The Eye

She woke abruptly to the smell of plastics burning. Dirty stinky dark fumes. It was still night. She should have been alone. She lay still and quiet and listened in her nest of blankets like a mouse in grass.

She heard muffled sounds in her apartment. She got up, wrapped a housecoat around her, and opened her bedroom door. The old wood floor creaked predictably under her feet.

He was there. He must have cut a spare key long ago and been holding on to it. He was in her kitchen. She walked down the short hall of her apartment to the living room.

All the lights were on. Every photo album had been pulled off the bookshelf and lay open, some laying with plastic cover sheets still pulled from pages, photographs removed. Some pages were pulled from books entirely.

He was in the kitchen lighting her photographs on fire and dropping them into the sink.

“Adam” she said softly coming up behind him.

“Sarah. I needed to get rid of these, Sarah. I love you. If you won’t be with me then none of this happened and we need to take the photographs and make them not exist anymore if you are cutting me out cutting me out then we need to take these. I need to take these. We don’t exist.”

Sarah suspected that Adam was bipolar but it might just be drugs. They had lived together for a year and a half in this apartment prior to his decline. He had hid everything from her: losing his job, the drugs, pawning her books for pocket money, until she kicked him out. But he wasn’t ready to let her go.

“Sure we do, Adam”, she said gently. He spun around to face her, old school steel Bic lighter in his hand. The kind where you can really turn up the flame. He was sweating. It struck her that he was closer to the knives than she was. Adam was wearing a dirty black Radiohead T shirt and dark well-worn jeans that would have fit a man of his height, had he not lost all that weight. Sarah noticed that he still had his sneakers on and that they had tracked mud into the apartment, as if he had cut across a lawn after sprinklers had run.

Her eyes darted to the video phone in the hall. The receiver was ripped off the unit, torn cord dangling like a tail. She wouldn’t be able to call for help but The Eye would see. Everyone has The Eye. It can recall information and play music but safety is one of the primary features. The Eye turns on when something interesting happens and it records it all. If video or audio indicate that the resident may be at risk of violence, The Eye will call the police. But that affects your rating. She looked over to the entertainment center where The Eye sat and was relieved to see the light was not on. It would not look good that he was here again. She had been diligently volunteering at the Mustard Seed to improve her rating after the string of domestic calls in the months after he left.

Sarah looked back to Adam and saw that he had been watching her, probably reading her thoughts. He lunged at her and she turned to run. She tried to turn the corner into the hall and slipped into a small maple table, the one she used to put his flowers on. Adam grabbed her throat from behind and started to squeeze. Sarah dropped her body slightly to try to elbow him in the nuts but instead hit him in the ribs. It was hard and it was enough. They scrambled and Adam loosened his grip.

Sarah turned to him, her hands around her throat where his had been. He was crying.

“I love you so much Sarah so much Sarah I love you so much” Adam sobbed.

“It’s OK baby, you’re safe, I love you too” she lied. Her stomach dropped as she looked over to the red blinking light of The Eye observing it all.