Observers

Roxy pulled the curtain aside and peeked out the window. Hundreds of observers milled around, some waddling along slowly in the street, while others perched in trees, on her mailbox, or on her car. A half dozen observers lounged in her yard, sunning their fat, little, purple, music-note-shaped bodies in the grass. When they weren’t observing, they always looked so aimless and docile, like their attention couldn’t cause the slightest harm. She told herself she wouldn’t clap today. She couldn’t clap again. Last time had been too dangerous.

“Don’t clap for them, Roxy. You have to promise me,” came the voice of her mother behind her.

Roxy turned to look at her. Roxy viewed her mother as an utterly bland woman: a little short, a bit pudgy, graying hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, dressed in ill-fitting scrubs for her work. Yet, it was like she could read Roxy’s mind. “I won’t, Mom.”

Her mother folded her hands over her chest, cocking her head slightly. Roxy knew this posture always preceded a lecture. She stood, shrugging her backpack onto her shoulder, absently pulling her long auburn hair out of the way so it didn’t get trapped between her jacket and her bag.

“Roxy, I know it feels good when they observe, but it’s dangerous—”

“I know, Mom.”

“Don’t forget what happened to the boy from your class—”

“I know, Mom.”

Roxy opened the door and slid out before her mother could say anything else. She sighed, feeling the urge to clap as soon as she set foot outside. One of the observers sat in the middle of the sidewalk in front of her, gazing into the sky, its giant singular eye unfocused. They really are strange little creatures. Their bodies were oval, about the size of a softball, with short, stubby wings and small, webbed feet. The body gave way to a long, skinny stalk, on which rested a single, giant, bulging eye almost as big as the body itself. The purple bodies had no discernible mouth or nose. They seemed to live purely off whatever they acquired during observation. She didn’t even know if they breathed.

She walked around the observer, cutting through the long, uncut grass of her yard. Three observers sat on top of her old beater car, but unlike birds, they didn’t poop all over her windshield, which she was grateful for.

“Go on! Shoo!” she said, waving a hand at the observers. They looked eagerly at her, clearly hoping she would clap, but when she didn’t, they flapped their little wings, bobbing off in awkward-looking flight only to land in her yard and go back to their general state of stupor.

She got in her car and gave the horn a small honk, which sent the observers behind her car to slow waddling. In the year since she had gotten her license, she couldn’t even remember how many observers she had ran over. Hardly anyone she knew even worried about running them over, because they just disintegrated into nothingness when they died, but she always tried to at least give them a chance by honking. She looked in her rearview mirror and saw one on her trunk, staring straight back at her. Everyone pretended to hate them, even Roxy herself. Yet she knew most people secretly liked them, or at least liked the way it felt when they observed. If everyone hates them so much, why is everyone clapping all the time? I even caught Mom clapping once! Roxy smiled to herself and put her car in reverse.

As she drove the mile-and-a-half to school, she passed hundreds—maybe thousands—of observers. In residential areas they lounged on roofs, toddled about in yards, or rubbernecked on sidewalks; in commercial areas they lined the porticos of restaurants, huddled in doorways, and nestled in half-finished construction sites. She observed at least three people clapping: a middle-aged man sitting on a motorcycle in his driveway, a teen girl who lounged underneath a tree, and even a boy who couldn’t have been more than eight on the sidewalk a few blocks from school. In every case animated observers swirled around the clapper, flapping their wings and bobbing their heads. Roxy hoped all of them had the sense to cut it off before attracting an agitator. She worried most about that little boy. Kids didn’t know when to quit sometimes.

She pulled into the parking lot of her high school, where thousands of observers congregated around the aesthetically pleasing school complex of the well-to-do suburb she lived in. After parking the car, she opened the door and for a moment basked in the beauty of a crisp fall day. The trees lining the walkway to the front door glowed with orange, red, and yellow hues while the breeze kissed her cheeks and gently played with her hair. Birds belted their morning songs with daring bravado.

“Hey Rox! You still sleeping?”

Roxy turned and saw that her best friend, Kylie had pulled in next to her without her noticing. She sat in the driver’s seat with her window rolled down, resting her forearms on the edge of her window.

