week one;

iris.

he could feel eyes lingering over him, like soup in a can. he was glancing over his shoulder while doing his grocery shopping. letting his gaze slip over everybody, staring at their pupils, trying to pick out the criminal from an ordinary day lineup. but he couldn’t find anything. maybe he was just insecure in his new haircut, maybe he felt like his pants were a bit tight, maybe he was just paranoid that the world was watching, when really he was very unimportant.

but the feeling didn’t leave. it followed him to his car, and it followed him to his house and it followed him down the hallway. at night he tucked himself in, to his solitary bed in a very empty room and the feeling of those eyes fitted snugly underneath the sheets with him. he woke up and he could taste it, taste the eyes over his gruffly uneven skin and as he slumped into the kitchen, in search of coffee - he felt the eyes blink against his chest.

it didn’t take longer than a week before they felt normal. people adapt and so did he. the eyes seemed to fit in to his schedule, somewhere between being awake and being asleep – so confusing that he could sense these eyes, but the only thing he couldn’t do was see them. they didn’t force him into reclusion, and they didn’t make him second guess the tie he paired with his beaten suit, and it didn’t make him doubt his choice in frozen meals. they just sat there, uncomfortably comfortable against his flesh like they were at least once, one.

he knew that one day, one day in the future they would meet. they would lock eyes and he would finally see them and finally he would feel okay – but he was okay with waiting, he was a patient guy. it was okay.

-

ten years later there was a wife and some daughters and a dog. they lived in the same overgrown house behind a closed, old, privately-owned wood that kept the secrets of men that didn’t deserve to be kept. he went to work and he walked the dog and he forgot what living without that nagging feeling of being watched felt like. the eyes grew through him like a tree over a bicycle. he laughed and his voice sagged with an age he had never felt before and his children had swollen into ball of joy that could carry themselves in conversation and throughout gravity.

tuesday evenings were his nights off, free of children, free of noise and void completely from responsibility – on tuesday’s, he didn’t exist. he’d sit with his back pressed against the wooden frame of his bed, and his own eyes scampering over a novel, worn and beaten against time and weather and he made a world around him that only he could see, and that was where he lived. on tuesdays, he called those overgrown woods that grew from his mind, his home.

on a tuesday that would always blend in with the rest upon further inspection, something happened. something changed and the wind slapped him out of his daydream. he felt his heart slip down around his toes and his head turned so frantically he was afraid his balance would be thrown. something felt wrong, and wrong and wrong and strangely right. the eyes. they moved, they shifted and they shuffled along and they weren’t pressed against his limbs in a passionate frenzy anymore – they were there, hovering – in the present.

he felt his lunch of tuna-pasta slide back up his throat, and he dropped the book he was holding to the floor. he rose from the bed shakily, eyes darting almost as suspiciously as the first time he’d felt them fall on him – a feeling he’d never spoken about, never repeated, never dared spell out. and here it was, happening in reverse.

they were near, so near and so close and so silent and he flew across to the front room of his house, overlooking a small veranda sporting only a moth-eaten hammock and a too-polished rocking chair.  he felt the same panic he felt when seven years ago he lost his daughter at a fair – that same cut-throat-death-terror that could only be saved by the sight of a child toddling towards him, arms outstretched. but he wasn’t sure he’d get the same gratification today. why. why now, why today, why.

he was pressing himself against the fly-wire door, teeth clenched and fingers bunched, staring where the vacant spaces against his body pointed – the woods. and he stared so intently that his eyes turned red and dry against the whipping winds.

but he didn’t have to stand there to long, because soon she came. she came through the trees without hesitation, walked out like this was her house and she owned it – stalked in like nothing could have ever stopped her.

he felt strange, his body was tingling with confusion and anger and hope – but her eyes never touched him and he still felt empty. he watched her walk, swaggering down the overgrown path, dodging the misplaced toys and tennis balls and walking straight for the door, straight to him.

h-hello he was flustered. did you want to come in? there wasn’t a reply but the eyes grazed across his chest and he felt himself burn and cave in, before suddenly, he felt normal again – everything that had suddenly shuttered out of his life, had fled back in. he blinked. she blinked back.

he opened the door and she walked in without waiting for him to move out of the way. he hated it, but he knew what he’d have to do. he knew until the eyes closed, he would have to share his life with them. he realized he felt parched without them.

my wife wouldn’t like this, he mumbled – more to himself than to her, but she wasn’t listening anyway. she was walking through the kitchen, turning over everything with her eyes as if weighing up her options. he shrugged against himself and felt a little uneasy.

did you want a drink? once again she didn’t respond, just let her eyes stare him down, and he nodded almost as though he’d been given a direct order. okay, he wasn’t going to get everything his own way, he supposed, and he wandered into the kitchen to pour some water.

-

his wife came home with one sleeping child, and one with too much energy. she wandered in to find him sitting with her on his lap. he looked apologetic and kind-hearted.

what’s this then? she asked, waiting for the child bouncing at her feet to notice the stranger in the room.

i’m sorry he slumped in his seat and closed his eyes waiting for the cries, waiting for the panic and waiting for the hiss.

but the silence was there for too long. his wife staring at him, shaking her head, biting her lip. his daughter was bounding around the room, taking too little care to realize the trap that had been set for her. but she stopped and she stared and she realized.

A KITTY, it came – bounding from a body too small to bode such a volume. his eyes narrowed as the child ran closer, arms stretched outright. he watched as the cat’s tail fattened and the hissing began. his wife sighed.

well i called her iris he mumbled, hoping he wouldn’t be kicked out of bed tonight, like the day he brought home the blasted dog. he finally felt whole.