by Kaleb Nation
She sighed. “I’ve done so well at this for years now. But the car…I just can’t ignore the car. You crashed a car. You ran a car over the edge of a cliff, and now it’s just impossible for me to act like that didn’t happen. Why, Michael? Why would you do that?”
She lifted her shoulders in exasperation, and any words I might have prepared in my defense raced out of my open mouth like butterflies. One of the officers glanced toward the minivan, but seeing the pantomime of what appeared to be my mother’s fiery wrath, he grinned and continued his work.
“I… I don’t know,” I stammered.
“You don’t know?” she said. She laughed, like my reply was absurd.
“You’re a genius, and you don’t know why you crashed your car,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you didn’t know something before.”
“I know it happened,” I said, trying to pick up the pieces of my story that her revelation had shattered to bits. She rubbed her temples, trying to squeeze the tension out.
“I know the man tried to kill me,” I continued. “I know exactly what I saw. I didn’t make that up. And that’s how the car crashed.”
She sighed, releasing her fury and confusion. At least she’d gotten all of her yelling out. Even though she couldn’t read eyes like I could, she had a way of telling things from my face. I wished I could have just told her what she wanted to hear, and she knew that, which was why I saw her expression soften.
“Come on,” she said. “I want to believe you. So you better not be lying to me.”
She studied my face for a few seconds. Her lips twisted up.
“Maybe,” she said, “you just think it happened. Maybe you hit your head and now you’ve imagined all that stuff when really, it’s all from delirium.”
A weak response, especially from her—mental alarms shouted at me to protest. I knew that if I did she would believe me, and might even jump right out of the van that very minute and go with me to look for clues the police had missed. That was the way my mom was. She’d figure it out based on my word, and ask for evidence later.
But the last officer had just started her car and was driving off, and my mom and I were the only ones left. It was late. So I chose to lie.
“Maybe so,” I resigned. She saw past it immediately but we both knew that rationally, her theory was the more solid one. After all, I had hit my head pretty hard while careening through the woods. Maybe I’d left the client behind hours ago, and all the extra parts were made up in my head during the aimless wandering after the crash?
Without anything left to say, my mom turned the key and started to drive.
Part of me hoped she was right.
* * *
The night’s ordeal had exhausted me, so as soon as we got home I went straight to bed. I heard my mom’s key ring rattle as she hung it onto the tack on the kitchen wall, and suddenly I was aware of just how much keys echoed in the house. It was funny and bitter at the same time—how long had I thought I’d been making it out undiscovered when my mom had been patiently locking doors and closing windows behind me? I felt like the world’s most bumbling spy.
This is going to make work ten times harder now, I caught myself thinking. But it was true. I needed to figure out entirely new escape plans.
And like that, I was already thinking of work again. I’d nearly been murdered—or at least thought I’d been nearly murdered—and already work was back on my mind. I was an addict.
I heard my mom’s steps as she laboriously climbed back up the same stairs she had likely dashed down a few hours earlier. Of course I’d had no scruples about sneaking out for work. But that guiltlessness only lasted until I realized how many hours of rest my mom had missed for me. She didn’t need anything else to add to her current list of reasons to lose sleep.
My head pounded wickedly, the heartbeat in my ears overtaking the silence my house soon fell into. I wanted to pore over all that’d happened between the two times I’d gone to bed, but I forced myself to leave it alone. I was starting to feel sore, probably from the swerving I’d done in my car. Sleep crept up slowly, though just as I became certain I’d never get any rest before morning, I was gone.
The moment I drifted off I found myself awakening again—this time, somewhere other than my room. Dreaming.
I was falling backward. Not the typical of dream where I was simply dropping through the air but more of a steady plunge into darkness behind me. It was like I was being carried on a feather through a black mist, until the invisible ship on which I floated entered into a place of whirling gray. This gray soon became watery colors, then formed shapes, then all of a sudden I was back in the woods.
I was running through the trees, this time without the protection of my car. Where the branches and sticks had once torn paint from the car’s doors and sides, they now ripped into my skin, forcing tears into my eyes.
And my finger…there was now a heavy, silver ring around the third finger from my thumb on my right hand, just like the white ring I’d seen on Mr. Sharpe but with three vertical cuts instead of one. It was throbbing and bleeding so terribly that I held it in my left fist to stop the flow of red liquid, like the band itself was digging into my skin. Still, even as it dripped across my shirt, I couldn’t stop.
Every few seconds, I looked back, seeing something moving between the gray towers of trees that stood like prison fence posts—a flash of muted blonde hair, a gleam of silver. It made a rustling noise, diving from side-to-side, its breath even louder than my own. I could hear it against leaves, my steps heavy but my pursuer’s nearly silent.
I was vulnerable without my car’s layer of metal between me and the relentless man. So I continued to run, not daring to stop even though I spotted countless tree trunks I could dive behind. My pursuer was always four steps behind me—just far enough so he couldn’t reach me, but always so close I could hear him and the torn spots in his coat that fluttered in the wind.
“We’re almost there,” I heard him say, voice like a whisper beside my ear. “The lights.”