Roxy smiled and shook her head. “Hey, girl.”

Kylie launched into a fast stream-of-consciousness recap of her morning so far as she jumped from the seat, pulled her bag with her, realized she forgot to roll up her window, returned to her car, dropped her keys, found her keys, started her car, rolled up her window, turned off the car, and closed the door. None of the activities interrupted her monologue.

Roxy smiled, listening to her ramble. Other kids were slowly funneling from the parking lot into the high school. As Kylie talked, she looked at her phone and squealed. “Rox! We have a few minutes before we have to go in. Wanna do a clap routine together?”

Roxy felt her face flush. She very much did want to do a clap routine, but she told her mother she wouldn’t, and she also wanted to clap less often. Or at least she wanted to want to clap less often.

“Oh come on, Rox, we aren’t stupid. We know when to stop. Plus we wouldn’t even have time to do it long enough to attract agitators.”

Roxy felt giddiness in her stomach at the remembered sensation of the observers’ attention. “Okay, Kylie. But just for a few minutes.”

The girls set their bags down in a pile and stood next to each other in the grass between the parking lot and the entrance to the school. Roxy caught Kylie’s eye, and they nodded to each other.

They clapped their hands in unison. The sound echoed slightly in the morning air. Three observers took notice, their glazed eyes suddenly focusing. Two came waddling over on the ground, their webbed feet shuffling through the grass, while the third flapped its wings as it flew slowly toward the girls. Roxy and Kylie had done clap routines together many times, and they always got more observers more quickly together than by themselves. Roxy clapped three times, followed by Kylie’s three-clap response. Next, they launched into a complex, intertwined clap pattern that caught the attention of dozens of observers. Even before the other observers had gotten close, Roxy felt the euphoric warmth of observation. The focused gaze of the two observers at her feet, paired with the gaze of the observer who bobbed in the air, sent a little shiver of pleasure through her.

As she clapped, more observers made their way over, a few on the ground, a half dozen weaving through the air in her direction. A bright blossom of gratifying heat started in her stomach. It felt like a mellow rising of both anticipation and satisfaction at the same time. She saw the intense focus in the eye of the observer floating in front of her. Watching clearly gave it some kind of pleasure, but its gaze made her feel like the most important person in the world.

Kylie caught her eye, her face flush with exhilaration, her mouth wide in a smile. Seamlessly, they started interspersing their claps against each other’s hands, and the intensity of the observers’ gazes increased, causing Roxy to shudder in delight. The other observers were pushing against each other now to get closer to them. Roxy’s vision tunneled, and the purple bodies and yellow eyes of the observers became vivid and bright. Her body felt hot, so pleasantly hot, but also like a spotlight being held too close. Sweat broke out on her skin, and her shirt stuck to her back. But the heat, it felt so good, it—

The bell rang, jarring Roxy from her clapping. Kylie’s hand stopped mid clap. She chuckled, looking at Roxy sheepishly. “Uh oh. We better get in there.”

Roxy’s body trembled as she picked up her backpack. Dozens of observers had been watching them, enraptured, plying her with their strange heat. She wiped sweat from her brow, feeling the thrill leave her as the creatures slowly dispersed, realizing the clapping had ended. Are they feeling them same emptiness I always feel when I stop? And that scary desire to start again as soon as I can?

She didn’t like to think about how much she liked observation. Craved it, even. The only thing she could compare it to was when she performed in gymnastics and the crowd admired her skill, fitness, and beauty. But when she was honest with herself, observation felt much more intense and … it was much easier. Her coach had told her she’d been slipping lately, never seeming to fully concentrate or to give her full effort at practice. A familiar little seed of longing, absence, and anxiety took root in her chest as she walked into school. She sighed, waving goodbye to Kylie as she turned down the hall toward her first period class.

Roxy’s mother, Jenny, sat on a lumpy sofa in the nurses’ break room at the hospital, propping her feet up on a desk chair. She’d eaten her salami sandwich and potato chips and now sipped an energy drink, wondering why she had agreed to pick up this overtime shift. Daytime television hummed at low volume in the background, but she hardly heard it. Her thoughts flowed like the tortuous rapids of a river, bouncing over and around rocks. Are Roxy’s grades okay? Why does she talk back so much? Is it normal? Does she care about gymnastics anymore? Will that deadbeat ex-husband of mine help cover college? All her thoughts came with a low level of distress and unease, but the thought that really bothered her, the one that caused the salami sandwich to churn in her stomach in very unpleasant ways, was: Are these damned observers going to ruin her life?

