All of My Animals Keep Staring at the Sky.

I have two animals. A cat, and a parakeet. Interesting choices, I know. I got the cat, Merry, when I first moved into this house. I inherited the parakeet when my cousin John died. Molly was a baby then. She has grown considerably since. I like to think they are both very happy, living in this house. They aren’t quite friends, but they aren’t enemies either. In my book, that's a win. 

I first noticed this strange phenomenon when Molly had escaped her cage. I was scared she had just flown out the window to never be seen again, but instead she had just sat on my lawn, her feathered face reflecting in the sunlight. She was motionless, looking straight up. I walked up to her slowly, hoping she wouldn’t see me. Or maybe she would see me and not be frightened, so that I could pick her up and put her inside. Back in her cage. 

I approached, cautiously, slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements. Even after all this time I still didn’t understand parakeets that much, I was always more fond of cats. Eventually I reached her, slowly moving my hands into a cupping position, and picked her up. 

She didn’t move. Just let me pluck her from the ground. As I moved her body, I noticed her head stayed in the exact same position, cocked up at the sun, her unnaturally glassy eyes looking straight up. Not leaving that same spot in the sky, until her line of sight was broken, and she was safely indoors once more.

The second time this occurred, I was in my kitchen, the usual cup of coffee in one hand. I was looking out the window and admiring the early morning sun when something caught my eye. On the ground in rows and rows, sat squirrels. So many squirrels. All sitting perfectly still, like a taxidermy exhibit, the little bushy tails straight up. I watched for minutes, pondering this strange behaviour. Finally, clouds began to hover, obscuring the beautiful clear sky, and the squirrels dispersed. 

When I saw my cat exhibit this behaviour as well, I snapped. She was looking out the window, pupils dilated.

I was tired of this. Molly, the squirrels, and now Merry. Something had to be up. Was there some kind of plane or drone up there? Maybe it made a high pitched whining that only animals could hear. I got out of bed, and closed the blinds.

I was sitting in my kitchen, my phone open to so many tabs, desperately looking for anything. I sighed and put the phone down, head shaking. I needed some kind of explanation, I couldn’t just be imagining this, and those squirrels… In perfect unison, rows of them, all looking at that one spot. My phone rang.

“Hello?”, I said, my voice audibly tired. 

“Hey Sam. Haven’t heard from you in a while, just checking in.”

“Oh right, I’ve just been so busy with work and my animals, I haven’t had much time.” 

This lie rolled off my tongue easily.

“Of course, yeah. I thought as much. Hey, you're never going to believe this. I woke up yesterday and there were some deer in my yard, and they were all looking straight up at the sky. I even walked over there, and I was standing an inch away, and they still didn’t move. Crazy right?”

I gasped softly. I wasn’t alone.

“You too? I saw the same thing. Well, something like it.”

“Really? Oh, hey I’ve got to go, my boss is calling. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bye,” I said quietly, my brain looking for anything, any random factoid or news article, to give a rational explanation for this thing. My brain hit a wall. What mattered was that I wasn’t crazy. From my point of view, this was a step in the right direction.

I woke up from a restless sleep, dreaming of infinite walls, and passing through them into a chamber without distance. I was dripping in sweat, and noticed I had kicked the sheets off the bed, thrown them into the corner. 

They almost seemed to be covering something, almost like they sat atop a statue, covering its horrifying visage from me.

I did not lift them.

I walked downstairs, my mind filled with endlessness and somehow so much matter clumped so close together, it was nauseating, claustrophobic, my own mind a narrow tunnel, barely able to breath. I tripped on something. My cat, staring at something unseen by my kind.

She made no noise, tipping over as if petrified, no more than a clay sculpture erected in place of Merry.  My arms flailing, my ankle swollen, as if I had knocked into a wall rather than my feline friend. 

I fell out the open window. 

Luckily, it was the first floor, and no glass was broken. I just fell into it, popped out the screen, and fell, thousands of blades of grass sticking out of the ground, poking me from all angles.

I screamed, the grass cutting into my flesh, poking holes in my underwear, ripping and tearing cloth and skin alike. I dragged myself onto a patch of dirt, blood pouring out of the gashes in my flesh. I felt something rip underneath my skin and I yelled again. My vision was flooded with tears. I wiped my eyes, and looked around me. 

Every blade of grass in my yard was at a ninety degree angle, stiff and straight. The patch I had fallen into wasn’t even bent. It was as stiff as every other patch, not a blade out of place. 

I looked again and I knew, every fiber in me knew, the grass wasn’t pointed at the sky. It was pointed at something in the sky. And I saw it too.

Maybe felt is a better word. I felt its presence, and a mixture of utter awe and terror filled me. I was dumbstruck. How can something so great, so massive exist? How can something fill me with such horror, and instill in me something else as well. Not dread, but almost, the feeling that something was close at hand.

I felt everything slowly clicking into place, like when you put a light switch halfway between on and off, and you can feel the tension, feel the way it’s slowly moving and at any moment it will click into place.

 I felt that, standing on my lawn, every part of me bleeding, staring at the thing in the sky. 

I stood there only a couple hours, but when the clouds finally covered the sky, it was dark, the thing shrouding our world in an unnatural black, a dull haze barely pierced by phones and lamps. 

I am writing this now, getting everything ready to share, hoping there are some people left to read it. I look to my left. A man stands on the sidewalk, his mouth agape, staring. Even as I look away I can feel the thing looming above my skull.

I dare not look up, dare not think about it even as I do. I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know. Its body is so hideously large I believe it does not hover above earth, but earth hovers in it. It is but a shell, engulfing earth in black. But that isn’t what scares me. What I think of now, although I know I should not, for fear my sanity cannot stand it.

What scares me isn’t the trees, the grass, the plants, gazing eyelessly at the object. I do not tremble at that great mass overshadowing the earth. What scares me is that it does not gaze at me nor the earth. 

The great darkness of the black, the great un-light. Its gaze rests in the opposite direction. That is what scares me. The great beast gazes at something, something we cannot. 

The black gazes starward, and the stars look elsewhere.