My job is to watch the dying. I wish that was all I was…
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My job is to watch the dying. I wish that was all I was seeing.
I don’t know if this is a confession or a warning. Maybe it’s just a scream into the void, because I can’t scream out loud anymore. I have to be quiet. For her.
For six years, I was a night-shift nurse on a long-term geriatric ward. If you want to know what it’s like to see the human body fail in every conceivable way, slowly and without fanfare, that’s the job for you. It’s not like the ER, all flashing lights and adrenaline. It’s the opposite. It’s the slow, quiet dimming of a bulb. My job, as I saw it, was to manage the dimming. To make sure the fuses didn’t blow too spectacularly on the way out. Change the sheets, administer the meds, chart the decline. It sounds cold, I know. But after a few years, you have to build a wall. You see so much loss, so much slow-motion decay, that if you let it all in, you’d drown. My wall was made of cynicism and exhaustion.
The nights are the worst. The ward takes on a different character after midnight. The daytime bustle of family visits and physical therapists is gone, replaced by a profound, humming silence, punctuated by the rhythmic sigh of a ventilator or the lonely beep of a heart monitor. The air gets thick with the smell of antiseptic and something older, something like dust and regret. My world shrank to the nurses' station, a small island of harsh fluorescent light in an ocean of darkened rooms. My main companion was the bank of security monitors.
They were old, cheap things. The feed was grainy, black and white, with a low frame rate that made everything look jerky and unreal. I’d watch the screens, my eyes tracing the vague, sleeping shapes in the beds, making sure no one was trying to climb out of their rails, no one was in distress. It was mostly a form of meditation, a way to pass the hours until the sun came up and I could go home to my own quiet, empty apartment.
That’s when I first started seeing it.
It wasn't something you'd notice right away. I didn’t. For weeks, maybe months, I probably saw it and my brain just edited it out, filed it under ‘bad reception’ or ‘light flare’. It looked, for lack of a better word, like heat. A shimmer. The kind you see rising off asphalt on a blistering summer day. A distortion in the air, a patch of reality that seemed to be vibrating at a different frequency.
It only ever appeared on the monitors. And it only ever appeared in one place: hovering directly over a patient’s bed.
The first time I clearly registered it was with a man in Room 308. He was a retired mailman, ninety-something, his mind long gone to dementia but his body stubbornly clinging on. I glanced at the monitor for his room and saw it – a wavering, vaguely man-shaped column of static and haze hanging over his bed. It had no features, no color, just this intense, silent vibration that made the grainy image of the man beneath it seem to warp and bend.
My first thought was a technical issue. A short in the camera, maybe. I got up, stretched, and walked down the hall to his room. The corridor was silent except for the squeak of my own rubber-soled shoes. I pushed the door open gently. The room was still, cool. The only light was the faint orange glow from his IV pump. The air was perfectly clear. The man was sleeping, his breath a shallow, rattling thing. Nothing was there. I checked his vitals, adjusted his blanket, and went back to the nurses' station.
On the monitor, the shimmer was gone.
Three hours later, at the end of my shift, the man in 308 passed away.
We called the family. The day shift handled the body. I went home, slept, and didn’t think much of it. Coincidence.
A week later, it happened again. Room 312. A woman who had outlived all three of her children. On the monitor, I saw the same heat-haze, the same silent, shimmering distortion hanging over her frail form. This time, I didn't hesitate. I walked straight down there. Again, the room was still and empty. The air was clear. I stood there for a full minute, just listening to her ragged breathing, feeling the hairs on my arms stand up for no reason I could name. I went back to the desk. The shimmer was gone from the screen. She was gone by morning.
This time, I was there when her daughter called. I picked up the phone. She was sobbing, but there was something else in her voice, too. Confusion.
"I don't understand," she said, her voice thick with grief. "I was just with her yesterday afternoon. She was lucid, you know? For a minute. She was holding my hand."
"I'm so sorry for your loss," I said, the standard line.
