Grimsnick

Grimsnick is somewhere between an audiobook and a graphic novel, on your phone. Each story is a short serial told one tap at a time: horror, surreal, absurd, occasionally nihilist. The first one is The Golden Goose.

I loved fairy tales as a kid.

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I loved fairy tales as a kid.

Once I figured out none of that shit was real, I despised them.

In time, I started hating reality too.

All this negativity consumes a person. It took away my ability to replenish what I consumed.

I was broke, unemployed, alone, and hopeless.

I felt trapped in an endless cycle of despair, with no way out in sight.

My life was so monotonous and empty that my whole world fitted into my small, shitty apartment.

A laptop computer whose noise could easily be mistaken for an R/C airplane, connected to an unreliable Wi-Fi connection my neighbor had no idea I'd stolen the password for.

A couch that didn't even look like one anymore.

And a microwave at the final stages of its miserable life.

Or both our lives...

The main similarity between fairy tales and real life is they contain the same amount of bullshit.

The main difference between fairy tales and real life is that real life's bullshit is pointless.

No happily ever afters, no life lessons, no nothing.

Sometimes, all it takes is a phone call or a knock at the door to get the bull to loosen its bowels.

This time it was the latter that got the torrent going.

I opened the door, and there was nobody there or in the hallway.

I looked down and there were three magazines on my mat.

I'm not a magazine reader, thus not a subscriber.

And I don't habitually take what's not mine.

But at that moment, I needed some ad-ridden entertainment already paid for by someone else.

Going through the loot, I was disappointed to find that the last item wasn't a magazine at all.

It was a notebook. An old, blue notebook.

After skimming through both magazines, I noticed the blue notebook had some kind of bookmark inside.

When I opened it up, I was surprised to see the notebook filled with intricate drawings of fairy tale illustrations.

Clearly, these drawings had initially been colorful but had washed out over time.

Every single page looked interesting, but the one marked by the bookmark somehow looked familiar.

Tilting the notebook horizontally, the drawing resembled a map.

A closer look confirmed it was a map of my block, with a detailed drawing of a large golden egg right on top of it.

Squinting, I noticed a small inscription: "12B."