The Night Eyes

I was asleep in a twin bed with a wooden frame and headboard, and the bed was outside in the night air.  It was down at the end of a long residential street, down past the last house, past the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, down where the sidewalk abruptly ends with a few trees and some tangled underbrush.

In a bush tucked away on the unlit side of the neighbor's house, I thought I saw something.  I could just make out the curving shape of the eye, and then the pupil and the iris, as though it had been sketched by pencil.  Then, having seen one, I began to see others, more and more, until the night seemed filled with eyes watching me from every corner.

I felt oddly untroubled by these eyes.  I just counted each new one that I noticed from my bed, as my own eye adjusted to all the nocturnal corners and crevices.  And having counted and cataloged all these eyes, as numerous as dew drops on every surface in the dark morning hours, I gathered up my blankets and rolled back over.