**DO NOT MOVE TO MADISON OAKS RETIREMENT COMMUNITY**
I do not enjoy human interaction very much.
My parents called me a hermit, I say that I’m learning from experience. People did not enjoy having me around, so I made myself scarce. My parents did not enjoy this explanation from a child so they brought me to the Pediatrician, and at a very young age I was diagnosed with Dysthymia, which is now referred to as Persistent Depressive Disorder. Normally the diagnosis changes as you get older and your symptoms are easier to read. Mine did not. I do believe this is important to my survival now (ironic I know). It’ll make sense later. Maybe.
I’ve learned to live with it. I got through high school the best I could with how quiet I was, did college online to avoid a repeat of high school and got a comfortable job as a technical consultant. I couldn’t work from my bedroom in my parent’s house for the rest of my life though, so I started looking for a place to rent. A simple google search was all it took to find Madison Oaks Retirement Community. My first google search result to be exact. I, at the ripe age of 24, am not ready for retirement believe it or not. It being the top result under “houses for sale near me” should have been a huge red flag, none of my search parameters should have led me there. But before I knew it I had clicked on the site, the application auto-filled with my information and was submitted within a few minutes.
To this day I don’t remember the entire process, just bits and pieces. I remember clicking the ad and then receiving an email that I was accepted. I was flabbergasted, there was no way they would allow someone my age there. After emailing back and forth with the property manager it was decided that I was an acceptable renter even with the large age gap and no prior renting experience. So I went for it. My thought was the older the demographic, the less likely interaction was.
I was wrong. Very wrong. On my first day moving in I was interrupted more times than I can count while I was trying to artfully stack my Tupperware in the cabinets. People would bring casseroles and cookies, stacks upon stacks of food to store in my barren fridge.
As the day drove on it started to feel like there was a manufactured assembly line of old people with homemade goods outside my door. The conversations started to match up with each other, the couple handing me over a plate of cookies would utter the same exact greeting as the couple two casseroles before, with the same exact sweet-toned inflection. It felt almost rehearsed, but I pushed that thought from my brain quickly. They were all just trying to be sweet I told myself, and there’s only so many greetings to utter. By the end of the day, I knew every surrounding neighbor’s name and had made plans with my closest neighbor, a sweet and small woman named Beth.
Beth was the last person to come to my door. At exactly 5 pm she rang my doorbell and stood in my threshold. Beth had talked me into having an afternoon “Tea Time” (her words) with her the next day, no matter how many times I had politely refused, she persisted with a firm tone. Finally, I agreed, mostly to get her off my porch, and it resulted in me sinking into her plastic-covered floral couch in her home the next day. She was busying herself in the kitchen as I sat there, I had asked to help as I came in but she just swept me over to sit on the couch without saying much.
It smelled heavenly there. The longer I sat swallowed in her couch the more at ease I felt. An hour ago I was absolutely dreading this interaction, now I feel drunk with comfort. Literally. The air had a lilac smell permeating it, and it was infesting me. It felt as if my arms were being weighed down in to the couch, the cushion felt like it would swallow me whole every time I inhaled. I couldn’t help but take long drags of the smell. It was addicting, but it felt very, very wrong.
I started to drift off to sleep when Beth came back into the living room, her setting the porcelain mugs on the table in front of us startled me back to my senses, and yet I could barely move my head to look in her direction.
Annoyed with my slowness, Beth grabbed my chin and moved my face to look at hers with a roughness that didn’t fit the environment we were in or the personality of the woman handing me macaroons on my porch yesterday. My brain supplied warning bells to get away from this situation, to pull back from her hard grip, but I couldn’t react at all. My mind was screaming but I felt disconnected from my body. I tried to move anything, even my mouth wouldn’t twitch. I could only sit there, paralyzed while Beth looked over my features with a gnarled, wrinkled sneer.
