The Hard Part by hil hoover

Living beneath it is hard, but not for the reasons you think.

The fear was heavy in the early days, when the first few rumors of a glaring eye among the clouds were going around. People keeping their kids indoors, or hiding themselves, as much as possible. People stocking up on food and water for an apocalypse, though none could agree on quite what that would look like, what the threat of a single glaring eye entailed.

And the first time the newspaper mentioned a second eye, or a third, or a night full of eyes countless as the stars, we all panicked. It was an escalation, after all. Was this many beings, and not just one? Was it a whole army of strange creatures, waiting to swoop down on us?

And then there were the days when the looky-loos started coming. Paranormal investigators. Scientists. Aficionados of the weird, wonderful, and terrible things in the world. Outside media. Tiktok kids. Anyone and everyone who thought that catching a glimpse of the things might be worth having the things catch a glimpse of them.

And they couldn’t see anything. Nothing at all. Just the setting sun, or the starlit sky, or rainclouds looming low over the roofs of this tiny town. No threat but rain, or ridicule, or disappointment.

That was a pretty scary thing, to know that for some reason, only we could see it.

But even that became mundane, after a while. Yeah, sure, there are weird eyes in the sky. They change places with each other, vary in number and size, and once in a while a new color or pattern arrives.

I’m fond of painting the one that looks like a cat eye, which always moves with the one that looks like it might belong to an owl. I like to imagine what that creature would look like if it’s one creature, or what the relationship between them is if they merely travel together.

I like to imagine whether the things in the sky have scales or feathers, two wings or many wings. If they’re some kind of biblically accurate angel, all wheels and wings, many-eyed or even many-faced.

The hard part, I was getting around to that, wasn’t I?

The hard part is, at this point, that we’re not really frightened any more. Not just of the things, but of anything. How can you be worried about the many everyday stresses and fears when you have THAT looming over you? How can you be concerned with the details of life, when such things are watching?

How do you keep any survival instinct intact when destruction of everything you know isn’t theoretical, or a statistic, but a seeming inevitability?

Could you do it? Could you get out of bed every morning and go for a jog, or work diligently, plan for the future, weed your garden, cook dinner? Just live, like that?

Some days, I spend all day lying in the grass, waiting. For what, I’m no longer sure.