"But she... she kept squinting at me," the daughter continued, her voice trembling. "She asked me who I was. She said... she said she couldn't see my face. Just a blur. She sounded so scared."
I gave her the hospital's other standard line. The one we gave when the dying brain started to misfire. "It's a common phenomenon," I said, my voice sounding hollow even to myself. "In the final stages, the brain can have difficulty processing visual information. It's just a part of the process, a symptom of the body shutting down."
She accepted it, of course. What else could she do? But her words stuck with me. *She said she couldn't see my face.*
The pattern started to become undeniable. A few weeks would pass, then I’d see the shimmer on the monitor in a patient’s room. I’d go to check, find nothing, and within a day, that patient would be gone. And then, like clockwork, the phone calls. Always the same story, with slight variations.
"My son flew in all the way from the coast," one man told me, his voice choked. "His mother looked right through him. Asked him why a stranger was crying in her room."
"She was terrified," a young woman whispered over the phone. "She kept saying, 'Your voice is so familiar, but I don't know you. Where are your eyes?'"
*He couldn't see me.*
*She didn't know who I was.*
*Just a blur.*
Every time, we’d give the official explanation. Hypoxia. Terminal agitation. Brain function decline. And every time, I felt a cold knot tighten in my stomach. Because I knew. I knew it wasn't a symptom of dying. The shimmer on the screen, this heat-haze creature… it was doing something. It was there, and then they were gone, and the last thing they experienced was the face of their loved one dissolving into a meaningless abstraction.
I tried to tell someone once. A senior nurse I respected. I phrased it carefully, talking about the camera glitches and the strange coincidence of the family reports. She just gave me a tired look and told me to take a few days off. "This place gets to you," she'd said, patting my arm. "You're seeing ghosts in the machine. Get some sleep."
So I kept it to myself. I started calling it the Scavenger in my head. It felt right. It wasn't killing them; they were already dying. It was just… feeding on something on its way out. Something from the wreckage. I became a connoisseur of the low-resolution feed from our ancient security system. I learned to distinguish the shimmer from a dust mote floating in front of the lens, or a trick of the low light. It was an organic, pulsing thing, and seeing it on the screen made my blood run cold. My cynicism, my carefully constructed wall, began to crumble. I was a witness.
And then my grandmother fell.
She was the one who raised me. My rock. My entire family history condensed into one stubborn, fiercely loving woman who smelled of cinnamon and old books. She broke her hip. A simple fall, but at her age, a simple fall is a death sentence delivered by gravity. The surgery went as well as it could, but the recovery was brutal. Infections. Complications. Delirium. One day, she was in the main hospital, the next, they were transferring her. To my ward.
My world tilted on its axis. The place I had managed to emotionally wall myself off from, the place that was just a job, suddenly became the most terrifying place on Earth. Because now, the Scavenger wasn't just some abstract horror I observed from a distance. It was hunting in my home.
I pulled every string I could, took on every extra shift. I basically lived at the hospital. My colleagues thought I was being the devoted grandson. They had no idea I was standing guard. My life became a ritual of fear. I’d do my rounds, dispensing medication, changing dressings, all with a knot of dread in my gut. And then I’d sit at the nurses' station, my eyes glued to one monitor in particular. The small, grainy, black-and-white window into my grandmother’s room.
Every flicker of the screen, every shadow, sent a jolt of panic through me. I saw the Scavenger everywhere. In the reflection on the linoleum floor. In the steam rising from a cup of coffee. I was unraveling. The other nurses started giving me wide berth. I was jumpy, irritable, my eyes wide and bloodshot from lack of sleep and an overdose of caffeine.
I spent the time I wasn't at the monitor in her room, holding her hand. She was mostly sleeping, frail and small in the oversized hospital bed. But sometimes she’d wake up, and her eyes, clouded with pain and medication, would find mine.
"There you are," she'd whisper, her voice a dry rustle. And she’d smile. A real smile.
