Dead Granny didn’t stay dead by TDVH

 The fever is currently 102.8. I’ve been sitting on the cold linoleum of the bathroom floor for the last two hours because it’s the only place in this house that doesn't smell like her. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the weight of her hand on my jaw. I’m writing this because I need to stay awake. I’m terrified that if I fall back asleep, she’ll come back with a second helping.

I’m twenty-one. I should be at a university housing complex right now, complaining about midterms and ordering late-night pizza. Instead, I’m trapped in a Victorian-style mausoleum in suburban Ohio. My grandmother—we called her Nana—passed away twenty-one days ago. It was COVID. One day she had a dry cough, the next she was being loaded into an ambulance by men in hazmat suits who looked more like astronauts than paramedics. I never saw her again.

Because of the interstate lockdown, my parents are stuck in Florida. They can’t fly; they can’t drive. I was the only one close enough to "mind the house." So here I am, the temporary curator of a dead woman’s life, living among floral wallpaper, heavy velvet curtains that trap the dust of the 1950s, and the suffocating silence of a neighborhood that has gone completely dark.

The first week was just the usual grief-induced paranoia. You know the type—you think you see someone in the corner of your eye, or you hear the floorboards settle and convince yourself it’s a footstep. I told myself it was just the "Lockdown Brain." When you don’t speak to a physical human being for weeks, your mind starts to invent company.

Then the sounds started.

It happened four nights ago. I was in the living room, wearing noise-canceling headphones, trying to drown out the oppressive quiet with a video game. Suddenly, I heard it. A wet, rattling sound. It was distinct, cutting right through the digital explosions in my ears. It was a death rattle—the exact, rhythmic struggle for oxygen I had heard over the final FaceTime call the nurses set up before she went under.

Wheeze... click... wheeze.

I ripped my headphones off. The house was silent. I sat there, my heart hammering against my ribs, until my chest felt tight. I walked into the kitchen, gripping a paring knife like a total coward. "Nana?" I whispered.

The air in the kitchen hit me like a wall of ice. It was twenty degrees colder than the rest of the house. From the darkened hallway leading to her bedroom, a faint, raspy whisper drifted toward me.

"Leo... I’m so cold, honey. Why is the heat off?"

I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the kitchen with every light in the house turned on until the sun came up. I told myself it was a localized auditory hallucination. I’d read about them—stress and isolation can trigger them. It was a "grief response." Rational. Scientific. Safe.

But science couldn't explain the migration of the objects.

The next day, I found her slippers. These weren't just any shoes; they were the worn-out, pink fleece slippers she had been wearing when the paramedics took her. I knew for a fact they were in a box in the attic. I had put them there myself, taped the box shut, and labeled it DONATE.

I found them placed neatly at the foot of my bed. The heels were slightly crushed, as if someone had just stepped out of them.

I didn't touch them. I backed out of the room, my skin crawling with a thousand invisible insects. I called my mom in Florida. I wanted to scream, to tell her that Nana was still here, but I couldn't. She was already crying about the funeral costs. Instead, I just listened to her sob while I watched those slippers. I stayed on the phone until the shadows in the room began to stretch.

That’s when the smell changed. The house usually smelled like lavender and old paper. Now, it started to smell like a hospital wing. It was that cloying, chemical scent of high-grade disinfectant mixed with something sweet and sickly—the smell of organic decay hidden under a layer of bleach.

I went to the sink to get a glass of water, trying to wash the metallic taste of fear out of my mouth. As I lifted the glass to my lips, I froze. Sitting at the bottom of the glass, submerged in the water I was about to drink, was a set of dentures.

Nana’s dentures.

I dropped the glass. It shattered against the linoleum, sending shards of glass and porcelain teeth skittering across the floor. I didn't stop to clean it up. I ran to the living room, curled into a ball on the sofa, and stayed there until the fever hit.

It started as a dull ache in my joints. By midnight, my brain felt like it was being boiled in my skull. I had it. The lockdown, the isolation, the stress—it didn't matter. I had caught the virus. I tried to reach for my phone to call 911, but my limbs felt like they were made of lead. I managed to crawl back to my bed, shivering so violently my teeth rattled.

I drifted into a delirium. I remember the floral patterns on the wallpaper beginning to breathe. The tiny painted roses looked like pulsing, miniature lungs, inhaling and exhaling in time with that wet, clicking sound from the hallway.

Wheeze... click... wheeze.

I woke up at what must have been 3:00 AM. The room was pitch black, save for the pale moonlight filtering through the velvet curtains. The air was so cold I could see my breath blooming in front of my face in gray, ghostly plumes.

I felt a heavy weight on the edge of my mattress. The bed dipped. Someone was sitting there.

"Nana?" I croaked. My throat felt like it had been lined with sandpaper.

"You're burning up, Leo," the voice whispered. It didn't sound like her anymore. It sounded like air escaping a punctured tire. "You’ve caught the sickness. You’re coming to stay with me."

I tried to sit up, but I couldn't move. Sleep paralysis, or the fever, or something worse had pinned me to the sheets. She leaned into the moonlight.

I wanted to scream, but my vocal cords were frozen. It was Nana, but she had been hollowed out. Her skin was the color of a bruised plum, translucent and sagging off her cheekbones in wet, heavy folds. Her eyes were gone—replaced by milky, white cataracts that stared at nothing. Her lips had shriveled away into a black, leathery line, revealing yellowed, jagged teeth.

She was holding a cracked ceramic bowl. I recognized it. It was her favorite soup bowl.

"I made you dinner, honey," she rasped. "You need your strength to join the rest of us."

She dipped a tarnished silver spoon into the bowl. The "soup" was a thick, gray sludge that moved with a life of its own. As she brought the spoon toward my face, I saw the truth. The bowl wasn't filled with broth. It was a churning, writhing mass of white, translucent maggots.

They were spilling over the sides of the spoon, falling onto my chest in soft, wet thuds.

"Open up, Leo," she hissed.

Her hand—cold, leathery, and smelling of deep-earth rot—reached out and gripped my chin. Her fingers dug into my skin, forcing my mouth open. The stench of putrefaction hit me like a physical blow. It was the smell of a body left in the heat, the smell of the end of all things.

The spoon touched my teeth. I felt the cold, slimy movement of the larvae against my lips.

The sheer, primal terror of it broke the paralysis. With a guttural, choked-off scream, I heaved my body to the left. I threw myself off the bed, crashing onto the hardwood floor with a force that sent a jolt of pain through my shoulder.

I scrambled back against the wall, my breath coming in jagged gasps. I looked up at the bed, ready to fight, ready to die.

The bed was empty.

The rocking chair in the corner was still. The moonlight was just moonlight. The house was silent again, wrapped in the suffocating embrace of the lockdown.

"The fever," I whispered, my voice breaking. "It was just the fever. It wasn't real. It couldn't be real."

I stayed on the floor for a long time, waiting for my heart to stop trying to exit my chest. Finally, I reached up and grabbed the edge of the duvet to pull myself back up. I needed to get to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face.

But as I pulled the white fabric down, I stopped.

There, scattered across my pillow, and writhing deep into the fibers of my duvet cover, were dozens of fat, blind, white maggots. They were twisting in the moonlight, leaving trails of slime on the spot where my head had been resting seconds before.

And then, from inside my own chest, I heard it.

Wheeze... click... wheeze.

I’m in the bathroom now. I’ve locked the door. I can hear her slippers clicking on the hardwood outside. She’s not whispering anymore. She’s just waiting.

Because she knows I have the cough now. And in this lockdown, no one is coming to open the door for me.