A Little at a Time

By Dominique Wilson

“Oh! Also, he puts his pants on backwards sometimes and forgets to drink water, but other than that, there’s nothing to worry about. Just make sure you set the alarm every night! It’ll beep if he tries to walk out so it gives you some time to catch him before he walks down the road towards Denny’s.”

My aunt said this casually as she made her way toward her car, as though the responsibilities she was leaving me with were hardly worth mentioning. I stood there, already sensing that the task ahead would be far more demanding than she made it seem. She made it all sound so simple.

Around two years ago, my grandpa was diagnosed with dementia after multiple confusing episodes. He got into the habit of asking whoever visited, “When are we heading back to my house?”

“But you’re already home…we’re at your house.”

He’d stare at them suspiciously before turning his attention back to the familiar world of The Rifleman. There was comfort in seeing Chuck Connors on the screen, a reminder of a world where the rules were always as black and white as the images flickering across the television.

Eventually, he began wandering away from home, sometimes forgetting how to find his way back. My aunt took him to the doctor, and that was that. Before long, the out-of-state family had settled into a rotation, each taking a turn to give my aunt a much-needed break.

The next couple of weeks were my turn to, as my mom called it when first preparing me for the trip, ‘babysit.’

It was strange being back in the house where I grew up, alongside a man who was slowly forgetting it and the people who had always known it as an anchor to our upbringing.

I had arrived in late October, and a few houses down the street had plastic skeletons hanging from their porches. Inspired, I decided to hunt around for some of the old Halloween decorations we used to put up back when I was a kid living nearby. I found the old, 1970s-style plastic pumpkins and foam gravestones with quirky names written across them and scattered them around the lawn. Inside, my aunt had redecorated the house to suit her Good Housekeeping style of living, but the carpet remained the same: soft and immaculate, with vacuum lines running from wall to wall. Grandpa liked everything in its place and had raised his daughters to live the same way, so they seemed to live alongside each other well enough. At least from what I could tell, in a feng shui sort of way.

For the first few days, we settled into a routine. Mostly, I harassed him about his water intake. Outside, the Halloween decorations continued to multiply, thanks to Grandpa letting me use his card to make the place a little more festive. He, meanwhile, remained entirely uninterested in the holiday. Nothing unusual there.

“You have to drink more, Papa.”

“No, Mijo. It makes me pee too much.”

“That is generally what water does.”

“I don’t need it.”

“You absolutely need it.”

“I’ve been alive eighty-three years...”

“Because you’ve been drinking water.”

He glared at me, then smirked at my ability to throw his own old wit back at him. He took the glass and drank while I supervised like an attending nurse.

I had come to realize that without enough water, he became noticeably more confused, so I stayed on top of him about it. I also set out his medications every morning and every night. He always joked that he'd have to hire me on full-time. Those jokes weighed heavily on my heart. Living on the other side of the country while his health had slowly declined had already left me with a lump of guilt, but comments like these were turning it into a boulder. Then I'd set the alarm, hug him goodnight, and head upstairs.

On the fourth night, the evening before Halloween, I was half asleep when the alarm chirped.

Beep-beep.

My aunt had warned me this might happen, but I'd begun to hope I wouldn't have to deal with one of these episodes myself.

Still, I tried to see this as an opportunity to prove I was a competent adult. I hurried to the staircase landing overlooking the kitchen and found Grandpa standing in the open doorway, talking to someone outside.

“No, no, it’s okay,” he whispered. “He’s always been a good kid. He won’t mind at all, Mija.”

Mija?

Wonderful. I now assumed it was one of my cousins. A few were still in active addiction and occasionally appeared when Grandpa was alone; always with urgent financial emergencies requiring suspiciously exact amounts of cash. Usually the amount of a bottle of liquor or a small bag of something.

I marched down to the foot of the stairs, prepared to become someone’s least favorite cousin. Crossing the linoleum, I made my way to the little white box mounted above the telephone and disabled the alarm before it could time out and summon a squad car. Then a woman stepped inside. She was small and barefoot, with mud caked around her feet and streaked up the legs of her ripped jeans. Long black hair hung in greasy ropes, falling over a black George Michael T-shirt.

