Chapter 1

Grandpa Bill passed away two months ago.

He'd been having trouble breathing more and more since the pandemic. That, and his smoking habit. It finally caught up with him this year. One week his health took a turn for the worse and one morning, the nurses found him having gone. His lungs had suddenly collapsed in his sleep.

My mom is devastated. I guess that's why it's taken us so long to visit the farmhouse, around two weeks ago.

We inherited the barn shortly after the funeral ended. It wasn't much, but it could make for something interesting later down the line if we chose to sell or refurbish it. Whatever we ended up doing, we had to clean it first.

Mom had me drive. She couldn't see straight with the tears in her eyes. Thankfully, she fell asleep after a few hours. We reached the barn shortly after. I decided to let Mom rest for the time being, God knows she needed it. When I walked inside those big wooden doors, I was instantly hit with a bittersweet scent. That smoky smell of his, always piping away on his cherry tobacco. He never listened to us that the stuff would kill him.

I started cleaning with the downstairs, eventually working my way up to the loft. This was where the real work began. The place was littered in tarp-covered furniture. A dusty couch here, an ottoman there. Nothing appealing enough for me to want to take home, though I supposed it could make for a cozy living space if we cleaned all of it off.

One item that caught my eye was a desk. Bulky, black wood, with a small drawer on the right side. Heavy looking. I recognized it immediately as the one he used for his writing. I ran my hand across the top, feeling a few knicks and the occasional burn from a flimsy cigarette.

Being that I work remotely, and spend most of my day hunched over my kitchen counter laptop, it was a jackpot find. I dusted it off, got my mom to help me lug it downstairs, and took it to my little apartment back home. It was a few weeks before I started noticing something was off.

See, I started using it as a junk drawer pretty quickly. Mostly just for my pencils, pens and batteries. Every now and then, I thought that I had a bit less than what I put in there, but thought nothing of it. Nothing that couldn't be added up to my crippling ADHD. I misplace things a lot, and with the steady stream of grief coming into my life as of late, it was easy to lose focus.

Then, one day, I go to grab some batteries for my TV remote, and the drawer is totally empty. With the prior knowledge, I figured, damn, I must have put them in the kitchen drawer. But no, they weren't there either. Being a normal person, I tore my apartment up from top to bottom looking for the batteries I had sworn I bought last week. But they were nowhere to be found, no evidence of them beyond a receipt on my counter.

I was pissed off, but it wasn't the end of the world. I could always just make a run to the local Walmart on my way to work the next day. I'd just have to cope without my YouTube for the night.

I went to bed later after getting my work done, and thought nothing more of it for another week.

But then my next pack of batteries went missing. This time, I moved the desk completely to see if they had fallen behind it. It was big and bulky after all. Halfway through doing this though, I blinked a few times, realizing I hadn't bothered pulling out the entire drawer yet. It would probably be a lot easier to figure it out from there.

When I did pull it out, for whatever reason, it didn't register at first that something was seriously wrong with this drawer. In the very back, against the grain, there was a spot. A large spot, larger and darker than anything around it. I usually have my curtains drawn, and like to work in dim light, so maybe I just didn't notice it in the dark.

But it was there, just…blackness, the size of a softball. It was only when I tipped the drawer back, and a stray pencil fell toward the back, that I realized what was going on. Because the pencil just straight up disappeared. It was gone, in and instant. No sound, nothing, just, gone.

Grandpa was gone. God, he was really gone.

I dropped the drawer immediately. Despite my carpeted floor, it still made a loud enough clunk that I'm sure the downstairs neighbors heard. I winced, coughed, and straightened myself out.

Had I been drugged? No, there was no way. I'm a total shut-in. The only person I would have had over is my mom, or my buddy Kevin. He comes over every other weekend to just play video games for a few hours, and this was his off Saturday.

I'm not superstitious, usually, but I do occasionally get freaked out at the notion of the other side, what happens after death.

More pertinently, I always wondered what would be on the other side of a black hole.

Discarding all sense of self-preservation, I immediately went to the store to buy some yarn and more paperclips. Using some basic knots, I tied said paperclips to the yarn tight, brought them home, and laid the drawer on its back for experimentation.