I slid to a stop, but only because I’d reached the edge of the cliff. It was hazy this time, darker than it had been in real life, but I could tell where the edge dropped into nothing. Rocks I’d skidded against went flying over, clattering against the metal wreckage of an upside-down car below. Its wheel was still spinning.
I whirled around. Mr. Sharpe had stopped at the edge of the trees. His fingers were spread open, long claws in a brilliant array. There was little emotion on his face, no reaction or feeling for what he was about to do, like I was merely an item for him to cross off a list.
He stepped forward. My feet slid back an inch and I could already feel where the rock ended. Mr. Sharpe didn’t grin, didn’t acknowledge that he had cornered me.
No words. No warning or threat. He just moved forward, fingers twitching and curling with anticipation.
I stepped back again but my foot slipped against the dusty edge. Before I could catch myself, I heard my shoes scrape, the gasp of my own breath, and then I stumbled into nothing.
Birthmark
I expected to feel my spine colliding with the rocks, to be flipped over as I slammed into the stones…even the man’s dagger-like fingers pricking my skin, if only for a moment. But the only thing I felt was my own pillow, pulled from under my head and slammed against my nose a second later.
“Zombie attack!” came the yell of my sister Alli, battering me with the pillow as I rolled over and shouted at her. She beat me again but I managed to grab the pillow, throwing it across the room where it crashed with a line of tripods and sent them flying.
“Are you insane?” I exploded, freeing myself from under the sheets and raising my hands in defense. She held my other pillow as a shield.
“That’s what you get when you don’t turn on your alarm,” she said between laughs. Alli was eleven, a mirror of my mom with messy blonde hair and brown eyes. She was very awake, even though my mind was still hopping back and for
th from my nightmare to the oh-so-thankfully-opposite world I was in now.
“Why didn’t you at least knock?” I protested.
“I did knock,” she replied. I glared at her.
“Knocked very softly,” she corrected. I threw a pillow at her but she was a good dodger. My heart was still beating rapidly beneath skin drenched in sweat—I could still hear the horrible breathing of Mr. Sharpe as he chased me. I rolled over miserably, wishing the entire night could have all been one long nightmare. The white bandage still wrapped around my arm told me I wasn’t so lucky.
“You’re up, finally,” my mom said, appearing in the doorway with a cordless phone in hand, her palm over the receiver.
“Phone call, for you,” she told me. Her voice didn’t sound too sharp—at least not as bad as was to be expected the night after I’d crashed my car, though she did regard me with a gaze of slight dissatisfaction. Why was she even letting me take clients today? It seemed odd, until I realized that she was so entirely convinced that Mr. Sharpe had been my imagination that she wasn’t worried about more murderous clients. I put a hand out to take the phone but she kept it out of reach.
“We’re not gonna talk about what happened last night,” she said, looking at the gash on my arm. “But don’t think just because you paid for that car that I’m driving you to clients or to school.”
I would have argued but she obviously wasn’t in the mood for me to defend myself.
“So we’re skipping The Rules at least?” I said, hopeful.
“You are absolutely incorrect,” she said.
“After all I’ve been through?” I protested. We both knew I’d need money to replace the car; luckily I had plenty of other, cheaper cameras. But there was really no use in trying to get around it. I knew The Rules. Alli knew The Rules too, especially the third one about my pay going to her college fund. She giggled lightly and rubbed her fingers together like she was shuffling through a stack of cash. My mom shot her a glare and the little troll darted out.
“So yeah,” my mom said. “Tammy is waiting. Your sister might afford Harvard after all.”
“It’s not Tammy, it’s Mrs. Milo.” I spat. “She’s the only one with our house number.”
“Either way, take care of it.” She shrugged. “Eye Guy.”
She tossed the phone to me and started to leave, but turned back to glance around the room again. Perhaps a quick eyeball of my stuff for weapons of mass destruction was enough to make her feel like she was doing a better job of parenting. There were stacks of lights with cubical diffusers, tripods freshly knocked over, two or three cameras and a shelf holding lenses lined up like a cabinet of drinking glasses. This was where most of my birthday and client money went: that shelf of glass and tubes I used to take pictures.
These, however, were hardly noticeable when placed against the most obviously unnatural part of the room. Almost every inch of every wall was covered with photographs, going along the edges of the furniture and even onto the ceiling around the wobbling fan. They were pasted up carefully with double-sided tape; their edges lined up as perfectly as a ruler—my best photos from my countless albums and computer folders. The crinkled edges of the papers made it look like the old house was peeling, and the splattering of color and black-and-white rectangles sometimes took the form of a mural.
Every picture was of a person: men and women and children, old and young, of every ethnicity I’d come across in LA, captured through the lens of my camera. They were all portraits but none had names, because the names didn’t matter to me, most of them cropped from the neck up. I didn’t really care about their faces so much either; what was important were their eyes. Most people might have easily thought it was just an art project, something I did to convince myself that I was unique and creative. But it was far more than that. This was my life of study: my Great Work.
Or maybe they were more proof to the world that I really was a fine, budding psychopath. The phone beeped to remind us someone was on hold. My mom lingered but I refused to answer the phone while she was still there. She huffed.
