Jack maneuvered his car up the mountain, eyes trained on the sky. He’d driven this half paved, pothole filled, road so many times it was muscle memory. A left turn at the residential intersection, a right, and up the switchbacks he went. Jack opened the window and stuck his head to side to get a glass free look at the cosmos above. 

When Jack parked, uncaring of the designated lines, he breathed in. The summer air was thinner here, crisper, cleaner, burning in his lungs like he’d inhaled menthol instead of the usual industrial smog. He took his eyes off the sky only long enough to get into his trunk and fish out the Pelican case that housed his telescopic camera. He’d taken out a bank loan to buy the best and most transportable on the market. He considered it a business expense, or at least, a would-be business expense once he finally got the photo he was looking for. After all, meteor showers were the perfect cover for UFO’s.  

The massive lens attached to the camera body, two tripods holding up either end. Jack had hand build a hold on top of the lens’ tripod to surround the circumference of it perfectly. Several sandbags holding the whole thing down from the wind. Once it was set up, it wasn’t going anywhere. He’d made that mistake before and had spent the morning after in the blackberry bushes digging his old camera out. Jack looked into the view, adjusting the ISO to keep the camera’s eye clear of grain, lowering the aperture, to see as much light as the night sky would allow. A whole city’s worth of light pollution pooled below, summer smog burrowing holes in the atmosphere so only a camera could see the beauty. 

The meteors were burning bright up there. Cascading across the sky in swift and unbreakable movements. The stars still pinpoint their familiar constellations. Ursa Major directing Jack to Polaris and back again. 

There was nothing strange for a long while. Just the cool, pine scented, breeze blowing the last of the mountains retained warmth down to already the humid city. Then, the stars disappeared, leaving his viewfinder as if he’d blinked and they had never existed in the first place. 

Dead batteries?

 Jack poked his head away from his camera’s view. No stars. In fact, there was nothing at all. The light pollution from the city was gone. Probably because when Jack looked down, the city had disappeared too. He looked to the grass, nothing. Eyes trailing up, he discovered he no longer had legs. Sticking his hand in front of his face, produced only the phantom limb of a feeling. Vague remembrance of what used to be there but no longer was. Empty, bodiless, a fleshless void trying to fill itself with a colourful imagination. 

When Jack’s vision continued to the sky, the stars had reappeared. One by one, they returned blinking like dim satellites, getting bigger every time they came back into view, no, they were moving closer, the stars were blinking. At him. Looking. At him. 

As it got closer, light emanating from the glowing UFO’s, he got a look at its shape. They were orb like. Bright white iridescence swirling like trails of motor oil on pavement. Shifting from blue tints to deep reds, yellows, all scorching his irises. That’s what they looked like. A cataract eye. It even had an optic nerve that it moved from. Trailing, flying, through the sky towards him. 

There was something colossal out there, something those eyes were attached to, but in the dark, beyond the approaching glow of the approaching eye, it was unknowable.

The eye was blindingly close now and there was a static growing in his mind. An electric hum, microphone feedback, a pastor preparing to speak a spell to remake the reality of the world.  If he had a body capable of movement, the sound would have knocked him down to his knees in worship. 

This is the closest being to God Jack had ever seen.

And it stared back.

Bright, too much light, no shadows, nothing but a white abyss, set on replacing the darkness. It was full of life, full of nothing but his own face reflecting back at him through the swirls of colours he could name that formed into new colours, ones he’d never seen before, let alone knew how to pronounce. 

He wants to look away. He wants to touch it. He wants to feel if it feels like his own eye. Rubbery and squishy when he puts his contacts in. Wants to know if those colours have ever formed an iris. If it’s ever matched his own.

Jack watched as the eye’s colour pulled toward him as if already tethered. The colour, still shifting its hue, bulged outward. A string of light trailed behind it like an incoming meteor. In the eye’s reflection he watched as his body reformed. His hands extended, beckoning the creature closer. His eyes wide and crying. Mouth set into a silent scream that rang like sirens between Jack’s unhearing ears. A limb touched down on his fingertip. The light got impossibly brighter where it met him. Then broke apart. A shattered mirror showing Jack every facet of his own screaming face before it shot out and stuck him. 

Sharp wisps of light clawed flesh from bone as gore ran rivers down his reflection and was sucked up by the light. An ephemeral link feeding the outpouring of his life into the eye.  It wobbled in the air, goop dripping from it like his tears were the only thing it couldn’t consume.

Jack couldn’t move, but his body got closer to the eye. Not Jack, it. It wasn’t his body anymore, but it stepped back. Not it, Jack. Too strange too familiar, too “Jack” to not be. No, Jack wasn’t moving. Jack no longer had a heart but it beat faster, faster, in a chest that was not his, was his, that felt pain. So much pain. 

There was nothing there. No words, No worries, No wonder. White, encasing, consuming. Nothing there. Jack breathed. Menthol sensation coating his senses.

And what was left of him vanished into the eye.

*

When dawn came and the early morning hikers appeared to complain about his car taking up two spots, Jack stood up and felt as if his head had hit an invisible ceiling. His knees ached. He reached into the fog of his memory and grasped for anything he could find. Bright light? Stars? Sun? He remembered remembering a meteor shower. Something horrible had happened. Jack heaved and threw up onto the dead, summer, grass. Something wonderful had happened. A throbbing headache rolled him down to his knees again. 

Again?

It was inescapable, the thrill of understanding what Jack’s memories of not remembering anything meant. He blinked back against the eye sun slowly blinking awake in the East. The dark spots behind his eyelids dancing, watching, waiting for him to look at them so they could move into his periphery again. Jack sluggishly took down his camera set up. The lens safely back in its foam cradle, the tripods bagged up and bordered by the sandbags, he held the camera body, the batteries dead, the SD card still there. Much to the annoyance of the family of four’s children who kept asking their parents what was taking so long to find a parking spot, Jack reached for the spare batteries he had hoped to swap out with last night. 

SD card corrupted.

Jack would just have to keep trying. It was something important, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember why. He closed his eyes and again the silhouette of some unknowable shape appeared, burned into the back of his eyelids like he’d been staring too long at the sun.