Alex and The Gruff (A Tale of Horror)

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After The Man had fallen asleep, The Gruff pulled himself from under the covers and he watched The Man for a minute or two before he left the room. And although he had grown accustomed to seeing him like this, there was something about the way The Man slept that unsettled The Gruff.

  There was nothing about The Man that he first fell in love with. His hands were bigger now, much bigger. They weren’t the kind of hands that were small enough to work the fine parts of small toys. They weren’t the hands and tiny fingers that could gently pull on fine threads to make small moving parts work. They weren’t the same small arms that needed to stretch in their entirety to embrace a small toy. These arms, they didn’t belong around him. And his hands, they were that way so they could carry things and put them far away and maybe even break them, just for measure.

  The Man was no longer a boy.

  And The Gruff wondered, how long would it be until he realized that he wasn’t a boy anymore? When would that day come? Would he wake up tomorrow and would he start drinking from a bigger cup? Would he want coffee instead of juice? Would he start cutting his own meat himself and would he want to swap his spoon for a fork? And where would it end after that? Would he start using bigger words? Would he try to confound the Gruff with longer sentences? Would he speak in circles and if so, how long then until he started to speak in tongues?

  He didn’t even sound like a boy anymore, not like the boy he once knew. His voice was deeper. It sounded like his tongue was a shovel, cutting through a mound of thick tarry gravel every time he spoke. When he was a boy, his voice sounded like an excited shiver. It was lighter than the air and it would rain down on The Gruff’s ears like an afternoon drizzle, on a warm’s summer’s day. Now, as a man, older and bigger than he once had been, his voice sounded like a stern warning. It was heavy and oppressing, even when the words that he said were kind and appropriate. They were weighed by something The Man couldn’t understand. But The Gruff, he had felt this weight before.

  And he knew what it meant.