And I would think, *It won’t take this. I won’t let it.*
I needed a plan. I couldn't just watch and wait for it to appear. I had to be able to do something. The thing was only visible on the camera. It was invisible to the naked eye in the room. What was it about the camera? Was it the infrared? The low-light sensitivity? It was something about the light, or the lack of it. It existed in that gray space between light and shadow.
So, I thought, what if I introduced a lot of light? Suddenly. Violently.
I went online and ordered the most powerful tactical flashlight I could find, and it had a disorienting strobe function, the kind police use to blind and confuse suspects. It felt insane, buying a weapon for a ghost, but it was the only thing I could think of. When it arrived, I kept it in the pocket of my scrubs at all times. It was a heavy, cold lump against my thigh, a constant reminder of the vigil I was keeping.
For two weeks, nothing happened. My grandmother’s condition stabilized, then began to slowly, inevitably, decline. I was in a constant state of low-grade terror. The exhaustion was bone-deep. My body felt like it was humming with a terrible energy. I’d doze off at the desk and jerk awake, heart pounding, convinced I’d missed it.
And then, one night, it happened.
It was 3:17 AM. The ward was as quiet as a tomb. I was staring at the monitors, my vision blurring, when I saw it. The air over my grandmother’s bed began to ripple.
It started small, a faint distortion, like a heat-haze mirage. But it grew, coalescing into that familiar, sickening, man-shaped shimmer. It was larger than I’d ever seen it before, more defined. It pulsed, a silent, ghastly vibration in the monochrome feed, and it was directly over her. I could see the image of her blankets and her sleeping form bend and warp beneath it.
A sound escaped my throat, a strangled gasp. For a second, I was frozen, my blood turning to ice water. The screen was a window into a nightmare, and the nightmare was in her room.
Then, the adrenaline hit me like a physical blow.
I didn't think. I just moved. I was out of my chair and running before I was even consciously aware of the decision. My feet pounded down the hallway, the sound echoing in the oppressive silence. I fumbled in my pocket, my fingers closing around the cold metal of the flashlight.
My thumb found the switch.
I burst through the door to her room so hard it slammed against the stopper. The room was dark, just as I knew it would be. The air was still. I couldn't see anything. My grandmother was stirring, her head turning on the pillow, disturbed by the noise.
"Who's there?" she murmured, her voice weak.
There was no time. I raised the flashlight, aimed it at the empty space above her bed where I knew the thing was hovering, and I slammed my thumb down on the strobe button.
The world exploded into a silent, strobing cataclysm of pure white light.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. The air itself seemed to scream, though there was no sound. The creature—the Scavenger—recoiled from the light as if struck. It wasn't just that it shied away. The strobing flashes, the rapid-fire assault of light-dark-light-dark, did something to it. It forced it into a state of temporary solidity.
And for a single, soul-shattering second, I saw it.
It was faces.
Hundreds of them. A screaming, swirling, three-dimensional mosaic of human faces, all crushed together into one writhing, humanoid shape. They were pale and translucent, their features overlapping, their mouths open in silent, confused agony. They weren't just any faces. I recognized them.
I saw the retired mailman from 308, his eyes wide with a terror his dementia had never allowed. I saw the woman who had outlived her children, her face a mask of pleading confusion. I saw a man who had died of pneumonia two months prior, a woman from a stroke last winter. Face after face, patient after patient, all of them taken from this very ward. All the people whose families had called, confused and heartbroken. All the people who had died unable to recognize the ones they loved.
The faces were the creature. It was made of them. Made of what it had taken.
The strobing light hit it again, and with a final, violent contortion, it dissolved like smoke in a hurricane, and was simply… gone.
The room was plunged back into darkness, the only light the steady orange glow from the IV pump. The silence that rushed in was deafening. My own ragged breathing sounded like a roar. The flashlight slipped from my trembling hand and clattered to the floor.
"What… what in heaven's name was that?"
My grandmother’s voice. It was clear. Frightened, but clear.
I stumbled to her bedside, my legs shaking so badly I could barely stand. "It's okay," I stammered, my voice cracking. "It's okay. It was just… a bad dream."