“On my way out.” She disappeared and I swung the phone up to my ear.
“It’s Michael.” I got to my feet and nearly tripped over my blanket that had fallen to the floor in my sister’s mini-skirmish. The aged house creaked under my feet.
“Michael!” came the voice of Mrs. Milo. I sighed—of course it was her. She’d been my teacher in fifth grade, but now she worked in the office at my high school. Like the game Duck Duck Goose, there were many things I wished I could have left back then.
“Have you done something to Tammy?” I asked.
“Listen, there’s no Tammy,” she whispered, words racing in her native Alabama drawl. “I didn’t want your mother to get suspicious or anything, so I faked an accent.”
“She knows who you are,” I said. “You call here a lot. It’s getting creepy.”
I glanced at the caller ID. “You’re calling from a Tammy’s number. Please tell me—”
“It’s my cousin’s phone,” she said. “I figured when you didn’t return my calls you might have accidentally blocked my number.”
“That feature is commonly activated by accident.” I wrestled with my jammed dresser drawers. “Now I’ve got to get ready for school, and I’m sore from a car crash, so—”
“I need you to do one more check of my husband,” she whispered frantically. “He didn’t come home until three AM last night. Lately he isn’t home at all. Like he’s avoiding me.”
“No idea why anyone’d do that,” I thought aloud.
“I have a bad feeling,” she burst. “I think he’s running off with some other woman.”
“I already told you he isn’t,” I replied. “We did this last month, right? Remember?”
“But it’s worse now,” she insisted. “He’s going out for golf Thursday evening. I want you to come with me. I’m gonna go surprise him. You can snap a picture of him from the car when he sees me. I’ve got it all planned out.”
“I’m busy Thursday.”
“With what?” she asked wildly.
“I’m recording snail sounds,” I said, exasperated. “Come on, you’ve already gotten me to look at eight photographs and I’ve met him three times. I’m sick of seeing the man.”
“I’ll pay more,” she said. “I’ll double your rate.”
“No.” Doubling the rate wouldn’t help me when it ended up as my sister’s money.
“I’ll…I’ll get you a new camera,” she begged. This offer stood for 0.03 seconds and I hadn’t declined it. She leapt onto it as her chance.
“The one with the most megapixels!” she blurted. “I know you love megapixels!”
Her bribes weren’t swaying me, though they were tempting. It wasn’t money, so that was a loophole in the The Rules, right? She sounded so distraught I knew she’d soon be selling her house to pay private investigators if I didn’t put her mind to rest.
“Fine,” I relented, slamming the drawer shut. “Don’t bother me after then.”
“Not once,” she said. “And if he’s cheating, I swear I’ll do it quick, with a tire iron or—”
I hung up before she could incriminate me any further. Adults—that was still a strange type of work. It wasn’t like I advertised. Word of mouth had just gotten around with the people at school, and then that had spread to me needing a website so people didn’t show up at my house. My reputation of being right was too solid for them to resist knowing the truth. Not long ago, I’d only been approached by classmates at my school. But adults? Their secrets wrecked more than just social lives.
This was how sturdy my confidence in my skill was. There were no mistakes, ever. I’d lived with it long enough that it didn’t feel odd—it was just a part of me, the same way that some people could pull a train with their teeth or other could gauge distances miles away down to the inch. I knew eyes. I didn’t know the parts—the lenses from the pupils from the zonular fibers. I knew eyes. Girls would brin
g me photographs of their boyfriends and I could see if he loved the person who took it, or secretly hated her, or had secretly cheated on her and didn’t regret it and was planning to break up with her that afternoon. Business owners would have me lurk at an opposite table in a coffee shop while they met with potential investors so I could detect any hints of treachery.
And that was the true nature of my Great Work. Because the photos on my walls weren’t just pictures of people’s faces lined up in no particular order. If everyone could read eyes as I did, they’d see just how plainly sorted they were. In those eyes—every single one of them—I could see exactly what the person had been thinking and feeling at that moment, printing their Glimpse on paper. With the careful attention of a scientist, I had divided emotions onto my walls. Joy, next to my bed. Sadness, going around the door so people couldn’t see them when they first walked in. On the wall with my desk were pictures of eyes showing Anger, and across from that were photos of Fear—those faces had a way of disguising themselves, but I could see straight through that. My ceiling, patchiest from missing the most pieces, had photos of faces showing Love. Eyes of love are the hardest to find. Love is the emotion most-often faked.
One day, when my walls were finally covered, I planned to take all of them down and turn them into a book. I’d have every human emotion ever expressed in it, and show the world just how many shades there were between them. Like primary colors mixing, joy and surprise might be relief, or sadness and love could be bittersweet. Maybe then my obsession wouldn’t seem so crazy.
But that was years away. For now, my skills were just a gift; when it came to people like Mrs. Milo or Mr. Sharpe, sometimes I wished I’d unwrapped this one in secret.
I tossed the phone onto my bed and scooped up my clothes. A shower sounded perfect.
“Girlfriend?” my sister asked in the hall.
