Member-only story
Trashley: Part Sixteen
The death, the date, and the vacuum
After discovering her Grandpa had been diagnosed with several forms of cancer, Ashley rushed to Missouri to comfort her Mom. Unfortunately for Ashley, her Grandpa dying in real life meant everything she’d said about him dying back in March was a giant fabrication. I could still remember the quiver in her voice that night on the phone, “I have to go. Someone’s crying outside my bedroom.” The next morning, she told me that her Grandfather had died.
Prior to his first death, Ashley established how close she was to her Grandparents, how she set an alarm to Facetime them every morning at eleven twenty-five, right before she took her lunch at Fermilab, doing “Physics” research.
She worried for her Grandma since her Grandparents had never spent a day apart. And wouldn’t you know it, Grandma had a stroke and died the next day. God rest her soul. What had once been a poetic and beautiful love story now felt pre-meditated and deceitful. If Ashley was lying, she did it…
