Grady was a fat, sad, old man. His heart had been broken too many times. Severely depressed, Grady locked himself inside of his house. The house was musty and old much like Grady. The bottles of alcohol that Grady consumed daily were strewn around every room. Multiple times a day Grady would stumble into these bottles and they would fall. They would make a convincing bowling pin sound as they hit the floor. After a late night bender Grady’s eye had become irritated. It throbbed with pain. Like the cure to all his problems he drank the pain away. He blacked out in his old recliner until late afternoon the next day.
Grady awoke with the pain in his eye even worse than the night before. After a struggle with putting the leg rest down on his recliner, Grady sat up. He felt around the area for cuts or swelling, but nothing was there. He winced and blinked but the pain stayed. An obtuse pain, Grady couldn’t find the irritation’s epicenter. Grady stumbled out of his chair and down the hallway to his bathroom. He swayed into the dead soldiers, and they smashed all around him. An unspeakable horror arose when the bathroom light illuminated Grady’s eye.
One little tooth had appeared in his bottom eyelid. The tooth was not sharp but was rather adolescent in its nature. A tooth a little boy or girl would put under their pillow for a quarter or two. When Grady saw this he moved closer to the mirror. Grady’s breaths had appeared on the mirror in the form of condensation. Grady wiped the foggy mirror clear and went back to examining his eye. The one tooth had now sprouted full sets of teeth on the top and bottom of his eyelid. Scared, Grady threw himself backwards. He slammed his back against the tile wall. His breathing thrashed like a broken record. Grady got up and looked again at his disfigurement. The pain in Grady’s eye pulsated. And now that Grady knew where the pain was coming from, now that he knew what it looked like, he could get rid of it. The only way Grady knew how to get rid of pain was the bottle. He grabbed a long bottle that smelt of old whiskey and smashed it. The bottom of the bottle smashed into hundreds of pieces. The handle and jagged mid-section remained. Grady opened his teethed eye wide. An epiphany should have settled in now. Grady’s eyes were wide with clarity, but he never stood a chance. Grady furiously jammed the sharp bottle into his eye repeatedly, ten times, twenty, and fifty, than one hundred times. The blood painted the room red. Grady collapsed onto the floor. He ran his index finger through his red bodily fluid and scrawled a note.
The coroner had taken a black and white picture of the note for evidence. The note that Grady left had read,
The pain has ended.
The coroner found only one set of teeth in Grady that day, and right where they were supposed to be, in his mouth.
By Joshua Ryan
The Carnage Conservatory 