The Grinning Thing

        I saw a movie when I was a little kid that ruined my life.

        That may sound overly dramatic, but it's easy to make that judgment from a safe distance. You have the luxury to cluck and chuckle and roll your eyes, because odds are you've never seen the Grinning Thing.

        That's what I called him, my vocabulary at eight years old not having the color and depth that it does today as a thirty-something who's just trying to get by in this world.

        I don't remember a lot about the movie, and I've never been able to identify it with the help of friends or the internet. No one seems to remember this movie, and I certainly don't remember any of the actors. I'm not even certain I was eight, maybe I was younger or older.

        What I remember about the movie is how the main character, a man who was also likely a thirty-something, trying to live his life in peace, only he couldn't. Because of the Grinning Thing.

        The poor guy would be minding his own business when the Grinning Thing would appear out of nowhere, with no warning. Sometimes peering from around corners, but more often than not it showed up smack in the middle of the man's affairs. The seat across from him at lunch. Draping an amiable arm over the half-wall of his cubicle at work. Waving jauntily to him from the middle of a field as he sped by in his car.

        The Grinning Thing had the body of a human; its face was where the real problems began. Bone white and whenever it caught sight of the man, its expression gleamed and brightened. When I saw the characters from the Scream movies and V for Vendetta as an adult, they vaguely reminded me of the Grinning Thing. Both of those characters wore masks, which were safely frozen in place. Most of the horror of the Grinning Thing was the hungry mobility of its face, like watching the time-lapse footage of a misbegotten flower bloom, the way it somehow elongated even as its malevolent grin widened.

        It never made physical contact with the man that I remember; I guess it didn't need to go that far. The man's face would drain of all color, and his eyes would take on the dull sheen of the frequently hunted. Prey that is exhausted with running and hiding and half wants the nightmare to just end; even the worst way possible would still be an end and maybe a blessing.

        What I remember most clearly was the final scene of the movie, the man thinking that he has successfully vanquished the Grinning Thing, that it has been exorcised from his life forever. Driving to safety with his wife, he turns to look at her with love and gratitude, only to realize it is not his wife smiling back, but the Grinning Thing. This time, its horrendous smirk wrapped in almost gentle remonstration, as if amused with the idea that the man could ever truly be rid of it.

        I remember sitting silent, arms wrapped around my knees, my parents having both fallen asleep on the couch on either side of me. I stayed that way a long time, unable to move, afraid to turn my head in case the Grinning Thing had found me too.

        Even so, I didn't dream of it that night, or for many nights after that. I was twelve years old when I first dreamed of the Grinning Thing, and I came awake paralyzed, ready to scream but unable to force the noise out. When I finally fought my way clear of the nightmare fog, I realized I was bleeding, and began to scream in earnest, which brought my parents running. I had gotten my first period while I slept, while I tried to escape the Grinning Thing.

        The next time the Grinning Thing appeared in my dreams was the night that my older sister, nearly a thousand miles away at college, got into a terrible car accident. She was in a coma for three days, and endured multiple surgeries and years of physical therapy while she was recovering. To this day, she needs a cane for stability, especially if she is tired or otherwise sick.

        The Grinning Thing stayed away from my dreams until my twenties, but then it appeared with some regularity every year or two. Once when I ended up with a case of pneumonia that landed me in the hospital, another when my boyfriend of two years decided to confess that he'd been cheating on me with someone at work. The Grinning Thing had established itself firmly in my life as an unwelcome messenger of doom. 

        On each of the Grinning Thing's visits, I would see it from a distance, and know what it was, and I would pray it wouldn't turn to face me, that this time I would escape that poisonously gleeful gaze. The first time I had seen it from some distance, perhaps fifty or so feet away from me, but each subsequent visit it would manifest closer to me, and still closer the time after.

        Each time I woke in silent tears, my mouth frozen in the rictus of a scream that I could not release, a scream that stayed locked in my soul with all the others. The time that the Grinning Thing heralded my boyfriend's confession, he had also woken to see me caught in that mute tear-filled scream. He asked what was wrong, shaking me with increasing roughness when I could not answer.

        After the Grinning Thing ushered in the bad tidings of my first layoff from my job as a financial analyst, it stayed away for a long time. When three years had gone by, I wondered if maybe I had left the Grinning Thing behind for good. Part of me thought it was foolish to hope, but still, three years. Perhaps my thirties were a boundary that the Grinning Thing could not cross. I had forgotten the end of the movie; how the man had thought his escape successful, that for once and all he was safe from the Grinning Thing.

        I got another job, met another man, lived my life as other people do. Five years total had passed since the last occurrence. Jeremy and I decided to get married, and spent the next year planning the event with our families. His parents loved me, I loved his parents, all was right in the world.

        So most of me was shocked and unbelieving, but part of me knew this day was always coming, this day when I turned from the mirror in my wedding dress only to see the demonic cavorting leer of the Grinning Thing, not two feet away from me in the conscious light of day, come to tell me without words that my fiancé was dead, and that there was no such thing as escape.

The End