Granny

Living in the last house at the end of a cul-de-sac, there was an old lady known to the entire suburb by no name other than 'Granny'. An eccentric elder seemingly without a care in the world, she made cookies and other baked goods for the whole community and opened herself up for anyone that gave her the time. None of us as kids felt comfortable being left alone with her for this very reason; Explaining it to our parents, who never had the time, was difficult to say the least. She babysat every kid in the neighbourhood, but only when you were alone did she show her true colours.

For me, it was one hot evening in early August. My parents dropped me off at her porch and had a quick chat with her before going to an opera downtown, leaving me to taste her latest recipes and staying up later than I was allowed at home. This would be the last day I looked forward to staying with her, but far from the last time I ended up doing just that in spite of my protests.

The first half of the night went like normal. I ate her delicious self-made cookies, some candy and a good meal. We watched some cartoons as usual, her golden retriever lying on the couch between us with its head on her lap. She even allowed me to go to bed without brushing my teeth, something I had never been given the luxury of doing before. I was as happy as an eight-year-old could be. That all turned into a nightmare when she came to sit by the bed just as I was drifting to sleep.

My eyes widened in fright as her saggy, wrinkled body began to throb. A vertical line passing over her distended belly stretched and deformed, the skin tearing apart and forming a bloodless cleft into the depths of her gut. She made a hollow gurgling noise and dug into the gaping cavity that was now wide enough to reveal an opening devoid of intestines and stomach. In their place was a small figure stained red-brown by the woman's bodily fluids, its shape much like that of an infant with a grotesquely engorged abdomen. There was only swollen flesh with festering blackened growth at their centres where the eyes should have been, its limbs underdeveloped and twitching, and perhaps worst of all its back fused into the spinal cord of what I had just seconds before called Granny.

The next thing I remember is waking up on the couch, my parents laughing with the thing about how I had fallen asleep in the middle of my favourite TV show and how adorable it was. I tried to tell them about what had happened, but they almost convinced me that it was only a nightmare. If my friends hadn't all experienced the same, I might have believed them. Everyone's story was the exact same: they went to bed upstairs, woke up downstairs. What happened between those hours, none of us ever found out, but we all had the same to say about when Granny opened up.