The package on my doorstep had my name, but I definitely didn’t order it. Neither have any of the neighbors. Neither has anyone in town. They’re all from some company called Apotheosis Solutions. They all have every field filled out on the shipping label, which is from the same company. The room number is “Bedroom” for most people in my neighborhood. Mine just says “Crash Pad.” I feel a little guilty, but that is how I think of it. Even the landline is filled out. I almost didn’t recognize the number of my childhood home.
The logo on the box is an A haloed by an eye, just like the one that hides behind my roof. They showed up, as best we can tell, exactly when the packages landed on the doorsteps. There’s almost no footage, the eyes or the package or something, they interfere with all our current photography equipment. Even Janet’s old polaroids show up completely white.
After some searching online, there's one video that convinced me. A doorbell camera clip, that shows a delivery van with that same logo. It pulls up to the house across the street, and an eye emerges from behind its steeple with green lines that spring across the recording as it starts skipping a little bit. By the time the driver makes it to the camera, the recording is a hellscape of black on green. The figure strobes across the screen as whatever encoding device fails to capture its image. Except for one moment, one image, three frames from the end of the recording. It’s still the staticky black on green, but I can see the driver. And I can tell, he’s smiling.
I can’t go into town anymore. The apartment buildings, especially the full ones, are unrecognizable now. The eyes floating outside each window take up too much space, and they bulge as they squeeze into a grid-like pattern that blocks off the outside world from the building within. I can even tell who’s rooming together, as the optic giants double up within the honeycomb pattern, rotating slowly against the lattice of white tissue and red muscle that twists and wisps into the air like smoke, slapping against each other like wet seals. The bulbous orbs are so big that they block everything, only slightly relaxing on the ground. Even then, the building would have to be a solid eight feet higher for the exits to be visible. Too bad for them. At least the slapping shields the world from the muffled screaming.
Except for their shuffling around each home, the greedy back and forth in densely packed apartments and the lazy orbit around homes, they don’t move, with one exception. We found out Max was evicted after we noticed one of the eyes following him to the bar. That’s all most people do now, is drink and look at our new observers. Max’s showed up with the box that appeared in his passenger seat one morning. The box that listed the parking lot’s address, with his license plate number in the apartment line. He was embarrassed to have it following him. Who wouldn’t be? We had joked. It’s a giant creepy eye that follows you around. But that wasn’t what he was ashamed of. Since I live alone, he’s been crashing at my place. It’s a nice distraction, and sometimes I catch myself thankful that there’s a second ocular orbiter around my home.
It finally happened. At first, it was just a few, but it started to come in waves, rippling across the landscape in swaths until the vacuum was almost as unbearable as the initial arrival. They started disappearing. Slowly at first, then rapidly once the news spread, the eyeballs just started going missing. They didn’t vaporize, or shrink into themselves, or pop like balloons. They just drifted out of sight, and then didn’t come back in. You can’t really tell when it’s happening, you just realize that it’s over. I only saw it once, at Janet’s. Her orb, its bloodshot body and the blue ring around its cavernous pupil, all circled above the fences and behind the roof, staring so deeply into me, I could still feel its gaze after it disappeared behind the second story. Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes into hours. Even at the eyeball’s stagnant pace, it was gone too long. When I walked over, I confirmed it was completely gone. So was Janet. And her belongings, her car, even the walls in the house. I suppose I should be thankful that the support beams were still there, but the absence of my neighbor and anything that showed she was there made it feel empty, physically, obviously, but also spiritually. It felt dead. After I doubled over the property twice, I confirmed it was completely vacant, except for one thing. The Apotheosis Solutions box. It was perfectly centered in what used to be the living room, exactly 9 and a half feet from each wall. And it was empty.
I had never opened the box, and neither had any of the neighbors. Neither had anyone in town. But once word got out that that would rid one of their new companion, people and their eyes and the contents of their boxes started evaporating like a creek spilling into a desert. We found out that the support walls sometimes weren’t spared from whatever was taking everything from the open-box households, and several houses and not a few condos fell into various stages of permanent disrepair. Max’s truck was completely gutted. No seats, no steering wheel. Even the engine was gone. I can only hope he was happy he did it.
The eyes floating overhead are few these days. They all showed up one day, and their numbers have only dwindled along with their targets, their prey. Or at least they had. I was in the park, away from my new neighbor when the young couple started yelling. She was screaming something about a broken water. It was touching really, how many people came running to the rescue, ready to take her to the hospital. Except for one. I saw the man sitting on a park bench, maybe a hundred feet away, get up and run off. I saw his hat when he slipped it on, and the logo emblazoned on the front panel. It was an A haloed by an eye, just like the one that hides behind my roof.