She stewed about it, feeling helpless and frustrated. At every level of society, governments, companies, and advocacy groups had tried to get rid of them. There had been clean-up efforts costing billions, pledge drives, neighborhood watches, even religious ceremonies to try to cleanse the world of the little purple pests, but they simply could not be eradicated. She’d read an article once that said even if they destroyed one, it just reconstituted itself elsewhere a few minutes later. She didn’t know if that was true, but it seemed like everyone now just accepted the irritants with a shrug.

To be fair, they didn’t eat, drink, excrete, kill, threaten, or damage property. They just sat there, looking dopey and half asleep until they heard clapping. Then they observed. And as long as the observer knew when to stop, they just went back to their sleepy existence. But sometimes, well … sometimes people didn’t know when to stop. And then they attracted agitators. And she’d seen what agitators could do.

Jenny shivered. The face of her closest friend from college, Adrienne, mother of four, who had been under the gaze of an agitator for over eleven minutes two summers ago came to her. Jenny had gone to see her in the “recuperation center,” the renamed and repurposed psych facility now overrun by gaze-damaged people. Adrienne, who their whole girlfriend group had always joked never aged despite having four kids, had sat slack-jawed in a corner, drool running from the corner of her mouth, dressed in scrubs with no waistband, in a room with no door handles. Jenny had sobbed at the sight of her, thinking about all their shared memories, and most of all, thinking about her kids and her husband. She’d left and never returned, despite the guilt it created in her not to visit.

She looked at the clock. Her break ended in six minutes. She sighed, thinking she should probably go pee since she had no idea when she’d be able to again once she went back on shift.

The staff bathroom door had been closed when she came in to the break room. She thought someone had just left it closed after using it, but now she noticed a light coming from under the door, and as she got closer, she could hear a muffled noise coming from bathroom that sounded like … clapping.

She knocked on the door. A dismayed woman’s voice stammered, “Just—just a—uh—minute.”

Jenny sighed. Whoever it was had obviously been clapping, but why? Just practicing? No observers were allowed inside the hospital, even if they milled around the grounds outside constantly. Suddenly, a webbed purple foot stuck out in the space under the bathroom door.

“Hey!” Jenny yelled. “Is that an observer? You can’t have that in here!”

“Uh, no it’s—it’s nothing!” came the voice.

She recognized it was the voice of her friend Savannah, a nurse she had been the preceptor for a few years ago when she’d started her career at the hospital.

“What the hell, Savannah?” Jenny said, opening the door.

When she entered, Savannah had her hands around the neck of an observer. Damp strands of hair stuck to her face. “Jenny! Hey, this—this is no big deal—”

She quickly twisted the neck of the observer, who evaporated into little squares of dust. “Don’t worry! The dust, it disintegrates in like two minutes! No one will even know—”

“You can’t have that in here! What are you thinking?! I should write you up for this!” Jenny stared at her, shocked.

Savannah’s looked at her with pleading, bloodshot eyes. “Please. Please don’t tell the unit manager. I’ve already been written up twice in the last year. If I get a third, they’ll fire me—”

“You brought an observer into a hospital! Do we even know if those things are sanitary—”

Savannah suddenly grabbed her hands. “Please, Jenny! I’m begging you! I can’t lose my job! We can’t get insurance through Ryan’s job and the twins are in daycare—”

Jenny shook her head, feeling intense anger well up inside her. The anger was only partially directed at Savannah’s stupid behavior; the larger portion went toward the observers. They were just … everywhere. Taking over everyone’s life.

“If I ever see you do that again, I’m going to report you to the unit manager,” Jenny said in a low, menacing tone.

Savannah sagged in relief. “Oh thank you Jenny, tha—”

“Don’t,” Jenny said through clenched teeth. “I precepted you and I taught you to be a responsible and competent nurse. And here you are, acting like a damn fool in the staff bathroom.”