I reached out and took her hand. Her skin was cool and papery. She turned her head, and her eyes, clear and focused in the dim light, found mine. There was no confusion. No blur. She saw me.
She squeezed my hand weakly. "You look so tired," she said, a faint smile touching her lips. "My boy. You're here."
I started to cry. Not quiet, dignified tears, but ugly, gulping sobs of terror and relief. I had done it. I had saved her. For now. She had looked at me, and she had seen me.
I quit my job the next day. I couldn't go back there. I couldn't sit at that desk and watch that screen, knowing what was really there. Knowing that the hospital wasn't just a place where people died, but a feeding ground.
My grandmother was discharged to my care a week later. She’s with me now, in my small apartment.
Every lamp is on, all the time. Our electricity bill is astronomical, but I don't care. There are no dark corners. I’ve bought three more of those tactical flashlights. There’s one in every room. I’ve even rigged a DJ-style strobe light in the living room, where she sleeps in a hospital bed I had delivered. I have it on a timer. Sometimes, it just goes off, flooding the room with that violent, cleansing light. It terrifies her, but it’s better than the alternative.
I don’t sleep. Not really. I doze in a chair by her bed, for an hour at a time, maybe two. I’ve set alarms on my phone to go off every forty-five minutes, jolting me awake. Every time I close my eyes, I see that collage of faces, swirling in the dark. I see what it’s made of.
I know it’s still out there. I know it’s patient. It’s waiting for me to fail. It's waiting for me to get sloppy, to get too tired. It's waiting for the moment I finally succumb to the exhaustion that is chewing away at my soul, the moment I fall into a deep, real sleep.
But I won’t let it. I won't let her last moments be spent staring into the face of her grandson and seeing nothing but a blur. She will not die alone, surrounded by strangers. When her time comes, she is going to look at me. And she is going to see my face. She is going to know that I am here.
I will be the last thing she sees. I will burn my image into her memory with every light I own. I will stand between her and that shimmering, hungry darkness. I don’t know how long I can keep this up. But I have to. Because I am her grandson, and I am here, and I will not let it have her.
#entertainment
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I don’t know if this is a confession or a warning. Maybe it’s just a scream into the void, because I can’t scream out loud anymore. I have to be quiet. For her.
For six years, I was a night-shift nurse on a long-term geriatric ward. If you want to know what it’s like to see the human body fail in every conceivable way, slowly and without fanfare, that’s the job for you. It’s not like the ER, all flashing lights and adrenaline. It’s the opposite. It’s the slow, quiet dimming of a bulb. My job, as I saw it, was to manage the dimming. To make sure the fuses didn’t blow too spectacularly on the way out. Change the sheets, administer the meds, chart the decline. It sounds cold, I know. But after a few years, you have to build a wall. You see so much loss, so much slow-motion decay, that if you let it all in, you’d drown. My wall was made of cynicism and exhaustion.
The nights are the worst. The ward takes on a different character after midnight. The daytime bustle of family visits and physical therapists is gone, replaced by a profound, humming silence, punctuated by the rhythmic sigh of a ventilator or the lonely beep of a heart monitor. The air gets thick with the smell of antiseptic and something older, something like dust and regret. My world shrank to the nurses' station, a small island of harsh fluorescent light in an ocean of darkened rooms. My main companion was the bank of security monitors.
They were old, cheap things. The feed was grainy, black and white, with a low frame rate that made everything look jerky and unreal. I’d watch the screens, my eyes tracing the vague, sleeping shapes in the beds, making sure no one was trying to climb out of their rails, no one was in distress. It was mostly a form of meditation, a way to pass the hours until the sun came up and I could go home to my own quiet, empty apartment.
That’s when I first started seeing it.
It wasn't something you'd notice right away. I didn’t. For weeks, maybe months, I probably saw it and my brain just edited it out, filed it under ‘bad reception’ or ‘light flare’. It looked, for lack of a better word, like heat. A shimmer. The kind you see rising off asphalt on a blistering summer day. A distortion in the air, a patch of reality that seemed to be vibrating at a different frequency.
