"Just because he died thirty years ago doesn't mean we shouldn't trust what he's saying." she argued, already tired of the whole ordeal and honestly just wanting it to all be over or a bad dream - anything other than the present. Anything other than her very much dead-looking grandad standing in middle of their parlour who seemed convinced that their lives were in danger.
Her husband scoffed and rolled his eyes in his usual obnoxious manner and she briefly wondered what was still keeping them together. "Some dementia-ridden old man in a zombie costume isn't going to make me leave my own home for some imagined disaster." And while he had a point about the sheer oddness of the situation, he was clearly her grandad and had already made enough sense that she was willing to trust him more than the man she regrettably married.
Her grandad somehow already knew about the nightmares they'd both been having the past month - all the same dream of waking up in a flooded cornfield and slowly sinking into the mud as the flood receded showing millions of blech-white skeletons with their arms raised to the pale sky.
He already knew about the flocks of birds in their back yard tearing each other apart til their little bodies were piled a foot high, blood and feathers splattered all over the damned place. Always in neat little piles in the south east corner where they buried her husband's childhood dog last summer.
He knew all the gruesome oddities that seemed to be following them and claimed they were all smaller parts of an overall sorrow intent on seeing them worry themselves to death, trapped in a house full of broken bones. Trapped and happy to tear into each other like so many small birds.
She was convinced enough to stop trying to save her husband and just tell her grandad that he didn't need to worry about her, that she'd heard him and everything would be okay. He seemed placated enough to nod, turn around and walk away, presumably for the graveyard.
She was out of the house that afternoon to 'go visit her cousin'.
The last time she saw her dear husband alive was when he asked her to grab the newspaper on her way back.
Whatever had been after them both had settled for him and that was fine by her.
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