Savannah looked at the ground. “I know,” she murmured. “I’m ashamed. I—I hate it.”

“Get the hell out of here. I’m going to use the bathroom in peace for the remaining”—she looked at her watch—“two minutes of my break. I’ll see you on the floor.”

Savannah shuffled out, her face beet red, her eyes downcast.

Jenny closed the door and listened to Savannah leave the break room. She burst into tears as she watched the dust swirl around her and disappear.

After school, Roxy drove home, feeling glum. Three observers disappeared under her front wheels, but she hardly noticed. On days her mom worked a twelve-hour shift she usually left her something in the fridge to warm up for supper. After she ate, she would go to gymnastics practice for two hours, come home sore and tired, shower, do her homework, and then go to bed. The plans for the night filled her with a strange dread. There was nothing wrong with her life. She was popular, athletic, smart, and knew that she turned heads when she walked down a hall. And yet, she noticed more periods of feeling empty. “Listless” was a vocab word from a few years ago that had always stuck with her. That was it. She felt listless most of the time.

She pulled into the spot where she always parked and absently turned the car off. When she opened the door, she noticed a chill in the air. It felt good, like a little mild discomfort to remind her she was alive.

She looked down at an observer in her yard. It stared at nothing, its single yellow eye unblinking. She gave it a nudge with her foot, and it waddled a few steps away. The phone in her pocket felt suddenly heavy, and she took it out and checked the time. If she was quick, she could do a little clapping before she went to practice. Her breath quickened as she thought about it. Mom wouldn’t like it if she found out, and it would be the second time today, but she could do it in the backyard away from nosey neighbors, and she could make it really quick. Didn’t she deserve a little bit of happiness? Observation always picked her up. It would probably help her have a better practice because she would be in a better mood.

She unlocked the front door and walked through the dim house. When she turned on the lights, she noticed a neatly folded note on the kitchen island table. The house sounded so quiet her ears rang. When she unfolded the note it sounded like timber falling. In her mother’s tidy handwriting it said:

Hey Girlie. Salmon in the fridge for supper. Should be home before you get back from practice, unless report goes long. When you get back from practice throw your clothes in the wash with the other stuff and start a load. Love ya! Mom

An observer sitting in the kitchen window that faced the backyard caught her eye. It stared at her, as if beckoning her to come. Her footsteps clicked loudly on the kitchen tile as she walked to the backdoor.

Four observers lounged in her backyard, but two others sat perched on her neighbor’s fence, and she knew more would come. She slipped off her shoes and stood barefoot, the cool grass feeling pleasant between her toes. Another observer she hadn’t noticed stared blankly from the tree limb where she had carved her name when she was nine. That made her sad, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. The listless feeling remained, and she eagerly anticipated the heat of observation. She took a deep breath and started to clap.

When she integrated some of her gymnastics moves, she noticed it attracted more observers, so she started off clapping to get their attention, and then did a simple roundoff while she continued to clap. The observers in her backyard moved toward her in an urgent, penguin-like waddle, and the ones from the fence and tree flapped down to see her. As she clapped, the heat began to stir in her, and it felt good. It felt soothing. Most importantly, it just felt like something.

She continued to clap, ducking and jumping as she went, using small, simple pieces of her floor routine that anyone at the gym would dismiss as novice moves, but the observers seemed to find amazing. Maybe it was because they were so easy to engage—their tastes so undiscerning, their expectations so low. But she found herself loving their gaze, bathing in it, not just taking physical pleasure, but psychological satisfaction as well. Why did everyone else seem so damn hard to please? These observers gave her attention for just … clapping.

As she clapped and moved, a large swarm circled around her, like a purple whirlwind, moving in such coordinated patterns it was almost as if they were part of the routine. Her mouth opened and she let out a brief sigh of pleasure as sweat beaded on her forehead. The warmth felt so good it was almost unbearable. She knew she should stop, but maybe she could go just a little more? She’d never really pushed the boundaries, and she’d known people who had gone much longer than this without attracting an agitator.

