Page 2 of Grim

TheEnd

Present Day

“H ello?”

My voice whispers through the void landing like a single droplet of water at the bottom of a well. It vanishes without so much as an echo, devoured by the infinite dark pressing in from every direction.

I blink. Or try to. It’s hard to tell if my body’s even moving. Hard to tell if I have a body at all. I feel suspended, somehow stitched into this silence.

Where am I?

What happened?

Logic tells me I should be panicking. But there’s no pounding heart, no hitch in my breath. Nothing inside me stutters or shakes.

I frown, slowly concentrating enough to raise my hands to my chest, feeling the fabric of my dress, the memory of skin beneath it. I press down hard. There’s no thud. No flutter.

Nothing.

Oh.

Oh no.

My fingers rise instinctively, clawing at the base of my throat, scrambling for purchase against a reality I can’t yet bring myself to believe.

They tremble as they press into the soft space just beneath my jaw, searching desperately for the familiar double thump of a life still present, still fighting, still mine.

But there’s nothing.

A foreign sound escapes me. It’s brittle and breathless. The noise goes nowhere. It vanishes before it can mean anything.

The cold doesn’t settle on my skin; it sinks beneath it.

It seeps into my bones and coils low in my stomach, then higher, weaving its way into my chest, into the space where my heart once lived.

I can feel it curling around my ribs like ivy growing wild in a graveyard, making itself at home in the hollowness left behind.

That’s what I am now.

Hollow.

The sensation is so new, yet somehow so obvious.

I am gone.

There’s no panic. No flood of adrenaline. Not even a jolt of fear to cling to. Because panic would mean my body’s still trying to protect me. Fear would mean there’s something to run from. This is complete stillness.

And I know. I know it now, in a way I can’t unknow.

I am dead.

The thought sinks heavily into me, like the last lingering note of a somber song.

There is no bright light. No tunnel. No warm embrace waiting just beyond the veil.

Darkness.

The pitch blackness of a moonless night.

I wrap my arms around myself—or at least, I think I do. I can no longer feel my body in the way I used to. It’s like hugging smoke.

My knees hit the ground, and I welcome the fact that I can feel the impact, but am terrified by the awareness that it does not make a sound. I curl forward, pressing my forehead into the earth, but nothing can relieve the burden that I alone must carry.

It’s me.

It’s what’s left of me.

I open my mouth, but I don’t know what to ask for. Help? Forgiveness? A second chance?

I need guidance. I need someone to help me navigate this. I don’t know how to do whatever this is .

But there is no one.

It’s not the sharp, specific pain of acute injury. It’s not even the broad, dull ache of grief. It’s something deeper. The kind of pain that hollows you out and leaves you feeling like a jack-o’-lantern in mid-November.

This isn’t what I thought death would be. I thought I’d feel a release. Peace. Some kind of weightlessness.

Instead, it’s as though I’d been erased so gently that I didn’t even notice until I was wiped clean from the page.

I tilt my head back, eyes searching for anything, but I am surrounded by a uniform blanket of nothingness.

I’m alone.

Utterly, completely alone.

And that breaks me.

I open my mouth again, and this time, the word falls out on a sob I can’t quite make. “Please?”

I don’t know who I’m asking.

I force myself to look up as the suffocating blackness around me begins to shift, like ink in water—thinning at the edges, rippling into shadows that stretch and lean without form. Shapes that almost look human if I stare long enough. But they keep slipping away the moment I try to name them.

I take a cautious step forward. The ground beneath my feet is solid but my feet are numb.

The emptiness is unbearable. An endless desert of loneliness. No one to say my name. No one to say goodbye.

No gates to enter. No bridge to cross. No warm hand reaching through the dark.

Nothing.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper, but the void offers no answers.

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND!” The near roar that leaves me is a raw voice I barely recognize as my own.

The black begins to pulse, and I see a light. Not white, not golden.

A flicker. A shimmer.

It’s … purple.

The air catches in my throat.

The light pulses once, twice, and I move toward it without thinking. Without fear. Because fear requires the possibility of loss, and right now, I’m not sure if I have anything left to lose.

I reach out, my fingers brushing the edge of the glow.

And warmth floods through me.

First like the gentle heat of the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, then like the scalding energy of a crackling fire, and finally the all-consuming burn of memory. That memory takes the shape of smell: fish, tarred rope, and salty air.

I choke on the sound that leaves me.

“Dad?” My voice cracks, the word torn straight from the center of my soul.

The scent of long days at sea and callous, oil-stained hands invades my mind. It’s really him! I scramble forward, reaching for the glow, my entire being lunging forward, toward him.

But a force hits me in the chest like the earth itself now denies my existence. The stab to my solar plexus feels absolute and final.

I gasp, my hands grasping at the thin air. My chest caves as the pinprick of soft light begins to recede.

“No!” I croak, the word jagged and torn. “Please don’t go!”

I reach for him again with everything I have left—my arms, my voice, my soul.

“Please, don’t leave me. Please.” My pathetic cries award me no sympathy. “Help me. Please, Dad?” My voice breaks around his name, splintering into a million lost moments of love and laughter.

The warmth fades as the last candle burning in my room full of shadows begins to flicker.

The essence of him vanishes. The scratchiness of his beard against my forehead disappears. The sound of his sonorous laughter falls silent in my mind.

I try to sob, but my body doesn’t remember how to cry. The grief just presses out through the seams of me stretching the thread.

Then I feel the sensation of something brushing my cheek.

So soft. So impossibly gentle that I think I imagined it. A ghost.

A sharp yanking seems to pull from the center of me, more forceful than the gentle feeling from before. It wraps around my ribs like barbed wire ripping me apart.

The space around me splits open, and I fall. Plummeting headfirst in a weighted free fall through an infinite chasm that feels as though it has no beginning and never ends.

Amid the grief and the loss and sorrow coursing through my mind, I return to the same question I had when this all began.

Where am I?

And I voice the same sad, simple word that wants nothing more than to be answered. “Hello?”