The Eyes That Don’t Blink

They were not headlights. Headlights move. These held. Two red points over the river at Point Pleasant, stacked just off-true, the way eyes are never perfectly level on a face.

Claire pulled onto the shoulder because that is what you do when a light does not behave. She killed the engine. The radio kept a sliver of static, a frequency with no station, as if the car wanted to be polite.

The points did not enlarge. They did not recede. When she looked away toward the bridge, she could still see them, burned on the inside of the look, and when she looked back they had not taken the opportunity to become something explainable.

Her phone unlocked itself. The front camera opened. In the preview she was correctly lit by the dash. Behind her, in the back seat she had not checked, the same two points hung in the dark, closer, still not blinking.

She did not turn around. Turning around is how you agree to be seen.

She started the car. She drove. The points stayed in the mirror at a constant size for eleven miles, which is not how distance works. At mile twelve they were gone, and the radio found a song, and Claire understood, with the calm of a person finishing a form, that she would look for them again.

Attention is the first warning. The second is wanting another look.