Scary Stories To Read Alone

Ittefaq

Ittefaq

I forgot how to turn on the microwave. I knew I'd used the machine a million times. I remembered my first wife scolding me whenever she caught me reheating coffee. Those bits of memory were still solid. But how... How had I turned it on and made its do its job...? That was missing.

I was fifty years old that morning, too young to be going soft in the head. I studied the calculator-like buttons next to the food streaked glass, grasping for it, a writhing unease growing within me. The memory came back in a pop and relief steamed after it, yet as I loaded my burrito it seemed I was doing so for the very first time. The machine's atomic hum sounded alien and when the timer dinged, I flinched from belly to shoulders.

It must've been that hard jump that jostled the memories out of the vault. They tumbled into the light, a swirl of forgotten moments, pictures pasted onto shards of glass. A svelte woman stood in the center. Her hair had greyed, but she kept it long and wore it like a rare kind of silver. My grandmother. Nanna Anne. She had an old house near Becker Lake and a monster lived inside its walls. I saw it the summer I turned thirteen, way back in 1979.

* * *

We were heading to the lake the day it started. I wore swim trunks and flip-flops, a Star Wars towel draped around my shoulders. I waited beside my grandmother's ten year old truck because she'd told me, "Meet you by Old Blue." The sun blazed on my shoulders. Impatient minutes passed. Finally, I went to see what was taking her so long.

A feeling of stifling dread grabbed me as I approached the back door. It descended from the hot air, an invisible python, gripping me from all directions, a foreboding that something had just gone horribly, irrevocably wrong. I was certain of it... Nana smoked cigarettes, after all, and everybody knew that smoking killed you. Sometimes it did it slow, gnawing on your lungs and torturing you. Other times it swooped in and snatched you from the world in a furious grab.

I imagined my grandmother a victim of the latter kind of death. She'd had a stroke or a heart attack and dropped dead. The tops of my feet got hot as I gave her another minute to come banging out of the door, a long white cigarette in one hand and her enormous bag slung over one arm at the elbow. She didn't.

In the kitchen, lines of sunshine broke through the closed blinds and cast bars on the floor. She was not, thankfully, dead on the linoleum. Rather, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, holding brown sunglasses. She stared at one corner of the floor, or at something small and far away that only she could see.

"Nana," I said.

She looked up and at me, her expression a squinting mass of sadness and dazed confusion. "James...?"

"Yes." I shifted my stance, suddenly aware of what she'd look like when she was truly old and too tired to make her hair shine. The thought filled me with a hollow cold. "Are you okay?"

She blinked the aged visage away, returning to her normal self, an old woman, yes, but one who wore bright colored clothes, smelled like suntan lotion all year round and drove a lifted four wheel drive.

"I came in here looking for these." She waved the sunglasses at me. "And I completely forgot what I was doing. Has that ever happened to you?"

"No," I said, still a bit weirded out.

Her lips curled into a smile, signaling that she was about to spit one of her favorite curses. Then she did and I giggled like a much younger child.

"Let's get a move on. Let the day getaway and it always will."

We spent the afternoon on Becker Lake. My skin had lost the melanin it needed to tan and, in spite of the coats of sunscreen she layered on me, I was a tingly pink that evening. She was more worried about it than I was. I'd burned before and always healed. After dinner, we sat on her back porch. She drank gin and tonics. I slurped soda through a straw and ate potato chips out of the bag, coating my fingers in a greasy salt. It was midnight when she sent me to bed.