Sooner or Later She Will Find the Key
It’s an eye, probably.
She can just barely remember a time before, so she knows she wasn’t born with it; rather likes to think it’s the ghost of her dead sister, because this gives it a friendly aspect. Benign intent. Truthfully, though, she has no clue. It’s an eye, not a mouth, so it can’t explain why it’s tethered to her like a balloon on an invisible string.
What she knows: it doesn’t blink. It’s unaffected by season, atmospheric conditions, temperature, time of day, environmental biome. It is an absolute constant, hovering above her, always far enough ahead to maintain a clear view—her of it, it of her. Is it dimensional? It stays ahead of her, so she can’t tell if it has a back. It’s simply a flat disk of variable size, her own personal inverted halo, silent and stoic.
It is watching her now, pupil wide and black, nearly obliterating the dull-gray iris. Watery red rims. No lashes. She can tell, by its twitchy gaze, the narrow ring of slate, that it is excited. Which begs the question: why? And: by what? The steam lifting from her instant noodle bowl? The tick tack of her laptop keys? Her curled, drowsy form, hunched in bed and trying not to succumb to its magnetic gaze?
Once she threw a wadded up shirt at it in irritation. Grabbed and chucked, no thought just buzzing agitation. She was so weary of its constant regard, sick to death of being observed. The pupil widened, darted, swallowed that shirt right down. Since then she’s wondered what it’s hungry for. The answer, so far as she can tell, is: everything. Socks, paper airplanes, canned goods, lipgloss, fingernail clippings, a hairbrush, bundle of twigs, soap bar, mounds of shoes and clothes from her purge pile, cat turds, lone Barbie head, fistful of spare change, broken champagne flute, used tampon launched by its string, expired carton of half and half, rotten banana—all of these items and more have been accepted without discrimination, consumed with apparent relish and simply gone. Never to be seen again. Which raises a subsequent question. What’s on the other side? And, the chilling follow up: Could something sail over from its side to hers?
She sleeps with a baseball bat under her pillow and the covers over her head, just in case.
These are classic symptoms of hyperarousal, says her therapist when she details her trouble sleeping, the tremors and racing heart, and she thinks, Yeah, no shit, but knows better than to name the obvious culprit. Instead she shrugs, says, Dead sister baggage, I guess, and asks for another blister pack of free samples.
What are you looking at, people sometimes ask, and what can she say? My pet eyeball, invisible to the rest of the world? Nothing, she says, and the eye stares its silent approbation, its pupil a depthless portal, beckoning, just to her.
It’s an eye, probably. Some days it feels like a curse. A threat, possibly. Other days she stares right back and, with a lopped tail of a smile, imagines hurling herself through its ravenous pupil and on, on, into whatever dark world she is certain lies beyond. Just wait, she thinks. Just you wait.
Originally published in the July, 2025 issue 15 of Blood Tree Literature, available for digital or print purchase at https://www.bloodtreeliterature.com/issue-15
CLAIRE HANLON 