Eyes Ashore

She stared at the waves, flowing back and forth onto the shore. The tears brought her peace, as though his hand were still on her shoulder. A cold, spectral fog crept up from the corners of the window, obscuring her view of the lake and forcing her to pull her blanket back up around her shoulders. She took one last sip of tea, set her cup down and headed outside.

She felt at home here, but home was a dark and sad place. She only felt at home with the dead, away from this world.

This lake house was his favourite place when she still had him, when he was here. The trees were green then, exploding with life and colour. The Sun was bright then, filling the world with light, making the water dance with luminous rays. Now, the water was dark, grey, blocked by fog that hid something far away, imperceptible. When she squinted, she could almost see a shadow, far away at the other end of the lake, at the edge of the world, behind the fog.

Their lake house was where he was happy. The lake house was where she felt the warm embrace of his love. She never really understood what he loved about it so much. To her, it was boring, but now it was the only place she could go. Love’s compass pointed here, grief’s weight pulled her here. Now, this was the place she would come whenever she had time to relax. She would unwind with his memories, at home with her tears. She was unable to feel anything else. No one else understood it. Everyone else was worried about her, she could see it.

She went back inside, and sat motionless at her typewriter again, as if the rest of her days here were looping in together. How many hours had she sat there, staring at that empty white, her mind too full to translate anything into words? It felt like she had been there since the beginning of time. Her fingers hovered over letters, the prose just out of reach. Her body froze, too afraid to put to paper what she truly felt, too afraid to make it real. The words blended together, in a blinding kaleidoscope, no clear structure, no start or end, only a maze of pain.

Before she could grasp what was happening, she was waking up and it was morning. She considered selling her bed for a moment, if she was going to keep falling asleep at the typewriter. She made a mental note to try and get some real sleep tonight, but that too was swept away in her subconscious whirlwind. She made some tea and headed outside, back to the comfort of that undead wind.

As she sat, staring at the other edge of the world at the distant riverbank, the fog growing more and more dense and hazy, she felt a sudden jolt. It was like a death inside of her, a dark and spectral spider web crawling through the depths of her mind. A figure stood far away, at the edge of the riverbank, at the edge of the world, trapped in the fog, his shadow the only shape he truly had. Then, just as suddenly as she felt him, he was gone.

She took a long, deep breath, trying desperately to steady her inhalation. Her eyes drifted lazily down to the water, where they instantly froze. She didn’t have to worry about her breath anymore, she could barely find it. She was trapped in time, breathless, motionless, fixated on the waves going back and forth and the depth of the darkness lurking underneath.

She hadn’t seen it. It couldn’t be real. But there it was, invading her mind’s eye,

A pair of eyes, disembodied, peered up at her from beneath the waves. They had no body, and their shape was fluid, oscillating in the tide of the water passing over it.

The eyes disappeared, and for a moment she thought she was seeing things again, but when she squinted it was like they never even left. And they were definitely looking at her. In her eyes. Begging her.

The eyes were visceral, alive. Vivid in vein and pupil. They remained stuck in her eyes, as though in an intense negotiation with her soul. As the eyes begged and begged, their desperation mounting, tears built up, flowing out of the eyes and blending into the stream of the lake.

As her eyes joined those in the water, following suite in tears as though joined to them by their gaze, she remembered the tears she’d cried a lifetime ago when he died. She had wanted to look at him, to gaze at one another, but now she knew she wanted so much more. She wanted to hear him, she wanted to feel him. She felt dead without him.

Their tears kept flowing together, mixing in the grandness of the body of water, connected in their painful longing. All at once, like some demonic manifestation, all her desires darkly assimilated. The bright blue sky began to flicker, casting the lake in sporadic darkness, before a black cloud faded into the sky, blocking the Sun completely and sending the world into night. The sky roared with deafening thunder, screaming across the world and demanding to be heard. Some imperceptible force reached up from the surface of the water, a wind on her shoulder. A ghostly hand, chillingly empty, no boundaries of skin and no heat of flesh, passed through her like a spectre, freezing her in time. The eye’s tears flowed, draining the nerves of all life, until the tears became dry, cold, dead. Red. Blood poured from the eyes, a final sob staining the lake in crimson. She sat, paralyzed, trapped in a ghostly purgatory, black sky above her and red lake below.

Her eyes had no tears left to cry. She screamed. The eyes from the water, bloodshot, closed, seemingly for good. Her screams begged them to return. Her screams begged for it all to go back. Her screams wished all the pain could disappear. Her screams wished to go back in time.

The Earth rumbled beneath her, sending ripples through the lake of blood. From the depths, a head slowly emerged through the surface of the water, in the center of the concurrent ripples. A corpse, skin peeling, bone decomposing, floated out of the water. Bathed in moonlight, it floated into the dark sky, towering over her, blood dripping from its feet and back into the infinite pool of red. A mass of bodies, each more dead than the last, emerged from the lake of blood, floating up to join their deceased brethren in the night sky. Slowly, as though floating through time itself, they approached her.

Her screams, unphased by fear but coming from the depths of pain, finally shattered her frozen curse. She returned to her body and ran, needing to be anywhere else, away from the truth that he was gone. She got into her car and once again, took a deep, long breath. The bodies, blocking out the moon, approached her in the rear-view mirror. She drove away, heading to infinity, heading to nothingness, driving into the emptiness of not feeling anything. She turned onto the path leading away from the lake houses, heading back to the world. As much as she wanted to avoid going back, she had to leave. She drove, across the edge of the lake, eyes fixated on the floating death that approached behind her.

And just like that, in a swift twist of fate, her tire missed the road, sliding off the path. Paused once again, frozen in time, she floated in her seat as the lake of blood rushed up to meet her. In that moment, she was one with the spirits. She was one with the death of the lake. She was with him again.