Bubbe Hates You

By Sylvie Althoff

The Nazis were marching in Waldo.

It was a cold, cloudy day in 1996 when three dozen white supremacists marched down Wornall, banners unfurled. The people of Kansas City turned up to show their disapproval; the local queers already had their witty protest signs ready from counterprotesting the Westboro Baptist Church.

Just past noon, the dead-eyed pasty boys half-assedly goosestepped down the road. Protestors jeered and shouted from behind the line of police. (Of course the cops were there—who else would protect the Nazis?) As the line of goons crossed 74th, a bent-backed old woman slipped through the police line and hurled a brick at the goon at the front. It hit him square in the nose, shattering the cartilage and turning his face into a bloody, screaming mess.

She was hauled away by the cops in front of all her neighbors, the only arrest made that day: Rose Meyer, five foot nothing. She smiled and giggled all through her booking.

*

Feet hurting against the hard floor of her grandmother’s sitting room, Camille set down her trash bag, already overflowing with old papers and tchotchkes. On the mantel, next to a few dusty family photos, there was a chipped and weatherbeaten brick, cheery red. Camille rolled her eyes and picked it up.

“Don’t you throw away my brick!”

Camille looked down her nose at the tiny old woman. “Bubbe, you keep saying you want everything out of here. You made me toss your winter coat!”

Bubbe smacked her lips from her falling-apart floral-print chair. “I’m not going to need it anymore. Besides, I hate that coat.”

“You hate everything,” Camille muttered, putting the brick back on the shelf. “Jesus, this is your mugshot, isn’t it? From the day you hit that Nazi? The things you hang onto.”

“It’s not like anyone else in this town had the sense to give a Nazi what they deserve. Had to leave an eighty-year-old woman to do it. Schmucks.”

Camille checked her phone and replied to a text. “I’ve got to go pick up Amy, she finished parent–teacher conferences early.”

“What, a woman can’t drive herself, she needs you to drive her?”

Camile sighed, tied off the trash bag, and grabbed her purse. “I’m a woman, too, Bubbe.”

“You think I forget that, with the makeup you slather on and the ungepatchka outfits and the nails out to here? I’m not senile yet!”

“Do you want me to heat you up something to eat before I go?”

Bubbe sneered and pulled up the Afghan in her lap. “I suppose you’ll be out all night, drinking and doing god-knows-what while your grandmother sits here and shivers. Or maybe I’ll just fall and break my hip, like you care.”

Camille forced a smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Bubbe.”

The old woman reached out and grabbed Camille’s wrist, freezing her in place. “Come on, that useless girlfriend of yours is so important she can’t wait a little?” Bubbe grimaced, coughed up something vile. “We only have two more rooms to finish!”

Camille patted her grandmother’s hand, unnerved by the unusual intimacy of the gesture. “I’ll be back to finish tomorrow, I promise. It’s not like this stuff is going anywhere.”

*

Bubbe had plenty of family out there, not like they ever bothered to check in on her. They turned up for the funeral, but they didn’t stick around after it was clear that Bubbe left everything to Camille. After settling the medical bills for two years of cancer treatment, “everything” was nothing more than the house.

It wasn’t exactly the best place to live—Bubbe and Papa Jules had built it by hand right after the War, and Papa Jules didn’t know anything about building houses. At least it was relatively clean, after Camille spent Bubbe’s last days cleaning it out at the old woman’s insistence. And it wasn’t like an underemployed trans woman had many other options these days.

There were five of them who moved in that summer: Camille, her girlfriend Amy, Amy’s wife Val, and Val’s kids, Mara and Brecken. And, of course, there was Bubbe.

No force on Earth could stop Bubbe, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that death didn’t manage to shut her up either.

One evening, Camille came home from a rideshare shift to hear screaming from upstairs. By the time she got up there, Val looked terrified but was in the middle of trying to calm her kids while wearing nothing but a towel.

“I saw someone in the mirror,” Val confessed over whiskey at the kitchen table, once they had put Mara and Brecken to bed. “It was when I was getting out of the shower. She looked right at me, had a real mean look. I fell and almost cracked my head on the tub, I was so scared.”

Camille rubbed her eyes. Her gaze landed on the mantel, and she pointed to the framed mugshot. “Did she look like that?”

Val stared at the picture, blood draining from her face. “Yeah.”

Camille emptied her glass and refilled it. “Yeah. Okay, yeah, that’s Bubbe.”

“So what, your grandma is haunting us?”

“Seems that way.”

“You don’t seem that surprised about it.”