For a moment, I wondered if she was wearing some kind of Halloween costume. Then, irrationally, I felt a flash of anger toward Grandpa. This was the same man who had taught me to lock my car doors at gas stations and warned me against handing cash to homeless people because they could “always jump into your car and do whatever they want to you, Mijo.” Now here he was, letting strange, barefoot George Michael fans into his house at midnight.

“Hey,” I said. “You can’t be in here. My grandpa gets confused. Can I call you a ride or get you some help?”

Her head snapped toward me. Her eyes were black. Every intelligent thought left my body. Grandpa whispered something in her ear while glaring at me. She studied me.

I stood there in my pajama bottoms and a loose T-shirt, my hair sticking up in an afro that had been flattened on one side from sleeping. I looked like a one-sided Eraserhead. I’m not a small man, but I’m not particularly large either. I’m about average height, with some muscle earned from unloading heavy containers at a plant nursery while working my way through college. But I’m a writer. I sometimes even think of myself as “artistic.” I think that sufficiently communicates my combat abilities. Apparently, she reached the same conclusion.

She smiled. Grandpa gently ushered her outside, murmuring a few soft words to her before slamming the door shut.

“Papa? Who the hell was that?”

He stormed past me into his bedroom.

I reset the alarm and texted my aunt asking if Grandpa routinely invited terrifying barefoot women into the house at midnight.

*

The next night, Halloween:

Beep-beep.

“Jesus Christ, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

I ran downstairs. The same woman with the same dirty feet and the same George Michael shirt was already inside talking to Grandpa.

“Who are you?”

She laughed. It wasn’t a particularly evil movie laugh. That would’ve been almost comforting in a way.

“Papa, who is this?”

“You know her, Mijo.”

“No, I really don’t, Papa.”

His face tightened with confusion, then hurt.

“You know your grandmother.”

I looked at the woman. She couldn’t have been older than thirty. My grandmother had been dead for eleven years.

“Oh.”

She took Grandpa’s hand.

“Nope!”

I grabbed his other arm.

“Absolutely the fuck not. Whatever weird shit this is, we’re not doing it tonight.”

My grandpa’s face contorted into a mask of anger I barely recognized as he screamed at me.

“LET GO OF ME!”

I released him and jumped back. He’d never spoken to me like that before. She led him to his bedroom.

For several seconds I stood stunned before realizing I was allowing some stranger with demon eyes to take my cognitively impaired grandfather into his bedroom. There were probably several professional caregiving guidelines against that.

I hurried down the hall, but his bedroom door slammed shut just before I reached it. I tried the handle. Locked.

“Papa?!”

Nothing but silence from behind the door.

“Papa!”

I heard a thud as if something hit the floor inside. I stepped back and kicked at the door. Nothing. Apparently artistic writers aren’t particularly good at kicking doors down either. I tried again. By the third kick, the door flew open and my inner thigh was on fire with pain from the force of my kicks.

The woman was on top of him. Blood covered her mouth. My grandpa lay beneath her, eyes open, his body twitching weakly. Blood ran from his ear into his white hair. She had one hand wrapped around the back of his skull. Her nails were buried in his scalp. Something wet and pale-pink stretched between her mouth and his ear.

I screamed. She jerked her head backward. Grandpa screamed too. A slick pink strand encased in what seemed to be glowing silver light tore free and she swallowed it. Grandpa went still.

I charged her. It wasn’t bravery or anything. My body just moved. I hit her hard enough to send us both crashing into the dresser. She weighed almost nothing. Then she shoved me away with the casual annoyance of someone pushing off an overly friendly dog. I flew across the room and slammed into the opposite wall. So much for that. Pain shot through my body as I slowly pulled myself off the floor, dazed but seemingly in one piece.

The woman crouched over my grandpa again.

“Get the fuck away from him!”

She looked at me as blood ran down her chin.

“But he lets me in.”

Her voice was surprisingly normal.

“He always lets me in.”

My grandpa stirred.

“Rosa?” he whispered.

The woman smiled.

“See?”

My grandpa reached for her. She bent toward him again. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find: one of the many glasses of water I’d forced him to drink before bed. Excellent. I’m dealing with some type of vampire and all I had was a glass half full of tap water. I threw it anyway.

The glass shattered against her face. She shrieked. Not out of pain, but probably because I’d just dared to hit her back but it worked. She lunged at me. I grabbed the lamp from the nightstand and swung. The metal base caught her across the mouth. Teeth scattered across the carpet. She screamed. My grandpa screamed. I screamed. There was a tremendous amount of screaming.

