One crisp autumn evening I was raking leaves in the backyard. The sun was going down, taking its time. The sky was clear and the breeze was cool. The north star was particularly brilliant, even in the sunlight, swallowing the scenery from every other star in the sky. It was perfect. But something troubling began to gnaw at me. The petrichor scented air turned curiously warm and bitter, and tasted vaguely of pulpy newspaper.
A sudden darkness came crashing, motivating me to check my watch. It had just been seven, but now was 8:59, and I found myself shielded in pitch darkness, despite the lavender gloaming of a sky still slightly awake surrounding the city. I sensed the presence of something near me. The bustle of the main avenue piercing through town drowned away. The bird song vanished and the dog which perpetually barks congruent to our back yard ceased.
It was an ecstatic silence, and in that moment I knew I was being assailed by something, and that was when I looked up. A disc-shaped object the approximate circumference of my property was suspended in midair, unmoving, just above the roof ridge. A flash of white light scorched my eyes to pitchy blots of darkness, then rescinded. The aircraft remained, and I had a vision of the future…
“Oh, honey, you look so tired”. “Yeah, well…”. “Is it Jennifer? She having another one of her breakdowns?”. I ran my fingers through my hair, defeated. “Are you sure you want to do this?”. “I think if we spend Christmas in New York, you know, away from everything…”. “That broad really has some screws loose. Do yourself a favor already and get rid of her. What happened?”. “Her daughter checked into a homeless shelter. She’s pissed off all the time. She’s miserable and she’s making sure I’m miserable along with her”.
I didn’t know a Jennifer, not as a girlfriend or acquaintance. I was married to my wife Jaclyn. The craft was dark underneath, and spherical like a bloated Jiffy Pop container, only not silver, but of a plum color. Around the seams were little twinkling lights that seemed to float and move about in little sparkling winks. It was smooth and wasn’t built of any adjoining pieces. I felt my heart skip, a sensation a fast falling, in the moment that I realized I was being observed by glowing eyes.
My vision got swimmy and everything seemed to dance around me like mirage distortion. I began to feel nauseous and disoriented. I could see with fine toothed detail of the inner workings of the ship’s dashboard, yet my feet remained planted in the grass. In the darkness among the various flashing lights of the mechanism were those dreadful glowing eyes, suspended and hovering all around me. Little heads without bodies floating in pure darkness.
Next thing I knew it was 9:04, and even further, time again lapsed, and I found myself inside of an ambulance shrieking like a child with a broken leg. The EMT workers had been forced to restrain me. I’d been clawing at my eyes. I felt the cold trickling down my face, the rust taste on the tip of my tongue. My hands and arms wet with blood. The lights inside of the ambulance were spinning and my mother knelt at my feet, repeating the same things over and over - “you need to cut the crazy bitch from your life. That broad sounds like she has a screw loose”.
Time lapsed ahead and I had my hands clamped around a woman’s throat I’d never met. Such infernal hate and rage poured from my mouth. Her face was a shade of light blue and her eyes had rolled over white. Her mouth hung wrong. I was afloat inside of a dream quickly as the needle entered my vein and the sedative applied. Everything dimmed and I found myself inside of a dark, cool tempered dream where a hollow, distant voice entreated me with the words “it was a mistake”, repeated again and again.
When the ordeal surrendered itself, I was lying across the grass under the stars. But the north star was blotted out by something silent hovering in the sky, growing smaller as the seconds passed. The time was 9:03. Soon it grew to a size eclipsing the center of the moon like its pupil - an eye in the sky examining me as it continued to constrict. My wife found me and shook me out of it. The rake was curled and bent like a wretched claw lying alongside me.
She brought me into the house and sat me in a chair at the dining room table. I couldn’t comprehend her words. They were audible only in drips and drabs, but the words “it was a mistake” didn’t match the movements of her lips , though it was all I could hear. And then something shocked her to silence. She threw her hand over her mouth and her eyes widened with shock. She was pointing at my face and screaming.
I ran away, upstairs, and looked in the mirror. My left eye was different. My left pupil had turned black. It wasn’t dilation. It was a new eye. They took mine and replaced it. I finally realized the truth. When I would shut my right eye, I could only see darkness and those little yellow eyes. The flickering dashboard, the lights, the buttons, a large rectangular array. The eyes grew bigger. Drew nearer.
I got an image, vivid, terrifying, and unforgettable. A light bulb, hanging from a single wire, dangling from the center of the room flashed, and burned out. The walls were smeared with bloody, hand-printed trails. The afterimage lingered for several seconds. I didn’t get a look at the creatures, but in the center of the ship was an iron table, and splayed across the top was my dad, dismemebered to bloody pieces. His mouth was opened and his eyes wide. His foot was resting across his mouth. Hand hanging off the side by tendons and ligaments. He died afraid. Terribly afraid.
He died in 1993 of a brain tumor. The night he was dying, I kissed him goodbye. He was seizing, staring at the ceiling, but his gaze stretched further, like he was looking beyond the bounds of the house, to something above, hiding, waiting in the night to take him. I’ll never forget that look. It’s haunted me since I was ten years old. I never went to the viewing or the funeral. I didn’t want the last time I saw him to be in a casket.
I can only get by on a thread of sanity by keeping my left eye shut at all times. I know they’ve taken mine and kept it alive on some sort of ocular life support machine. The right continues to show my reality, but the left, only the horror of that room, inside that ship. But sometimes, when I wake up from sleep, disoriented and in dreary lassitude, I see it. They’ve left the light on. And the words continue to ring in my ears - “it was only a mistake”. Maybe I’m going insane, but truth is what I can only feel. Everybody knows truth when they feel it.
I’m afraid to die. So afraid.