She kept clapping, sweat running from her damp temples, making her shirt unpleasantly damp in her armpits. I’ll just throw this in the wash, too. No big deal. Just a few more seconds. She kept clapping, moving, tucking, leaping, all awash in the warm gaze of dozens of observers. They pushed against each other, angling for space, trying to get within seeing distance of her routine. The flying observers ran into each other, vying for space in her sphere.

The sweat poured from her and her vision blurred, the purples and yellows of the observers and their eyes smearing like spilled paint. Her chest rose and fell in quivering pleasure as she clapped. The intense heat felt like being close to the sun. Or maybe she had become the sun.

Then a large, bloodred globe invaded her vision. In a panic, she wondered if somehow she had been transported closer to the sun. She stopped clapping and wiped her eyes. Before her stood a large, circular creature about the size of a bull. It had similar features to the observers, except instead of a long, thin neck, its large yellow eye stood in the center of its round maroon body. It flapped with its wings, hovering in place, its gaze trained on her. It was an agitator.

Now the gaze of the observers all trained on the agitator, and the absence of their gaze felt so cold. Or maybe the agitator’s gaze felt cold. Or both.

She tried to run, but the hypnotic gaze of the agitator held her fast. All she could manage was falling to her backside and weakly trying to push herself away with her heels. Her body shook with cold as its frosty gaze held her. Its yellow eye stared with such menace, such utter contempt and disgust, that when she tried to scream, the sound died in her throat. Her hands felt like blocks of ice. She couldn’t clap even if she wanted to now. The gaze felt magnetic, almost gravitational in its power. None of her attempts to tear herself away succeeded, and her hands were too numb and uncoordinated for her to cover her eyes. In the utter blackness of its pupil, she saw her reflection, a mirror image in the enormous nothingness of space. The reflection of herself in its eye felt like an ice shard into her brain. Finally, she screamed.

“Jenny, you have a phone call,” said the unit manager.

“I’m finishing med pass. Can you get a number and I’ll call ba—”

The unit manager looked at her seriously. “I think you better take it now.”

Jenny set down the cup of meds she’d been holding and picked up the phone located in the nurses’ station. They weren’t allowed to have cell phone while on shift, but people knew if they needed to they could generally get through to someone by calling the hospital and being directed.

“This is Jenny speaking,” she said.

“Are you the mother of Roxy Parsons?” came a formal male voice.

“Yes.”

“There’s been an accident—”

#

After forty-eight straight hours, Jenny had to leave the hospital to get supplies. Roxy remained mostly catatonic; on occasion her eyes tracked light, or her head turned toward sound, but mostly she sat and stared blankly at nothing. Jenny fed her, and she would chew, and when she sat her on the toilet, she would pee. The basic functions worked if prompted, but she remained totally mute, and the vacant stare of those gray eyes hurt Jenny more than any time they’d ever flared at her in anger. In fact, she would give anything to see her get mad again. Or sad. Or excited. Or anything.

Jenny told herself she was going to take a shower, gather her supplies, and maybe take a nap before she returned. Sadly, she knew there was no rush. Doctors hadn’t figured out how to treat gaze-damaged patients yet. It was such a new condition they basically just shipped them off to the recuperation centers that took care of them. Sometimes they would improve there, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with treatment, and instead appeared to be some mechanism inside of the gaze-damaged person. Jenny didn’t have much hope; her friend Adrienne hadn’t uttered a word since her gaze-damage incident.

Jenny stared out the window, watching the sun slowly inch downward toward the horizon. She’d cried so much her eyes felt like fruits squeezed of all their juice. Now she just felt tired and empty. The minutes crept by. Occasionally, cars passed on the street. A bird perched on the ledge of her window planter box at one point. Jenny stood, a plate with apple slices in one hand, and the knife she’d been using to cut them in the other. She couldn’t remember why she had even approached the window in the first place.

Two observers waddled into her yard, and a small ember of feeling began to burn. She looked at the small, purple creatures and their aimless wandering. They floated around, hoping for someone to clap, reacting to stimuli, but possessed no volition of their own. As she watched them, the creatures’ presence caused that small, red coal of anger to give way to the bright orange flame of hate. The plate of apple slices fell from her left hand, but the knuckles of her right hand turned white as she gripped the knife tight.