It only ever appeared on the monitors. And it only ever appeared in one place: hovering directly over a patient’s bed.
The first time I clearly registered it was with a man in Room 308. He was a retired mailman, ninety-something, his mind long gone to dementia but his body stubbornly clinging on. I glanced at the monitor for his room and saw it – a wavering, vaguely man-shaped column of static and haze hanging over his bed. It had no features, no color, just this intense, silent vibration that made the grainy image of the man beneath it seem to warp and bend.
My first thought was a technical issue. A short in the camera, maybe. I got up, stretched, and walked down the hall to his room. The corridor was silent except for the squeak of my own rubber-soled shoes. I pushed the door open gently. The room was still, cool. The only light was the faint orange glow from his IV pump. The air was perfectly clear. The man was sleeping, his breath a shallow, rattling thing. Nothing was there. I checked his vitals, adjusted his blanket, and went back to the nurses' station.
On the monitor, the shimmer was gone.
Three hours later, at the end of my shift, the man in 308 passed away.
We called the family. The day shift handled the body. I went home, slept, and didn’t think much of it. Coincidence.
A week later, it happened again. Room 312. A woman who had outlived all three of her children. On the monitor, I saw the same heat-haze, the same silent, shimmering distortion hanging over her frail form. This time, I didn't hesitate. I walked straight down there. Again, the room was still and empty. The air was clear. I stood there for a full minute, just listening to her ragged breathing, feeling the hairs on my arms stand up for no reason I could name. I went back to the desk. The shimmer was gone from the screen. She was gone by morning.
This time, I was there when her daughter called. I picked up the phone. She was sobbing, but there was something else in her voice, too. Confusion.
"I don't understand," she said, her voice thick with grief. "I was just with her yesterday afternoon. She was lucid, you know? For a minute. She was holding my hand."
"I'm so sorry for your loss," I said, the standard line.
"But she... she kept squinting at me," the daughter continued, her voice trembling. "She asked me who I was. She said... she said she couldn't see my face. Just a blur. She sounded so scared."
I gave her the hospital's other standard line. The one we gave when the dying brain started to misfire. "It's a common phenomenon," I said, my voice sounding hollow even to myself. "In the final stages, the brain can have difficulty processing visual information. It's just a part of the process, a symptom of the body shutting down."
She accepted it, of course. What else could she do? But her words stuck with me. *She said she couldn't see my face.*
The pattern started to become undeniable. A few weeks would pass, then I’d see the shimmer on the monitor in a patient’s room. I’d go to check, find nothing, and within a day, that patient would be gone. And then, like clockwork, the phone calls. Always the same story, with slight variations.
"My son flew in all the way from the coast," one man told me, his voice choked. "His mother looked right through him. Asked him why a stranger was crying in her room."
"She was terrified," a young woman whispered over the phone. "She kept saying, 'Your voice is so familiar, but I don't know you. Where are your eyes?'"
*He couldn't see me.*
*She didn't know who I was.*
*Just a blur.*
Every time, we’d give the official explanation. Hypoxia. Terminal agitation. Brain function decline. And every time, I felt a cold knot tighten in my stomach. Because I knew. I knew it wasn't a symptom of dying. The shimmer on the screen, this heat-haze creature… it was doing something. It was there, and then they were gone, and the last thing they experienced was the face of their loved one dissolving into a meaningless abstraction.
I tried to tell someone once. A senior nurse I respected. I phrased it carefully, talking about the camera glitches and the strange coincidence of the family reports. She just gave me a tired look and told me to take a few days off. "This place gets to you," she'd said, patting my arm. "You're seeing ghosts in the machine. Get some sleep."
So I kept it to myself. I started calling it the Scavenger in my head. It felt right. It wasn't killing them; they were already dying. It was just… feeding on something on its way out. Something from the wreckage. I became a connoisseur of the low-resolution feed from our ancient security system. I learned to distinguish the shimmer from a dust mote floating in front of the lens, or a trick of the low light. It was an organic, pulsing thing, and seeing it on the screen made my blood run cold. My cynicism, my carefully constructed wall, began to crumble. I was a witness.
