My grandmother.

I never knew my father and my mother was a drug addict. She eventually did a four-year stint in prison for possession with intent to distribute. I remember watching her lose her shit at a custody hearing when it was determined that I’d be living with my maternal grandmother. “He’ll end up just like me!” she said.

So I’m eleven years old and move in with my grandmother who lived in the middle of no where. We didn’t have much of a relationship prior to this. Obviously my mother didn’t like her and kept her at arms length. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why.

My grandmother was cold, distant, and behaved strangely. She was a devout Pentecostal and believed in tongue-speaking. Within the first couple of weeks I woke up to her standing in the doorway to my room. She was just watching me sleep. The only reason I woke up was due to her muttering something unintelligible to herself. “Grandma? Is everything ok?” I asked. She closed my door without saying anything.

Some time passed and I woke up in the middle of the night freezing my ass off. It was winter and I discovered that every door and window in the house had been opened. I went to check on my grandmother but her room was empty. Eventually I found her sitting on the porch in her nightgown.

She normally wore thick socks or slippers around the house but this time she was barefoot. I’d never seen her feet before and was horrified by what I saw. Her toe nails were long, thick, and dark. They curled over her toes. Her pale, veiny feet were hairy like a man’s. I looked away not so much in disgust, but fear.

“Grandma, it’s really cold inside,” I said. “Why are all the doors and windows opened?” She turned to me and said, “You ought to be quiet now and go back to bed. I can hear things in the wind that no one else can. I need to hear the wind tonight.” I went back inside, put on warmer clothes, and tried to fall back asleep.

I could go on and on about all the weird, fucked up things my grandma did, so I’ll conclude with this last story. I had a half day at school once and apparently she forgot about it. The bus dropped me off and as I approached the house I noticed one of the front windows was broken. I decided to investigate and walked around the perimeter of the house.

As I got close to the backyard, I heard my grandmother’s distinct muttering again. I peaked around the corner of the house to see what she was doing. To my horror, she was scurrying back and forth on all fours like an animal. She’d stop, mutter something to herself, then move about on all fours again. It was truly a terrifying sight.

I went straight inside to my room and closed the door. I never learned why the window was broken or what she was doing in the yard. Thankfully I only had to live with her for two years. She passed away from a stroke. I went into foster care for the remainder of my mom’s prison sentence (plus an extra year to see if she could stay clean and get back on her feet). Foster care sucked, but it was a lot better than living with my insane grandmother.

I remember when some distant relatives came to settle her estate. They found a lot of bizarre things amongst her possessions, but one that stood out the most to me was her bible. There was blood and shit stains through out it, and almost every page had scribbles and weird symbols/drawings on it. I’m in my thirties now and still have nightmares about living with her.