The Boy Who Sees More:

It always starts at bedtime.

Because of course it does. Nothing existential ever happens at two in the afternoon when I am upright and logical, fully caffeinated, shielded by daylight.

No, the universe prefers the moments when my body is soft with exhaustion, when my mind is slack,

drifting toward sleep.

That’s when the whispers come.

“Mama,” Kai murmurs, voice feather-light, fingers curling into the blanket. “The eyes are here.”

I do not like this sentence one bit.

I do not move.

I do not want to ask—because I already know.

But I do.

“The eyes in the dark?”

My voice is steady, careful.

Kai nods. “They don’t blink.”

Something cold moves in my chest.

“Where?” I sit up.

He points:

The corner of the room

The slats beneath the dresser

The places where the light doesn’t reach

Where I see nothing—but he does.

“They don’t move?” I ask, keeping my voice even.

He shakes his head. “They sit there watching..Waiting.”

I want to tell him there is nothing there, but when I meet his gaze, I know that would be a lie.

“Do they ever leave?”

He pauses, considering.

“Sometimes,” he says. “But they always come back.”

I start sleeping with the hallway light on after that one.

Eventually, the eyes stop bothering him.

But sleep—sleep is still a battlefield.

Kai, my little philosopher, my lawyer trapped in a child’s body, has turned bedtime into a symposium, a debate stage, a place where logic and reason press against my motherly authority, bending it to the point of fracture.

Tonight, I tell him:

“Kai, you can’t just stay up forever. I don’t want you to grow up and say, ‘My life was terrible because my mom never taught me healthy habits.’”

A good argument, I think. Sound. Parental.

Kai, unblinking, considers it from the other side of the bed.

Then, with all the patience of a man explaining something very simple to someone very slow to grasp, he says:

“Do you realize you’re assuming that I’m going to grow up?”

My stomach drops.

Not if I grow up. Not when I grow up.

"You’re assuming that I’m going to grow up."

I blink.

Something in me misfires.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

He shrugs, pulling the blanket up to his chin. “Some people don’t.”

The air in the room tilts just a smidge. The walls stretch, narrow, and begin tell their own stories.

I swallow deeply, and then force a laugh.

“That’s a grim thought Bud...”

He only murmurs under his breath a barely audible: “I guess.”

He does not argue further. Does not press me with more words.

Just closes his eyes, like the conversation never happened.

Sleep does not find me that night.

One day, without preamble, Kai tells me:

“Mama, you glow.”

I glance up from my book, frowning. “I what?”

“You glow,” he repeats, as if this is obvious, as if I should have known. “It’s gold.”

A flicker of something deep and stuck moves in my spine.

I try to sound normal. “Since when?”

“Since always.” He shrugs, chewing absently on the tip of a pencil. “Everything does. People, sounds, places.”

Something shivers in me, again. A thread pulled too tight.

“What else do you see?” I ask.

He tilts his head. “Colors have shapes. Sounds have weight. Sometimes, if I listen really hard, I can tell what something used to be.”

a pause-

" If I stare at the eyes long enough, even they remember"

The creatures never really left him.

But at some point, instead of just seeing them—he began to create them. Sketched them into notebooks, named them, gave them origins and fates. And when he began coding, he breathed life into them in a new way, brought them from the void into movement, and into being.

One day, he draws me.

And something is… wrong.

The eyes. There are too many. Deep, endless, black pits, swallowing light. No whites. No pupils. Just dark, dark, dark.

“Kai,” I say carefully. “Why do I look like that?”

He studies me, quiet. Measuring. Then he gently, like an adult trying to break difficult news to a child says—

“Because, Mama… that’s what you really look like.”

I start looking in mirrors differently after that.

Start noticing how my reflection doesn’t always move at the same time as I do. How my shadow lags, stretches, bends at angles that don’t make sense. How sometimes, I feel like I am being watched too—

Even when I am alone.

One night, I ask. “Kai… what do you see when you look at me?”

A hesitation.

Then, softly, like the answer is a wound in his mouth—

“You dont really want to know” he says.

Suddenly—

I do. I want to know how the entire world looks through his eyes. I want to understand all the things he has waited until I was mature enough to hear him speak about. All the creatures, and beings he saw.

Kai sits beside me as he begines to take my request seriously. The air feels strange, still, but heavy. Like the house is waiting to settle. Kai's eyes dont break contact. "You know what happens next..." he says.

My heart drops and I can only say the word "No...", even with each flooded memory-

I remember.

I remember-

“You can go now,” he says. Neutral, Strong and sure of himself.

The walls pull away, folding into the dark.

I don’t ask where. I don’t ask how.

Because suddenly, I remember.

I remember the night I swallowed the pills.

The water glass tipped beside the bed.

The way the silence swallowed me whole.

I was never losing time.

I was out of time.

And Kai—Kai knew.

He has always known.

I look at him, my beautiful, impossible son, my golden-glowing child, and for the first time, I truly understand.

The eyes in the dark weren’t watching him.

They were looking for me.

Because I am one of them.

One of those left in the dark watching and waiting.

As if the memory itself was unfolding some years of tension, I began to dissolve. I felt my spirit float warmly away from my body.

The last thing I see before I unravel—

Is Kai, steady, untouched by fear.

He has done this before.

He will do it again.

And he will be okay.

Even without me.

Even beyond me.

Even after I am nothing but the thing in the corner,

the whisper at the edge of sleep, the presence in the dark that does not blink.

And then—

I let go.

-----------------------------------------------------

Black screen washes over like a clumsy scene change

and suddenly-

I wake up.

I wake up gasping, like something has pulled me from deep water.

The room is too quiet.

The air too still.

I know this feeling. I know this place.

It is dark.

My head fills with confusion, pressure pressing against my skull. A wave of something thick and invisible, wrapping itself around my shoulders, pressing behind my eyes. I exhale, pushing every ounce of air from my lungs, steadying myself for whatever comes next.

A voice stirs the silence.

I freeze.

The body beside me is small, younger than it should be.

A memory claws at the edges of my mind. A ghost of something that wants to be held onto.

“Mama,” Kai murmurs, his voice feather-light, arms sprawled foward curling into the blanket.

“The eyes are here.”

I do not want to ask—because I already know.

A warning flares inside me. A memory thrashing to surface. A voice—not my own—whispers: Don’t ask. Don’t let it start again.

But the words are already spilling up my throat.

No.

I try to scold myself, to bite my tongue, to swallow the question down before it can take shape.

I try to remember.

But I don’t.

The fog thickens, spilling over my shoulders again, crawling between my ears.

I rub my eyes, heavy, heavy, so heavy.

Like clockwork, through the haze, I hear myself speak—my own voice, distant, preloaded, inevitable.

I try to fight it, but it’s already too late.

A spell of dizziness presses into me, and the words spill from my lips.

He is so matter-of-fact.

“The eyes are here.”

He mutters again, voice already drifting into sleep, like it doesn’t matter.

I do not want to ask—because I already know.

But the words press past my lips anyway.

“The eyes in the dark?”

The world tips, spirals-

...And the loop begins again.