I lowered the first paperclip in.

At the same time, my brain was flooded with thoughts. Angry thoughts. Guilty ones. Every one of them was dripping with regret.

Dangling that paperclip above the abyss, I thought about our last time together, fishing on the pier.

It was sucked in with tremendous force. So much so that it gave my fingers rope burn. I nearly was brought to my knees. The hole expanded. It was now the size of a pancake. Part of it overlapped with the edge of the drawer, and it, like…I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's like it folded in over itself? Like a ventablack omelette. Or a Salvator Dali painting. Melting blackness. I could feel the pull now, too. A gentle, but firm pull.

I thought about him holding my hand, late at night, as a kid. I thought about what I would say to him, if I had one last chance.

A moment later, I noticed the tearing sounds in my carpet, and the hole expanding further. I picked up the drawer, noting the new bald spot on the ground. My upper lip twitched. Just holding it, the drawer felt ten times heavier than it had before. I hadn't used my legs and my back nearly gave out.

Grandpa, I hope you know the burden you left me with.

I panicked, pulling the drawer toward the sliding-glass entrance to my apartment.

What exactly did you give us? What did you leave behind for us besides a gaping fucking hole?

My adrenaline spiked. I pulled hard, again, screaming. It was pulling harder now, pulling on my foot as it dangled from my struggling hands.

You left me, my mother, and my family grieving you too soon. You were 64. You had a pension. A life. People who loved you. You abandoned us for your vices. I can't blame you for it, I'm a victim to them myself. My anger. My gambling. My drinking. I should have realized it sooner, that all of it has been killing me slowly. I didn't realize it. I don't know if I get that from you, or if it's just my own head playing tricks.

It felt like I was about to tear my whole foot off, but I somehow, miraculously, managed to get it away. I threw the drawer as far away from myself as I could. The neighbors definitely heard that one, too. My foot had grown slightly swollen. Dull pain, growing more intense. I thankfully hadn't broken any bones. Not yet, anyways.

Mom hasn't talked to me much. When she has, she's overbearing. Like she's interrogating me on my life. Wants to make sure I'm okay but smothers me in the process. I'm starting to hate her for it.

My breathing finally slowed. My tears stopped flowing. I grabbed my work stuff, packed a bag of laundry, and left my apartment behind. I limped outside, I thanked God that my keys worked, and I drove to the hospital. Haven't been back to the apartment since. I've been staying with my best friend. Trying to forget about what I had experienced. Asking myself if any of it had been real.

The pain has only been growing worse. My doctor tells me that he's never seen fracturing like this before.

I'm sorry that I'm angry with you. I just miss you. I wish that I could have told you I loved you one more time.

Maybe I can. The other side got me. It seems angry that I pulled away.

It started with the bruising. It was all over at first, but then it started localizing, all to one area, one that grew necrotic and grey. The center of my foot began to deflat, while the edges around it began to swell. Yestrday, it looked like a fucking donut. I've been admitted back into the hospital since then.

For a while, I've felt like the world would be better off without me. But I don't want to die. I think I realize that now, you know? I've taken a lot of my life for granted, been really down and hard on myself as of late. But now that I'm faced with death, a very real possibility of death, the thoughts of being better off dead quickly go away.

They did x-rays. Several, over the course of a few hours, as they couldn't quite understand what was happening. Why they were seeing motion, and what this cavity was at the center of my foot. A cavity, the size of a quarter, doubling in size every hour as my bones slowly are sucked away.

It got me. It's probably going to get my neighbors at some point. God, I don't know how big it's gotten and I don't want to go back. I don't know what to do. I don't know who to call.

Pretty soon, I'm going to see what's on the other side. I'm going to see what happened to my Grandpa Bill, and everyone who came before him.

You know what scares me most? Is that you're really gone. That there's nothing on the other side, that this is it.

I've considered sawing my own foot off to save myself. But I'm a coward and I hate pain. I don't know. I'm scared. I don't know what to do.

I'm sorry. I'm not ready to see you yet.

Please don't take me now.