The Eyes Have It

I remembered this after watching The Fourth Kind.

It happened when I was so young I was still spending most of the time in my crib.

I remember standing up with the aid of the railing. I was crying and pointing but nobody would believe me. I remember my parents arguing about it.

“Just close your eyes honey. It’s all your imagination." My mother would say "It's just an empty wall."

“Don’t say that to him. We can’t know what he is seeing." Father would argue.

I understood what they were saying so I looked back at the huge disembodied eyes staring at me from the wall. They we not human eyes, they looked like cartoon eyes huge and oval. I stopped pointing at them because that seemed to trigger the yelling. But I continued to stare back at them.

I was trying to decide whether I was imagining the eyes or if they were really there when they blinked. That’s when I started to scream. I stopped staring back and cried. I think that that was the moment when I begun to fear clowns. Their eyes would always remind me of the eyes from that wall.

Many years later I told my mother that I remembered three of my aunts picking me up from my crib and I remember crying inconsolably because they had the same eyes as the ones on the wall. She said that must have been a dream because those three aunts had never visited us at the same time and I was never left alone with any of them. It felt more like a nightmare.

I told my mother about the eyes I saw on the wall and finally after 45 years she confessed to me that both her and my father could see the eyes too. They were trying to protect me because I couldn't even speak much and they didn’t t know how to help me deal with it.

Al