Camille blinked at the smeary black eye makeup on her fingers. “I kinda suspected it was happening for a little while now.”

“What?” Val yelped, then winced as she glanced toward the stairs to the kids’ room. “What makes you think that?”

“Whenever I leave out a slice of cake or anything sweet, there’s a bite taken out of it as soon as I turn my back—Bubbe loved sweets, even though she always picked at me for getting too fat.” Camille held up a finger, then another. “My bottles of nail polish keep breaking or drying out—Bubbe always hated my glittery nails. And remember when the smoke alarm went off when you and I were having sex a few weeks back? Something like that happens whenever Amy and I do it. Sometimes it’s the stereo or circuit breaker. Amy said it’s the same for the two of you, most of the time.”

“Fucking hell.” Val reached for her cigarettes, remembered that she stopped being able to afford cigarettes weeks ago. “Well, what do we do? Move out?”

“Move where? With what money?” Camille glared at Bubbe’s mugshot and shook her head. “I’m real sorry she scared you today. But I don’t think she means us any harm. She’s just a hater, dyed in the wool. I never heard her say anything nice about anyone, not once. She treated everybody like shit, even people she loved.”

Val shuddered. “Good thing she doesn’t really hate us.”

*

It was a long, slow trickle to hell, at first anyway. Amy lost her job when the public schools purged all the queer staff. Val started to get letters threatening to take her kids for raising them in a “subversive” household. A friend had to bail Camille out when she was arrested for driving on an expired license—if she’d renewed it, her name and gender marker would have been reverted. Fashy signs and posters spread like a rash, moving closer and closer to the old house in Waldo.

It didn’t happen overnight until it did. Then Camille and her little family left in the dark. With the house empty, the Nazis moved in.

Everything was more or less official, as much as such things mattered anymore. The house was commandeered by one of the new peacekeeping organizations and assigned as a barracks to Lieutenant Bollig’s team of head-crackers. Within a week of being abandoned, the house was infested with bright-eyed young men eager to do violence to make this country great again.

Bubbe didn’t like that one bit.

The first casualty was a kid they called Snooze. He was on KP one afternoon, charged with cooking up some nourishment for the white race. Snooze’s teammates hadn’t been able to steal any decent fresh ingredients from the people of Waldo for the last few weeks, so he had to dig through the weird, narrow pantry.

After a few minutes of searching, Snooze spotted a can of tomatoes up on the top shelf. He crouched down to pull out the step stool, not noticing the antique iron slip from a hook on the wall above his head.

If Snooze made a sound as the iron plowed into the back of his skull, nobody heard it. There wasn’t much blood, really. They had the next-youngest recruit take over the cooking while they hauled Snooze out to the street.

The next one who ate it was a car mechanic named Jensen. A few of the Nazis were getting drunk around the firepit they’d dug in the front yard, celebrating the day’s violence, and they sent Jensen in to pull out a case of beer from the basement.

Jensen was almost at the top of the stairs when the light went out. He missed the step, but probably would have caught himself if there hadn’t been a scratchy-breathing sound right by his ear. That was enough to send him tumbling down the steps onto the unfinished stone. The fall hurt him bad, but what killed him was lying face-first in a puddle of cheap beer, the cans exploding when he hit the ground.

The Nazis started to talk about ghosts. A few of them scuttled away in the night. They were replaced by others.

Things moved quicker after that. Papa Jules’ wiring was never all that reliable, but now it was bad enough to make a circuit with the bathroom floor when it was wet. That was what killed Bollig, then his replacement. One morning, a dozen Nazis who were sleeping on the ground floor were found dead in their beds of a carbon monoxide leak. Bubbe was out for blood, and she got it.

No more Nazis moved in after that. They sent someone to strip the place bare and board up the door, but even that was abandoned when a cinder block fell off the roof right next to the front stoop.

Camille had a friend from college who had a camper van out in the woods of Wisconsin. That’s where Camille and her family hid. They were lucky enough to make it through the worst times—most of them were, anyway. It was almost two years before they finally heard from a neighbor in Waldo that the Nazis had kicked rocks back to hell.

When what was left of Camille’s family made it back home, they found a board dangling by one nail on the doorframe. Inside, the house had been trashed pretty bad. It took them ages to clean up, longer still to find the splintered remains of Bubbe’s framed mugshot in the overgrown weeds outside. But there was still a brick resting in its place of honor on the mantel.

Originally published in the Trevor Project benefit anthology Punch a Nazi. Donate to the Trevor Project here!