Blue Eyes

Location

She had never been very perceptive.

Her body knew weeks before she did that he had been coming near,

Making her palms dampen and neck prickle

And her heart ache like it wanted to beat faster but was frightened he would hear it.

She thought it was stress in the fall and then,

When winter came, she convinced herself

It was the flu, even though she had never had it before because,

Well, there’s a first time for everything.

And she was right, of course.

He was certainly a first.

 

She looked over her shoulder walking home,

Always seeing the same man there, but never fully,

Never enough to know him beyond

Tall, slender

Pale, brunette

Vivid eyes that glowed too far away to make out a color.

She could never see his face but, somehow,

She knew it must be beautiful and cold

Like the silver charm bracelet he

(for who else could it be?) left on her kitchen table.

Admiring the craftsmanship of it

In the light of her television, she decided

She was too tired to panic. It had been a long day,

After all, and the girl, framed in “Missing” headlines on the news,

May have gotten the same type of bracelet,

But they are certainly common enough.

 

When the body turned up

Bloated and floating on the pond in the park

By the carousel

She felt bad for the poor girl.

To lose such a lovely bracelet and then to die

(Under suspicious circumstances, but so much is suspicious these days).

What a shame.

 

She started looking for him, but either he was being more careful

Or his name was Something Macalister and he was a

“Person of Interest” to more people than only her.

She did not see him for precisely three days

(ten hours, forty-seven minutes), since he gifted her that lovely charm,

and her heart felt too at peace for comfort.

She left a note on her kitchen table.

The next morning she rose with the sun and smiled

At the moistness of her palms when there was a new note,

Written on the stationary she kept

In the box under her bed.

The anchorman announced that the suspect had been released

For lack of evidence and she thought, belatedly,

What a shame.

 

“Where are you?” in cursive drilled into the hand

by years of Catholic school and the compulsion

to always do as told.

 

“Here” smudged in something red that smelled of iron.

 

The next time her body warned her,

She did not turn around. The television etched his face

Into her mind, and, though she’s sure

It did not do him justice, it was something.

His eyes are blue.

 

She sees a light on in her kitchen,

Thrills in the sensation in her hands and heart

And the back of her neck, cold enough to make the hairs rise,

But the rest of her is feverish.

She opens the door; he is dressed in black,

Holding something that gleams like the bracelet he gave her

And she is right.

He is beautiful.

 

She wanted to stare at him until the stars sang,

As she knew they would, but

She barely has the time to think,

Before she’s falling and all she got the chance to see was blue,

 

What a shame.

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