The hollow eyed strangers who refuse the candy—now they might be reason enough to keep offering it.
You’re followed. Every day. It doesn’t make you special. Little swirls of creatures in the hollow of snowy footprints, mounds of bark on tree branches that don’t sit quite right, darker squares of brick than you remember your apartment having. We’re all followed, one way or another, and it’s rare for things to get attached.
Rare, but not unheard of, especially when your feet carry you far from home and your soul doesn’t reach into the earth below you, rebuffed by the new and strange around you.
That’s when you first saw the hollow-eyed stranger that follows you. Abroad. Alone. Anchor-less. With your pockets stuffed with chocolate sweeter than you can find in this country, your life savings burning a hole in your wallet, and your hair sleep-mussed from a train ride that just feels too long for how far you got.
They’re standing on the corner ahead of you, under the pale yellow glow of an upstairs window, leaning against the next bus stop. They’re wearing a long tunic over black pants, something you’re used to over here, but the baseball hat on their head is very Western. You know that that doesn’t mean anything—clothing doesn’t exist in a vaccuum—but it makes your shoulders a little looser than they were walking down a foreign street at night.
The baseball cap is what brings you within five feet of the stranger, feet crunching on broken glass and crumpled newspaper in a language you can’t read. The stranger turns, the brim of their hat shielding their eyes with shadow, but there’s something about the way they do that brings you up short.
Like a weather vane, you’ll realize later. Their head turns on their neck like a weather vane, as if it was drawn to you on a wire, all the way until the gears clicked into place.
“Hello,” you say. