Chapter Two
       page 7

     “Edna, as we anticipated, you are resistant to the idea of a superior race. Therefore I am going to provide you with proof of one of the capabilities that differentiates us from humans. There is no English word for this. I will now track the path of your eyes.You are standing above me and you are looking to the right.”
      She looked down at the floor, though she could not see it.
     “Now you are looking at your feet.”
      Looking straight ahead she concentrated all her mind on keeping a steady rhythm, leafing the negatives one over the other as was required.
     “The eyes are in front. The eyes are straight in front.”
      She started to sweat. Her glasses slipped down her nose.
     “I know where you are. I know where you are looking. I know where your eyes are going before they get there, like the flight of a bird or a flying ball.”
      She looked at the timer. Six minutes left.
     “The eyes are looking right.”
      Feeling panic rising in her throat, she closed her eyes. The negatives were in the second tray and the time would soon be up. Then she could turn on the lights and be sick. She looked again at the timer.
     “Looking right.”
      Eyes closed, nothing. Eyes open, he knew where they were pointed. If she could go through life with her eyes squeezed shut she could get rid of Henry.

here was a very long list of psychiatrists in the yellow pages. She stared at them morosely. What would she tell the doctor? “There is a little man living in my crawl space reading my mind.” The good doctor would then say something like “What exactly do you mean by crawl space? Hmmmm?” It would be impossible not to laugh.
      Over the last few days she seemed to have gotten used to the idea of a nerd-from-hell-Peeping-Tom-thief stalking her. Why not just add ESP to his talents? Because it wasn't ESP. ESP was two people concentrating with all their might to come up with some vague guess about what one was desperately trying to ‘send’ to the other. Not some voice announcing her every move like a baseball game.
      She hesitated. She vacillated, wavered, made up her mind and then unmade it. She muttered to herself through her shower and supper and lay in bed still undecided until she fell asleep. At one a.m. she woke abruptly feeling intense, overwhelming fear. Once the light was on, she was able to calm herself. The rain was pouring down. She could hear it overflowing the gutters onto the deck. The steady drumming on the roof just over her head comforted her. It was a good soaking rain, the kind gardeners and farmers love. When she began to feel drowsy again, she dragged her bureau against the bedroom door and eventually fell asleep with the light on.

ecause it was still raining, she stayed inside most of the next day. She sloshed around the kennel, cleaning the runs and then holed up in her bedroom. Her house was two stories with the bedroom upstairs. The possibility of Henry lurking below her made her uneasy on the first floor. Pretending that nothing was out of the ordinary she worked at filing her negatives. She ate her lunch upstairs, too, and then turned on her computer, which was in her bedroom, to check her e-mail. There was mail - from Henry. Here is what she read:

“Once upon a time, millions of years ago, there was a family of people living on a big island. There were also huge, scary, people-eating animals that lived there. These animals ate all the people they could catch. They were so fast and so strong that if they saw a person, he was as good as dead. Only those people who were never, ever seen survived. The hungry animals got better at seeing them and faster at catching them. And only the smallest, fastest people were left. The sharpest-eyed, swiftest people-eaters survived and prospered.
      Over thousands of years, the little people became so sensitive to being seen by the people-eaters that they knew when one was even thinking about looking at them. Since they had to be so quiet and careful, they couldn't forage openly in the woods. Instead they found that they could watch the squirrels and mice and birds storing their food and take some when they weren't looking. They even took leftovers from the big people-eaters, whenever the coast was clear.
      One day, boats full of very big, strange men landed on the island. They made camps and gathered fruits and roots. And they went out in big groups and killed the people-eaters with axes and clubs. The family of the little people watched all this. These strangers were big and slow and very, very insensitive. You could stare right at them and they never noticed. They stored more food than all the mice and squirrels put together. The end.”

“Once upon a time there was a little runt named Henry. He lived by terrorizing people who lived alone. He made them think they were crazy and then stole all their stuff. One day he ate a Fudgesicle stuffed with strychnine and died a terrible, agonizing, well-deserved death. The End.”

Copyright © 2000 by Jay Arraich. All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright © 2000 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com