And then my grandmother fell.
She was the one who raised me. My rock. My entire family history condensed into one stubborn, fiercely loving woman who smelled of cinnamon and old books. She broke her hip. A simple fall, but at her age, a simple fall is a death sentence delivered by gravity. The surgery went as well as it could, but the recovery was brutal. Infections. Complications. Delirium. One day, she was in the main hospital, the next, they were transferring her. To my ward.
My world tilted on its axis. The place I had managed to emotionally wall myself off from, the place that was just a job, suddenly became the most terrifying place on Earth. Because now, the Scavenger wasn't just some abstract horror I observed from a distance. It was hunting in my home.
I pulled every string I could, took on every extra shift. I basically lived at the hospital. My colleagues thought I was being the devoted grandson. They had no idea I was standing guard. My life became a ritual of fear. I’d do my rounds, dispensing medication, changing dressings, all with a knot of dread in my gut. And then I’d sit at the nurses' station, my eyes glued to one monitor in particular. The small, grainy, black-and-white window into my grandmother’s room.
Every flicker of the screen, every shadow, sent a jolt of panic through me. I saw the Scavenger everywhere. In the reflection on the linoleum floor. In the steam rising from a cup of coffee. I was unraveling. The other nurses started giving me wide berth. I was jumpy, irritable, my eyes wide and bloodshot from lack of sleep and an overdose of caffeine.
I spent the time I wasn't at the monitor in her room, holding her hand. She was mostly sleeping, frail and small in the oversized hospital bed. But sometimes she’d wake up, and her eyes, clouded with pain and medication, would find mine.
"There you are," she'd whisper, her voice a dry rustle. And she’d smile. A real smile.
And I would think, *It won’t take this. I won’t let it.*
I needed a plan. I couldn't just watch and wait for it to appear. I had to be able to do something. The thing was only visible on the camera. It was invisible to the naked eye in the room. What was it about the camera? Was it the infrared? The low-light sensitivity? It was something about the light, or the lack of it. It existed in that gray space between light and shadow.
So, I thought, what if I introduced a lot of light? Suddenly. Violently.
I went online and ordered the most powerful tactical flashlight I could find, and it had a disorienting strobe function, the kind police use to blind and confuse suspects. It felt insane, buying a weapon for a ghost, but it was the only thing I could think of. When it arrived, I kept it in the pocket of my scrubs at all times. It was a heavy, cold lump against my thigh, a constant reminder of the vigil I was keeping.
For two weeks, nothing happened. My grandmother’s condition stabilized, then began to slowly, inevitably, decline. I was in a constant state of low-grade terror. The exhaustion was bone-deep. My body felt like it was humming with a terrible energy. I’d doze off at the desk and jerk awake, heart pounding, convinced I’d missed it.
And then, one night, it happened.
It was 3:17 AM. The ward was as quiet as a tomb. I was staring at the monitors, my vision blurring, when I saw it. The air over my grandmother’s bed began to ripple.
It started small, a faint distortion, like a heat-haze mirage. But it grew, coalescing into that familiar, sickening, man-shaped shimmer. It was larger than I’d ever seen it before, more defined. It pulsed, a silent, ghastly vibration in the monochrome feed, and it was directly over her. I could see the image of her blankets and her sleeping form bend and warp beneath it.
A sound escaped my throat, a strangled gasp. For a second, I was frozen, my blood turning to ice water. The screen was a window into a nightmare, and the nightmare was in her room.
Then, the adrenaline hit me like a physical blow.
I didn't think. I just moved. I was out of my chair and running before I was even consciously aware of the decision. My feet pounded down the hallway, the sound echoing in the oppressive silence. I fumbled in my pocket, my fingers closing around the cold metal of the flashlight.
My thumb found the switch.
I burst through the door to her room so hard it slammed against the stopper. The room was dark, just as I knew it would be. The air was still. I couldn't see anything. My grandmother was stirring, her head turning on the pillow, disturbed by the noise.
