Jonathan Grimm always loved solving puzzles. He knew all about them. Jonathan knew the history of puzzles. He was an 80-year old widower. His children and grandchildren all lived in different states. Jonathan didn’t care. Now that he was all alone he had all the time in the world to put together more puzzle pieces.

Sometimes his eldest son would call him because he was worried about his father living all alone. He wouldn’t be able to talk very long. Jonathan would usually cut him off and explain that he was too busy to talk. He couldn’t talk because he was too busy with his jigsaw obsession. When he really wanted people to leave him alone, he would bore them with stories about the history of puzzles.

“Puzzles have been a part of America since the 1700’s. People would put maps together that came in many tiny little pieces.”
His tales of the history of puzzles always got people off the phone quickly. It also stopped people from calling him too much. That left Jonathan with more time on his hands. Time he could spend to do more puzzles.

One evening Jonathan was working on several puzzles at once. He heard a knock on the door. He was irritated that someone would interfere with his favorite obsession. Jonathan’s curiosity eventually got the best of him. He walked to the door and opened it. He looked around and there was no one there. Then he noticed something. A box was on his doorstep. He brought it inside and opened it. The box was filled with puzzle pieces! There were no directions or cover. There were only many puzzle pieces.

“I’m going to have to solve this one!”

Jonathan started to put all the pieces together. The task of this mysterious puzzle demanded his full attention. Jonathan realized that the pieces formed a person from the waist up. It wasn’t a very big puzzle. The puzzle was only twenty four inches in length. It was about twelve inches in width. Jonathan notices that the man in the puzzle was wearing the same clothes he was wearing. Then he put the pieces together that formed the figure behind the man. A long skeleton hand with a boney finger pointing was touching the man’s shoulder in the puzzle. Then Jonathan finished the puzzle. He looked in horror as he saw his own face. He was the man in the puzzle.

Jonathan felt a chill in the room. He felt an ice cold hand touch his own shoulder. Jonathan stopped breathing. He looked at the mirror in front of him and saw the long skeletal hand of death that was touching him.

It was almost a month before they found Jonathan’s body. During his funeral, people were talking about who could have sent him the strange puzzle. No one ever found out who sent Jonathan the puzzle. For generations after his death, people in town found other hobbies to occupy their time. No one wanted to share the same fate of seeing their own mortality, one piece at a time.