Then she was on me. Her mouth opened and I noticed her front row of teeth was already growing back.  Behind her, my grandpa sat upright. He looked suddenly lucid, but terrified.

“Mijo?”

I looked at him. For the first time since I’d arrived, there wasn’t a trace of confusion in his face. He looked exactly like my Grandpa, my Papa.

“Papa?”

His eyes filled with tears.

“Don’t let her take any more.”

The woman turned toward him. I saw the vacuum lines on the carpet beneath us. Perfect straight lines. Except beside my grandpa’s bed where dark brown stains interrupted them. It was old blood. How in the world had none of us noticed it before? This didn’t start two years ago. That was just when she’d finally started taking enough for us to see a change in his cognition. The woman smiled at me through her new teeth.

Then the alarm went off. Down the hall, a computerized voice announced:

“FRONT DOOR OPEN”

I looked toward the hallway and then back at her. I’d forgotten to punch in the code to disengage the alarm countdown. The siren erupted throughout the house. The woman and I both screamed. In my defense, hers startled me.

She lunged, so I swung the lamp. She caught it in one hand. For one stupid second, we both stood there holding opposite ends of it while the alarm blared around us. Then she yanked, but surprisingly I was able to hold on. The lamp broke in half. She stumbled backward. I was left holding the base and about two feet of jagged metal tubing.

“Oh.”

Without wasting a second, I plunged the jagged end into her stomach. The sound that came out of her wasn’t human, and neither was what spilled from the wound. Thick black ooze poured over my hands, hot as blood and sticky as syrup. She grabbed the metal shaft and tried to pull herself free, but I shoved harder. The metal scraped against what I could only imagine was her spine, and she let out another scream, this time in agony.

Behind us, my grandpa gasped.

“My first car was a ’57 Chevy.”

I looked at him, bewildered.

“WHAT!?”

The woman slammed her forehead into the side of my turned head. White exploded across my vision. I fell backward, still clutching the broken lamp. She came with me, impaled on the other end.

“My first car,” Grandpa said again, clutching his head.

The woman shrieked.

“Your mother was born at Santa Ana Community.”

The woman twisted herself off the metal. I scrambled backward.

“I married Rosa in 1964.”

The woman screamed at him.

“Shut up!”

She turned her full attention toward Grandpa. That was her mistake. I grabbed a fistful of her hair. She spun around so violently that a chunk of it tore free in my hand. Her mouth opened, revealing rows of jagged, needle-like teeth that had fully grown back.

I shoved the broken lamp through her open mouth. The metal disappeared between her teeth and punched through the back of her neck. She made a horrible choking noise. I pushed. She clawed at my arms. I pushed harder. The metal kept driving through her, inch by stubborn inch. Her black eyes widened. Grandpa was crying now.

“I remember you being born, Mijo.”

Something inside me broke. I removed the lamp and drove it between her eyes with all my strength. The back of her skull split and something wet burst across the wall. She dropped to her knees. I pulled the lamp out and stabbed her again. And again. I kept going.

She stopped screaming, but the alarm didn’t. I stabbed again. Her face collapsed. Again. Teeth bounced across the carpet. Again. Something that might have been an eyeball landed beside my foot. Again.

“Mijo.”

Again.

“Mijo!”

I stopped. The woman wasn’t a woman anymore. She was a mess of black blood and ooze, tangled hair, broken teeth, and pieces of things I decided were better left unidentified. I was kneeling, hunching over what remained of her, the broken lamp still raised above my head. Blood and black ooze dripped from my elbows. The alarm continued screaming.

I looked at my grandpa. He was now sitting on the edge of the bed. His eyes were clear of the uncertain expression I’d gotten so used to. The distant look he had when he couldn’t remember what room he was in or why I’d come to visit was gone. He looked at me the way he used to.

Then he looked around the bedroom. At the blood on the walls. The random puddles of sizzling ooze. At the teeth. At all the chunks and pieces. At me. Then his eyes slowly lowered to the floor. The immaculate beige carpet was ruined. Chunks of the woman were scattered from his bed to the doorway. The vacuum lines were destroyed. Grandpa stared at it for a long time. Then he looked back at me.

“Mijo.”

I lowered the lamp.

“What the hell did you do to my carpet?”