The Seller by Damien J. Grant

The Seller by Damien J. Grant

Glancing in the mirror, I watched the division between sea and sky melt away, as if one had swallowed the other.  Clouds wisped playfully across the blue expanse.  Our tires bounced over dusty ruts, carrying us south as the coast faded away.  Ramshackle bungalows, their lawns fringed with seagrass and punctuated by the obligatory kitsch of beach towns—anchors, tin crabs, the occasional pirate—soon gave way to a stretch of woods that snaked its way from town to the mouth of the interstate.

We had been on the highway for just over an hour when the sky grew angry, the alabaster clouds now replaced by dark soot.  A cold rain began to fall, drops plunking against the white hood.  We pressed on, cresting a hill as the black towers of the city came into view, stretching down from the gray.  Soon we were navigating a serpentine maze of dim corner stores, empty basketball courts, and shuttered cafes.  As we paused at a stoplight, a large white dog, likely a stray, bowed its head and snuffled through the damp trash on the sidewalk.  It glanced up, meeting my eyes, before disappearing down an alley.

Our street was lined with rowhouses lit from within, the rain beating the scales of their shingled roofs.  Confusion hit as we reached home.  A couple feet up the driveway, blocking us from the garage, was a black card table, rain pooling on its shiny plastic top.  A battered tin cup sat near its edge.  To the side stood a black, wooden piling, protruding from the lawn as if dropped from the sky.  It was adorned from top to bottom with roses—a vast display of brilliant red, pink, and peach—that appeared to grow from the black wood and sweep down its length.

The roses trapped my gaze as I stepped out into the rain and absently moved the table aside.  Approaching the piling, I tentatively grasped a salmon-colored specimen, wincing as its thorns broke my skin, the rain transforming the red in my palm to a watery pink that matched its petals.  I saw now that the roses were not growing from the pilings, or even alive.  Someone had drilled hundreds of holes into the black wood and stuck them into the cavities.

The waterlogged grass hugged my feet when I returned an hour later, armed now with leather gardening gloves.  I began plucking the roses and laying them on the table next to the cup.  I put my shoulder to the barren timber and was soon rewarded with a squelching from below, as if pulling a decayed tooth from the gums of the earth.  A man sploshed by as I worked, his rubber boots thudding against the concrete.  The large white dog at his side growled as the man stopped and peered at me through sea-blue eyes.  “Did you sell anything?” he asked.  I stared back at him wordlessly.  Unsatisfied, he gave a little shrug and trudged off down the sidewalk. 

Stars strained against the glow of the city, shining unnoticed.  The night air tussled the curtains, cooling the mug in my hand.  I stared ahead as I sat in the kitchen, focused on the vase of roses now on the table before me.  I had never seen brighter colors.  I began to think about going back outside to collect the rest when a loud bark shattered the night, breaking my focus.  Two dogs, mangy and white, stood side by side just outside the window, their eyes staring ahead.  I rapped hard on the window.  They growled back, their voices a deep rolling menace, their bodies still.  They stared through me, as if looking at something off in the distance, before turning as one and silently crossing the yard to the curb.

There they stopped, posed motionless at either side of the discarded table, the roses shimmering in the moonlight.  The row of dim streetlights up and down the block flickered and went out in a series of muffled pops, their death throes bright showers of sparks that stained the backs of my eyes.  An inky shadow stretched itself over the table like liquid, dark strands pawing frantically through the roses as the dogs sat motionless.  I made out the markings of a humanoid shape within the shadowy mass, watching as it scrabbled over the table.  It lifted the cup, shaking it silently as if to verify its emptiness.  Then it blazed up the lawn before the breath I had drawn could leave my lungs.

I could see now that it resembled an old woman, dressed in ragged cloth, her hair long and unkempt.  Its head jutted forward, eye-to-eye with me through the window screen, the metal grid distorting its features.  Time slowed as its mouth stretched wide, hot breath pouring through black teeth, fouling the air and watering my eyes.  I froze as it pointed a long finger above my shoulder and toward the roses on the table behind me.  “You…sold.”  The words hissed from its throat like a chain of whispers, as if they had traveled a great distance on the wind.  “You sold,” the thing repeated, its whisper growing louder, a slight rattle in its chest.  It then spoke in a language I did not recognize and could not repeat, its face moving unnaturally, as if something under its skin was alive and moving independently.  I spoke back to it in the unknown language.  My mind began to process the horror of what was happening, digging deep into itself, clawing through memories the way a drowning man might thrash about in search of something, anything, to grab onto.

My flailing synapses careened through a lifetime, a whirling carousal of joy and sadness, triumph and regret.  Spinning faster and faster, whipping through the fog of my forty years, grasping desperately until at last I took hold of something solid, a fragment pulled from my boyhood schooling.  I pray the Lord my soul to take.  With those words a hand plunged through the screen, sharp nails ripping through the thin metal that had separated us.  By instinct alone I grabbed the mug from the table and flung its contents through the window.  A hissing erupted as the cool water hit its mark, the shadow reeling backward as it uncaged the screams of a thousand voices, a swirling mass of black flashing back to the card table and the dogs.  I pray the Lord my soul to take.  Its caricature of humanity washed out, its screams choking themselves off as it spread itself over the table, smothering the roses, the dogs now baying at the sky.  I pray the Lord my soul to take.  An instant later the three beasts were gone, replaced by twisting plumes of ash that rose like cobras into the sky. 

A quiet peace descended as bits of ash slowly blanketed the yard.  I turned away from the window and toward the kitchen table.  The once brilliant roses were now dark and crumbling, thorned weeds reaped from a poisoned field.  I watched as a blackened petal fluttered down to the table.  The words of the man on the sidewalk echoed in my mind, “Did you sell anything?”  “No,” I answered to myself.  “Thank God.”  

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Damien J. Grant 2025