Tabby Eyes
From birth, never did a shoulder-laid hand startle Tabby Jones. Her infant eyes— a pair of haunted little spotlights— met you the instant you walked in the room. Now, she is sixteen.
Lined up vertically along the fridge next to wide-smiling family portraits, her report cards shouted an uninterrupted “ahhhhhhh.” More impressive than her stack of high marks were a high stack of yellowing papers in Mr. Jones bottom drawer: Tabby’s diagnoses.
“An acute case of synesthesia,” jotted Dr. Mari. That week Tabby broke from flooding a coloring book with red crayon to flooding the dining room with worried babble about Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Jones found their neighbor ghost-white on her marble bathroom tiles, clutching to her chest.
“A perceptive, precocious youth, but nothing to worry about” Dr. Chang had written. They drove to his office with a ring of cake still smushed around to Tabby’s mouth. She pinned the tail on the donkey seventeen times; by the last attempt she was blindfolded with a duct-taped towel.
“A complete and total psychosis, induced by undiagnosed schizophrenia,” said Professor Wurst. That week, a seventeen car pile up killed six people, but never touched Mrs. Jones’ car; a result of Tabby’s insistent remarks to take route fifteen.
Twenty-four of these files sat in the secretary.
As Tabitha grew so did that uncanny nature and the Jones looked for alternative explanations. A voice dipped in Louisiana sugar gave the only answer satisfying to the Jones. Its owner sat with Tabby for one hour; two lone partitioners in an otherwise empty chapel.
“She can see through other people’s eyes,” Mama June reported kindly to Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Tabby nodded. And that was that.
For a while, things improved and Tabby opened up.
Over meatloaf, a tween Tabby dropped the remark “I can see through animals’ eyes now too” in front of her parents like a bundle of the morning papers.
One evening Tabby pulled her mother from the garden bed, as though a starter pistol fired that only she could hear, and flicked on the TV. A somber, balding newsman detailed that a factory had blown up; two hundred miles away.
She was a little car with a big, powerful engine. In the words of Mama June, just “growing into the shoes of her special, special soul.”
But a month ago Tabby started acting strangely.
She yanked her father’s collar, drawing herself close to his ear and said “Daddy you need to get rations, food rations,” and she sprinkled nervously into conversation “I love you mom.” “I love you.”
Her grades slipped, her acne flared, and a streak of gray formed in her long black hair.
Buckle up folks, the big kahuna this way cometh.
Lofting bags of rice onto the highest shelf her father finally breaks down.
“What is it, Tabby, please you have to tell us,” he begged his aged, sad child, “what do you see.”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“But it sees Earth,”
“And it’s almost here.”
Charlotte, We Need You to Listen
The warble of the Humvee’s engine clashed with the sharp chipping of tire spikes along the ice. Through the cracks she felt the invasion of Antarctic breath chill the metal around her thin wrists.
“Radie, you are to tell us what it wants. That’s it,” Agent Cooper said. Charlotte nodded.
She missed the ants.
As long as she could remember– since the men took her from the orphanage– there had always been ants. They marched across every land they dragged her through.
The men in black suits beset a torrent of anguish over her life; chained wrists and tattooed numbers, while the ants paraded to a delightful song: “food,” “home,” “mama.”
How good they were, she thought. She cried when one was stepped on.
They were little blips of precious morse code; her only companions.
Although, the forests they took her oozed with talk of stretching to the sun, hippos steamed with mucky rage and monkeys pulsed with chipper tongues, she cared only for the ants.
Charlotte understood as fact– plain to her as sky-blue days— that from all life flowed mind. She could hear them all, the mind of any living creature. It was why then men took her.
Even now her hand, glazed in bacteria, rippled with a tiny, scintillating chorus: “alive,” “alive,” “grow,” “grow!”
From the expanse of the ghost-cold void at the bottom of the world, the other voice, a mind older than any tree, grew louder as they ventured into the measureless tundra.
A rotting fear oiled off of Agent Cooper; Agent Cooper who called her “Project Radar” and kept her hidden away from the sun.
Charlotte hated the human mind, for something else resided in that infinite lighthouse. It was unlike ant thought, or tree thought. It was evil. It hurt her.
Then she saw.
The sky misted over it a tint of blue. Its body was unbounded columns of stone, its head a great pyramid, housing fathomless eyes. The creature slouched onward miles away, shivering the ice with its steps.
It was a Biblical terror.
“Alright, stop. We’re far enough. She can read well within 100 miles.” Cooper said.
“Start the recording. Radie, you know what to do, don’t ya girl ?” said Agent Porter.
He was right about one thing.
She did know what to do. What Agents Porter didn’t know was Charlotte had grown.
She was no longer a radar. She was a telephone.
She called to gates of the leviathan mind; a vast palace of eon-long halls.
She poured into it every fragment of suffering; each torture inflicted by mankind. She tugged the coattails of the titan; “help me,” “help me,” “help me.” Her whole life. All at once. As hard as she could.
She was red and crying.
Cooper’s screams were washed over by a deep, doleful mourning.
For the Angel heard the pleas of the ant; a precious blip of morse code.
It turned. And the very Earth trembled.