by Samuel Smith
It was a lovely area, nice and quiet. Perfect for someone trying to put the pieces of their life back together like a cosmic jigsaw. Tucked away in a corner, nobody bothered him, and vice versa.
He’d been there a few months when he first noticed the sign. It was a large red triangle featuring a detailed picture of a human eye, and the words, ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ in red paint. It still appeared fresh, judging by the drips. He took a photo and asked a few of the neighbours about it, the first time he’d spoken to them beyond a hurried hello, but nobody seemed to know anything.
A few weeks later he was coming back from the pub, stumbling on the kerb and fumbling through pockets for his front door key. He found an old bus ticket instead and he flung it into a neighbour’s hedge in frustration.
The momentum caused him to lose his balance and slip off the kerb entirely, landing on his back and gazing up at the night sky. Staring down at him was a colossal, disembodied eyeball, 10 times the size of the moon and twice as bright. No lid, no lashes, just a white orb floating in front of the clouds with a dazzling green iris and pink veins snaking across the watery surface.
He awoke the next day with a mouth-like loft insulation and no memory of how he got home.
Plodding downstairs, he opened the living room curtains, and the light streaming in made him wince. He slipped on a pair of scuffed sliders and stepped out holding a box overflowing with bottles and cans. He’d only emptied it yesterday.
He dropped the things into the bin one at a time, glancing around at the neighbour’s houses. Softly closing the bin lid, he turned to go back inside, and dropped the box, covering his slack mouth with his free hand. The pupil of the eye seemed to bore into him with a fierce and frightening intensity.
Scrambling back inside, he yanked every curtain and blind shut, then sat on the edge of the sofa, hands between his legs and his hood pulled tight around his head.
Had he drank too much? Had he left his drink unattended at any point? Was it just the stress he was going through at the moment, with everything being finalised?
He was struck by a sudden thought and began searching the house for his phone. He eventually found it wedged between the sofa cushions and tapped at the screen until he found what he was after.
He zoomed in on the photo of the neighbourhood watch sign. The eye on the sign matched the one in the sky exactly, down to the snaking veins on the surface.
He swiped to his GP’s number and negotiated the robot to get to a woman who sounded like a robot.
“Can I have an appointment with a doctor please?”
“What’s it regarding?”
“I’m seeing a huge floating eye in the sky, and it’s watching me.”
A short pause.
“The doctor can see you at five past 2 on Thursday the 18th of July.”
“That’s three months from now!”
“Mm-hm. If the eye gets bigger, or you start seeing more eyes, just ring back and we’ll try and bring your appointment forward.”
Click. He looked at the phone as though it were a used condom and chucked it onto the sofa.
Creeping over to the window (in case the eye could hear him?), he peered between the slats of the blind to see the colossal green iris burning into his. He stepped away and let the blind pingback.
He messaged his boss and told him he was taking tomorrow as a mental health day.
The reply made some reference to him being back on the market. He didn’t reply.
Later on, he needed to buy some essentials, so he waited till dark before leaving the house. Even then, the eye seemed to glow like a demonic night light. Scurrying along with his head down and his hood up, he looked exactly like the type of person he’d cross the road to avoid.
With each skyward glance, he noticed that the eye was never behind buildings or trees. It was always in the best position to observe him as he hurried along, though, at the same time, he never saw it move around in the sky.
Stumbling through the front door, he dropped his shopping in the hall and kicked the door shut behind him, exhaling like a gas leak.
He slumped down on the sofa, hair matted to his forehead, and googled ‘giant eye in the sky’. There were 330,000 pages of results. He scrolled down the first page and tapped on a link at random.
The page loaded. It was a creaky-looking forum, all different shades of grey like a battleship.
The most recent post was from January 1997 and read:
“This is gonna sound crazy, but I can’t leave my house without seeing this giant eye looking at me. It started after I had an argument with a neighbour and took his bin. It’s been happening for about 3 months now, and I feel like I’m losing my mind. Can anybody help me?”
The comment underneath read:
“This is the neighbourhood watch. You are now under surveillance. Until such time as we have decided you have atoned for your wrongs, you will continue to be watched. Any further infringements will be dealt with accordingly. You have been warned.”
He read the reply again. Was this someone’s idea of a joke? Then he saw the avatar for the user. It was the exact same image as he’d seen on the sign outside his house.
Leaping to his feet, he stormed out of the front door and over to his neighbour’s hedge. Plunging his hands into the tangled thicket of branches, he began searching for the bus ticket he threw away last night. He walked up and down the street, sticking his hand into the hedge at random intervals, all the while throwing dirty looks into the sky. A handful of people walked by, eyeing him suspiciously, but he barely even registered they were there.
Finally, after about 20 minutes of frantic searching, his arms looking as though he’d been fighting with a wild cat, his hand closed around a scrunched ball of paper.
He brought it out and unfolded it carefully. It was the bus ticket he’d discarded yesterday.
“Ha!”, he yelled triumphantly, brandishing it at the sky. With two long strides, he bounded over to his bin, threw open the lid, and flung it in.
“Now fuck off!”, he screamed and ran back inside the house, the front door banging like an exclamation point.
Over the next few days, he barely left his house. He twitched the curtains to check if the eye had gone away but it hadn’t.
After the fourth week of unanswered phone calls and ignored door knocks, he couldn’t bear it any longer. He fought the front door open past a brown and white mountain of letters, marched into the garage, and dug around until he found a bent litter picker and a dusty bin bag. He then strode out into the close, snatching up flattened coke cans and soggy crisp packets and stuffing them into the bag. Every now and then he would steal a glance up at the eye, its green iris shimmering like a fish’s scales and the veins moving like fault lines across the glassy surface.
He grew more frantic, jabbing at soiled sweet wrappers and mangled milk cartons when Lynsey appeared and nearly tripped over him, clutching a pile of papers in both hands.
She looked him up and down, taking in his unkempt facial hair, stained clothes, and ashen complexion.
“Jesus Mark, you look like shit. You on community service now?”
He concentrated on grabbing an empty beer bottle by the neck.
“I’m doing something selfless, Lyns. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”
She groaned and rolled her eyes.
“This kind of shit is exactly why I wanted to do it over the phone. Why aren’t you picking up, anyway? Something to do with your”- She gestured at the bag and litter picker- “extra-curricular activities?”
Without waiting for an answer, she thrust the papers in her hands towards him. He reached out hesitantly and took them.
“If you could get those signed ASAP, my solicitor can finalise everything.”
He looked blankly down at the papers. She shrugged and turned to leave.
“Lyns, wait.”
She glanced back.
“Blue or black ink?”
“Fuck off, Mark.”
She walked away, shaking her head.
He didn’t even look at the papers, just screwed them up and shoved them into the bag at his feet.
He sat on a nearby wall and gazed up at the giant eye. For the first time, he held its unblinking stare with steely determination.
“Yeah, you and me both”, he said.
As he sat on the wall holding the bag, a sudden gust of wind caught it like the sail of a ship. He grabbed at it with his other hand, but he was too slow. The force tore it from his grasp and tossed it down the street, spilling its plastic guts all over the road.
He shouted and dived forward, but the empty bag floated upwards in a strange cyclone. The litter he had spent the last hour picking up was now strewn everywhere and he had no intention of picking it up again.
He rang his GP as he walked home under a sky full of watchful eyes.
Samuel Smith is a former Creative Writing and Scriptwriting student. His stories will make you laugh and think, and he enjoys experimenting with conventions to create offbeat scenarios and characters.