"Who's there?" she murmured, her voice weak.
There was no time. I raised the flashlight, aimed it at the empty space above her bed where I knew the thing was hovering, and I slammed my thumb down on the strobe button.
The world exploded into a silent, strobing cataclysm of pure white light.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. The air itself seemed to scream, though there was no sound. The creature—the Scavenger—recoiled from the light as if struck. It wasn't just that it shied away. The strobing flashes, the rapid-fire assault of light-dark-light-dark, did something to it. It forced it into a state of temporary solidity.
And for a single, soul-shattering second, I saw it.
It was faces.
Hundreds of them. A screaming, swirling, three-dimensional mosaic of human faces, all crushed together into one writhing, humanoid shape. They were pale and translucent, their features overlapping, their mouths open in silent, confused agony. They weren't just any faces. I recognized them.
I saw the retired mailman from 308, his eyes wide with a terror his dementia had never allowed. I saw the woman who had outlived her children, her face a mask of pleading confusion. I saw a man who had died of pneumonia two months prior, a woman from a stroke last winter. Face after face, patient after patient, all of them taken from this very ward. All the people whose families had called, confused and heartbroken. All the people who had died unable to recognize the ones they loved.
The faces were the creature. It was made of them. Made of what it had taken.
The strobing light hit it again, and with a final, violent contortion, it dissolved like smoke in a hurricane, and was simply… gone.
The room was plunged back into darkness, the only light the steady orange glow from the IV pump. The silence that rushed in was deafening. My own ragged breathing sounded like a roar. The flashlight slipped from my trembling hand and clattered to the floor.
"What… what in heaven's name was that?"
My grandmother’s voice. It was clear. Frightened, but clear.
I stumbled to her bedside, my legs shaking so badly I could barely stand. "It's okay," I stammered, my voice cracking. "It's okay. It was just… a bad dream."
I reached out and took her hand. Her skin was cool and papery. She turned her head, and her eyes, clear and focused in the dim light, found mine. There was no confusion. No blur. She saw me.
She squeezed my hand weakly. "You look so tired," she said, a faint smile touching her lips. "My boy. You're here."
I started to cry. Not quiet, dignified tears, but ugly, gulping sobs of terror and relief. I had done it. I had saved her. For now. She had looked at me, and she had seen me.
I quit my job the next day. I couldn't go back there. I couldn't sit at that desk and watch that screen, knowing what was really there. Knowing that the hospital wasn't just a place where people died, but a feeding ground.
My grandmother was discharged to my care a week later. She’s with me now, in my small apartment.
Every lamp is on, all the time. Our electricity bill is astronomical, but I don't care. There are no dark corners. I’ve bought three more of those tactical flashlights. There’s one in every room. I’ve even rigged a DJ-style strobe light in the living room, where she sleeps in a hospital bed I had delivered. I have it on a timer. Sometimes, it just goes off, flooding the room with that violent, cleansing light. It terrifies her, but it’s better than the alternative.
I don’t sleep. Not really. I doze in a chair by her bed, for an hour at a time, maybe two. I’ve set alarms on my phone to go off every forty-five minutes, jolting me awake. Every time I close my eyes, I see that collage of faces, swirling in the dark. I see what it’s made of.
I know it’s still out there. I know it’s patient. It’s waiting for me to fail. It's waiting for me to get sloppy, to get too tired. It's waiting for the moment I finally succumb to the exhaustion that is chewing away at my soul, the moment I fall into a deep, real sleep.
But I won’t let it. I won't let her last moments be spent staring into the face of her grandson and seeing nothing but a blur. She will not die alone, surrounded by strangers. When her time comes, she is going to look at me. And she is going to see my face. She is going to know that I am here.
I will be the last thing she sees. I will burn my image into her memory with every light I own. I will stand between her and that shimmering, hungry darkness. I don’t know how long I can keep this up. But I have to. Because I am her grandson, and I am here, and I will not let it have her.
#entertainment
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| 5,000 mlx | |
| 7 | |
| 0 |