Grease

Grease is a scary story about a young girl who lives above a fast food restaurant with her father and her brother. It is based on a horror manga by Junji Ito called “Glyceride”.

I grew up in a small city in Japan. From the hill near my house, you could see Mt. Fuji. Ever since I was a child, I would sit on the hill and gaze at Mt. Fuji. It was so big and so beautiful. It made me feel fresh. It made me feel clean. It made me feel new again. I always dreaded the thought of going home.

Our house was a gloomy mess. My dad ran a fast food restaurant and we lived above it. The place was just dripping with grease. The greasy fumes from the kitchen wafted upstairs and hung in the air. Everything, from the walls to the furniture, was coated in a sticky layer of yellow grease.

Nothing was ever cleaned. No matter how many times we did the laundry, our clothes were always stained and sticky.

My mother had left years before. My father was always covered in grease. He had the strangest smell. A sickly, greasy stench.

My brother Goro was 2 years older than me and he was a sadistic bully. Dad was always downstairs, working in the restaurant and my brother would never leave me alone. He was constantly punching me or kicking me or pulling my hair. He made my life a living hell.

After a while, I noticed that he had a really weird habit. When he thought nobody was looking, he would open the kitchen cupboards, take out a bottle of oil and drink it down like it was cherry cola.

It was all too much for me to take. Those sticky walls… that gross smell… my oily father… my greasy brother. I started to hate the grease. It hung in the air, heavy and oppressive. I could even taste it when I breathed in. A disgusting mixture of air and grease…

The saturation levels had reached 50%.

When my brother hit puberty, he started to get pimples. When he squeezed them, they would pop and yellow pus would spray out.

As time went on, they got worse and worse, covering his whole face. At school, the girls would laugh at Goro and call him names. The boys would make fun of him and beat him up. When he came home, he would take all his frustrations out on me.

One day, my brother was hitting me and kicking me. My father heard the commotion and came running up the stairs. He tried to break it up, but Goro flew into a rage and attacked my father instead.

“It’s your fault!” my brother yelled. “It’s because of you that my face is like this! You and your filthy grease!”

My brother kept punching him in the face. My father wasn’t able to defend himself.

After that, my brother spent all his time holed up in his room. Day after day, he just sat there, drinking buckets of oil.

One day, I heard him yelling my name. I went to his room and asked him what he wanted.

“We’re out of grease!” he yelled. “Go to the store and buy some more!”

He started squeezing his pimples in the mirror. A big one popped and the pus sprayed all over me.

“Ugh! Gross!” I cried.

“What did you call me?” Goro demanded. “You called me gross, didn’t you?”

He grabbed me and pinned me down on the floor. Then he started squeezing all his spots.

The pus dripped down on me and I let out a horrified scream.

“I’ll kill you!” he shouted. “I’ll kill all of you! I don’t care who, but everybody has to die! And I’m starting with you!”

He put his hands around my throat and began choking me. I was sure he was going to murder me.

Just then, my father appeared. He hit Goro over the head with a frying pan and knocked him out.

I struggled out from under him and checked his pulse.

“He’s dead,” I cried.

“Give me a hand,” my father said. “You carry his head and I’ll carry his legs…”

The saturation levels had reached 70%.

That’s about the time the dreams started. In the dreams, I would find myself staring at Mt. Fuji. All of a sudden, it would erupted, but instead of spewing out lava, it spewed out grease. The entire city was covered in a thick blanket of grease.

Whenever I woke up, I would feel terribly sick. After that, looking at Mt. Fuji never cheered me up the way it used to.

I began to feel more and more sick. I looked at my face in the mirror and I could see pimples starting to appear. When I squeezed them, yellow pus would pour out. Soon, they were covering my whole face. I stopped going to school and spent all my time holed up in my room.

The saturation levels had reached 80%.

One night, I had the same dream again. Mt. Fuji erupted and a river of grease was flowing through the city. I tried to run away, but I tripped and fell. I was caught in the deluge and the grease washed over me, flowing into my nose and mouth… choking me… suffocating me…

I awoke with a start. My father was standing over me. He had a bottle of oil in his hand and he was pouring it down my throat.

“Come on, drink up,” he whispered.

Coughing and spluttering, I knocked the bottle out of his hands.

“What the hell, Dad?” I screamed.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were awake,” my father mumbled.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

“Uh… I thought you might be… um… hungry,” he replied.

“How long have you been doing this to me?” I demanded. “You’ve been secretly feeding me grease, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”

My father didn’t answer. He just turned and walked out of the room.

After that, I was on my guard. It was no longer safe for me to sleep. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, my bedroom door would quietly open and my father would peer in. When he saw I was awake, he would quietly close the door and leave without saying a word.

Eventually, my father closed down the restaurant. He just sat around the house all day, drinking bottles of oil and muttering to himself. Even though the restaurant was closed, the air was still full of grease.

The saturation levels had reached 90%.

The house got greasier and greasier. The water my father left in the bath had a thick film of grease on the top. The walls and the furniture were slick with grease. The grease slowly dripped from the ceiling, just like rain.

One day, it finally happened. My father went crazy.

I found him down in the restaurant, chopping off his legs with a meat cleaver.

The strange thing about it was that there was no blood, just a pool of yellow grease.

The saturation levels had reached 100%.