The Snag

1.

Nestled in the hollow of the dead tree is a bad man who watches and waits. One can only see his eyes, blue and bloodshot and hardly blinking, amidst the tree's insides.

The fear I hold doesn't concern myself, but my children. They don't notice the man, and although I have banned them from the backyard, I know they eventually will ignore me. My husband doesn't listen. I show him the eyes, and he shrugs at me. He gives me looks now, no doubt wondering if I've lost my mind.

I know I'm not crazy. Crazy people want to hurt others or themselves. Maybe both. I see things on the news, phrases like "murder-suicide" said with nonchalance. Nothing's wrong if all you know is the maelstrom.

2.

The other day I found what I can only describe as a package wrapped in leaves on the back porch. I moved it to the closet, in the space my husband doesn't know about, until the sound of it hiding—like a raspy voice shouting nonsense in my head—became deafening and I ventured a peek. Inside I found a twig bent by its own growth into a near-perfect spiral, a pair of mittens that I recognized as my daughter's, and leaf with the drawing of an eye on it, the lid partially covering the iris.

I placed the mittens in the mudroom closet and disposed of the remains in the outside recycling can before the children got home from school. Outside the eyes stared back at me, and I saw they, too, were half-closed.

3.

I watched the kids ride away on the bus. My son pressed his face against the glass but his face spelled sadness instead of a goofy expression. Like me, always the sensitive one. After, I walked back into the house and stared into the backyard. Only a sliver of the man's eyes remained, twin moons in their last stages, and I walked out to look at them more. I got close to the wide trunk of the tree, until I was staring at them on their level. I didn't need to bend down or step on something. I noticed in the remaining splinter of blue, that they were my eyes.

A hand reached out to me, gray and withered, fingernails blackened. A voice from the tree that decidedly didn't sound like a man or a woman or any human, asked me a question that had no sound and proffered the hand.

I took it.

4.

I stare out at the backyard. Someone else, a woman with sad blue eyes, cleans, makes dinner. She lets her kids out to play sometimes and watches from the window over the kitchen sink. The children don’t interest me; I don't interest them.

The woman's gaze and my own sometimes meet, and I sense something; but our connection breaks a split-second later and she returns to her task. 

Nestled in the hollow of suburbia is an empty woman who watches and waits.