There is a face at the window. Yes, a face. Looking patiently in, not moving or flinching. Patiently interested but pressing for attention, a look of intensity in the uncanny eyes. I look up from my floor, out my dark window and see it. It’s night outside and I have left my blind open to receive some of the cool breeze, an eternal source of frustration for dad.
“Close your blind if its dark outside! You don’t know who is outside. You have no privacy”.
“You never know who’s watching”.
This simple warning flashes through my mind as I make eye contact. However, I also get the weird feeling that the face would readily have waited until I open the blinds in the morning to let in the fresh sun rays.
Still it would have been sitting.
Still looking down at me.
Slightly cocked to my right, its left. Against the darkness it floats, a pale orb upon a sable curtain. The face is an old white, the skin cracked. As if it has been painted in thick white industrial paint then left for years in the sun, fading and cracking. Abandoned by a chain-link fence in a abandoned town, dust swirling, alone. Forgotten by nature, humanity and time.
The eyes open windows into the darkness beyond, completely black. One iris is liquid silver, the other a velvet black. The eye sockets are shadowed. Strands of hair, also black, hang to either side of its face. The far corners of its mouth are slightly twitched up in a parody of a smile.
I flinch, a curse rising in the back of my throat. Yet it does not come out as the face makes no reaction, merely continuing to observe. I sit on my floor, cornered in the middle of the room. The face floats, stationary, yet it seems to loom closer against the blank backdrop of night ink. The eyes are approaching, coming closer, the greasy hair brushing the window, the tip of the cracked nose pushing through the glass as if a curtain of water.
All the while, its eyes never leave me, never move or dart. Its muscles never tighten or relax. The hair does not stir despite the breeze I can hear against the awning. Almost as if it was made out of wax.
My heart flutters, beats, panics. My lungs thicken. Thoughts freeze in the light of the persistent gaze. My vision pounds as if I just stood up too quickly. The face draws closer in my distorted line of sight.
In reality, it never leaves its place.
(If anyone did read this then thank you bahaha, I'm not sure where this came from in my mind or why but it was fun and sorta thrilling to write)
Misha
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