For the longest time she just…looked at me. Her eyes darted all over my face until they landed on my droopy eyes. Slowly her sneer turned into a long smile across her face, a sharp cut that reached too far on either side. “You’re melting into my couch, honey. That didn’t take long at all.” she said, the corners of her smile never moving from the apples of her cheeks, a false sense of sweetness on her tongue. She was mocking me. I could feel tears forming in my eyes, tracking down and pilling at the corners of my lips.
She flicked my face from her grip, her hold being the only thing keeping my head up as I slouched my chin into my clavicle. I heard her offended scoff, then felt a dangerously cold palm center on my forehead and shove me back into the soft cushion until the couch kept me propped. Using a long fingered hand she haphazardly slid the full tea mugs to the left of the table, steaming tea bounced out and onto her hand with no reaction from her. She sat on the table, positioned her legs in between my skewed ones, and got as close as she could.
Looking at her from under my heavy lids I finally took in all of her malformed features. This was not the woman I met yesterday. Her face made no sense, nothing fit in the space it was made for, and the more I looked the more things..changed. The skin under her eyes drooped and slid away from her sockets, leaving a deep void between her eye bags and her reddened eyes. The skin slipped over the apples of her cheeks that were taut unlike anything else on her face. They sat high up, keeping her mouth arched and long, a harsh imitation of a smile meant to fool no one. I couldn’t see her teeth between her sealed smiling lip and I didn’t want to. Her hair sat in wisps framing her face, her thick gray hair I saw on my porch was completely gone, and guessing from the red and awful marks on her forehead, it seemed that she ripped it out herself moments ago.
At first I thought she was going to continue her long observations of me from the space between my legs, but instead she leaned in, closed her eyes, and with flared nostrils she… smelled me? She kept leaning in, taking deep inhales until she was inches from my face. Flicking her eyes open she looked deep into mine for a moment, I could feel her wet breath against my skin but couldn’t look down to see. Leaning back only an inch she moved higher up, extending her neck until her nose was level with my eyes, I could finally see deep into her curved open mouth. Rows and rows of sharp jags poked in every direction, a tunnel of teeth that lunged and reached for my face, and in the middle sat a long tongue that unfurled right next to my open eyes. Slowly, she dragged her tongue up my cheek, tasting my sweat and tears with a harsh draw.
The face of disgust she made was unexpected. She flinched her head back away from mine with wide eyes, the skin around her sockets forming a facsimile of an arched brow. Hesitating, she brought her face in for another taste and that repulsive look of disgust was back.
“You taste foul. Like a rancid stain.” she muttered, more to herself than to me.
She stood quickly, moving away from my spittle and tear-soaked face like one would after smelling something spoiled. She started to move around in the space behind me, I loathed this paralyzed state that didn’t allow me to turn and watch. All I could hear was mutterings of disgust as she poked around in her house, all I could pick out from her whispered insults was the end of a “…eave her for the others.”
Once she came back around to my periphery, the Beth I met yesterday was present again. Everything was back in its place, her normal blue eyes and the pixie cut of thick gray hair was present again. The only thing that hadn’t slid back into place was her smile, I watched as the malformed arch shrunk back down into the thin line that was present when I knocked on her door.
She reached out, smiled a small odd smirk at me, and lightly touched my eye lids with her fingertips. That’s the last thing I remember.
I awoke in my bedroom. The only place in the house I had set up before the bombardment of people came. I felt awful, like someone dipped their hand into my skull and slurried everything up. It took me almost an hour to fully control my limbs enough to move from my spot in the bed over to my kitchen where my laptop is. Looking at the date at the bottom right, it read 5/22/2023. I had my afternoon with Beth three days ago.
I’m writing this now, I need to before I forget or convince myself it never happened. I know it was real. I can still feel the phantom touch of her awful tongue on my cheek. I don’t know if she’s coming back. I don’t think she will. I honestly don’t know much about this, or what to do.
The only conclusion I have is I must have tasted bad. I’m not sure if the others I met will think the same. It’s already to late for me, I’m surrounded by them.
I can only say to you, don’t come to Madison Oaks.