smelled something like this.

As I got closer and closer to the stairs overlooking the living room, which was right across from the bathroom, I started to hear something. Faintly, I remember hearing it a few feet back, but suddenly it seemed so much louder. My head was pounding, my heart was pounding, and all I could hear was gurgle, smack smack, squish squish, RIIIIIIIIIP. The mere idea of peeking over the stairs and into the living room was suddenly so profoundly frightening that I almost just went back into my bedroom, but strangely enough, it was amazingly easy to just do it anyway.

What I saw in the living room will never leave me for as long as I live, in more than one sense.

My grandmother was lying on the ground. There was someone wearing black kneeling over her. They were both covered in blood. The person’s head was moving rhythmically over its hands, which held what I the relized was some organ in her body. The person didn’t look up, and I was scared silent.

There was so much blood. So, so much blood.

The sound of gnawing, the smacking mouth, the snapping of her organs at they were ripped from my grandmother’s body (what was left of it), the brutally grotesque sight of her chest cavity having been torn open, of her body being consumed little by little filled me with terror I had never known before. I didn’t know what to do. It ate her body, slowly, seeming to enjoy every bite it took, its body swaying and moving so unnaturally that I couldn’t even think it was human.

I couldn’t stop watching, I couldn’t run away, the sheer terror of it choked the scream I would have let out. It stopped, I stopped. It looked up at me after what seemed an eternity, releasing the contents of its mouth. Gorey pieces and blood, some brown at that point, covered most of its face. What I could see of the face, it seemed to be male, very pale in patches. Where eyes were supposed to be were black pits, pits that seemed to dilate, expand and retract. He had no lips, but his mouth twitched, like some kind of hologram going in and out, slowly smiling, the smile expanding beyond normal human ability. I vomited and fainted.

I woke up, my father was home and worrying over me. My grandmother’s body was gone along with all of the blood. “Where’s grandma? Where is she?” I kept asking him, until I had to stop, from the look in his eyes. He told me her heart was bad, and she was “in heaven now”. I couldn’t believe it. That was impossible, right? Did I imagine that whole thing?

At her funeral, on the way to her burial site, I saw the man again. He looked more human, but I knew it was him. I remembered that smile. That day, I smiled back.