She walked out into the late afternoon sunlight. It had warmed up a little, and if she had been in a different frame of mind, Jenny may have even thought it beautiful outside. But she only saw the observers with their glazed yellow eyes. Jenny stopped in her tracks. She’d seen observers disappear into the neat little squares of dust that evaporated in a few minutes. What was the point? She needed to confront the monster that had done this to Roxy.

Jenny began to clap.

She had to do it awkwardly, her left palm cupping the outside of her right hand where she carried the knife. But it seemed to be enough. The two observers looked up at her, suddenly rapt. Three more swooped down slowly from a tree nearby. The slapping sound echoed in the otherwise quiet, sleepy afternoon.

She kept clapping, rhythmic and unhurried, feeling some of the warmth of being observed. She’d only clapped a few times in the past, and she had to admit, it felt good. But this time she resented the warmth, and it only fueled her anger. The back of her hand became reddened as she clapped it harder with her left hand, gritting her teeth against the sensation of pleasurable warmth as more observers joined. The small, purple bodies jostled each other, trying to get a good look at her, and their heat felt like a spotlight. Jenny sweated, bringing her hand down angrily on her other hand, the skin moving beyond red to a purplish bruise.

Now the observers formed a floating circle around her, bobbing up and down, circling like a barber’s pole around her. She clapped so hard her hand began to swell. She blinked away tears she hadn’t thought her eyes could make anymore, refusing the pleasure of observation, instead focusing on the pain in her hand. And in her heart.

A strange line in the air appeared just behind the flying observers. It looked like a tear, a few feet up in the air, and Jenny saw a large, round, dark-red body push through it, as if squeezing through a tear in a tight screen. Jenny had never seen an agitator in real life before. They were ugly and malicious, not pitiful and harmless-looking like the observers. The maroon skin looked thick and rough, like elephant skin. Aside from the small, fleshy wings, the whole body encased a giant, yellow eye, with a large black pupil.

It leveled its gaze at Jenny, and all the observers turned their attention toward the agitator. Jenny stopped clapping and focused on the steady ache of her battered hand. She felt the agitator’s malevolence, its utter contempt for her and every creature like her. Her body felt suddenly chilled to the bone and she shook, but she didn’t even try to look away. Instead, she stared defiantly into its eye.

A swirling image began to form in the emptiness of its pupil, and Jenny felt like icicles were accumulating inside her. The image inside the hollow nothingness of its eye was her, but she didn’t care, and she swung the knife forward with every bit of strength she had. The blade plunged into the darkness and blood sprayed from the wound, coating her arm. She felt the frigid liquid burn her skin, the line between heat and cold lost in the intensity of sensation. She pulled the blade out and stabbed again. Then again. The agitator collapsed to the ground but did not disappear like the observers.

Her teeth chattered and her extremities went numb. As the agitator lay on the ground, she noticed all the observers had changed. Now they were flushed a dark red, seeming energized by what they’d seen, their hungry eyes drinking in the violence. They looked like mini-agitators, watching her with malevolent, frigid gazes.

Her breath froze as she panted, and she brushed ice crystals from her eyes. She looked down at the knife frozen to her hand in a block of ice. Other normal observers were flying in now, watching what was happening. She heard a siren in the distance as she stabbed the closest mini-agitator in the eye. It did not disappear like usual but spurted the same freezing blood. She knew it was hopeless. She couldn’t blind them all, but she didn’t care. She’d blind as many as she could. As she stepped, she knocked a block of ice from her foot. She blinded another, and another, and another, taking their gawking stares from them.

Thousands of observers swirled around her, some purple, some red, all with the vicious yellow eyes, all drinking in the intoxicant of voyeuristic violence. When she couldn’t move her neck anymore, she pointed her eyes down at herself, covered in blood and ice, and remembered Roxy. She remembered her as a toddler, her little red pigtails and her dolly clutched in her hand, those big gray eyes staring up at her in wonder. A single tear ran from her eye and froze.

Thank you for reading my work! Feel free to share, subscribe, and/or comment. Please check out my dark fantasy series, LUNAR LIVES on Amazon—the first book, SCAB AMONG THE STARS is available for a dollar. Seriously. One dollar. Please buy it here You can also buy the sequel, ECHO FROM THE VOID here