Grandma’s eyes (13 unpleasant stories, dreamt up for the purpose of terrifying and mystifying)
Text and image by James Knight
1
She
found the book at twilight in the silence of the forest. It was bound in red
leather. When she opened it, the pages turned into moths and fluttered in
drunken spirals, aspiring to the moon.
2
In
Grandma’s garden are gnomes, roses, a
lovingly mown lawn. But her greenhouse is home to a thousand desperate twisted
things, gasping, blind.
3
She
pauses before the door to the forbidden room. The apple-shaped doorknob is
warm, smooth. In her other hand: a key like a snake's tongue.
4
Grandma
sips a cup of tea. A broken wolf stares at her from the prison of a picture
frame.
5
The
curtains of her eyelids are the forest. Denser and denser into the heart, into
the wet darkness, into the house of phantoms.
6
Grandma’s teeth are knives, hatchets, crenellations, the serrated
canopy of the endless forest.
7
When
she breaks the mirror she swoons into a long, restless sleep. Her lips turn to
rose petals, her hair to snakes. Her sex becomes a seashell. Put it to your
ear: listen to the mermaids murmuring in an ocean of blood.
8
Red
roses proliferate in the Kingdom of the Wolf. Grandma’s skull is a cave. Inside, you’ll hear the voices of the dead.
9
Her
heart is a mirror whose surface reflects the witch, an apple, a rose bush, a
broken sword.
10
In
Grandma’s eyes you’ll see a red moon, red shoes, secret flames, the howling
storm. She shows her bleeding palms to the heavens.
11
Opening
the door to room 13, she finds herself entering a candlelit bedroom. Her double
is sitting at the dressing table, smiling at her own reflection.
12
In
the Medusa coils of Grandma’s floral wallpaper: the statue of a
wolf.
13
An axe, a grin, a labyrinth of trees. The girl,
now a woman, writes her name in blood on the mirror of the moon.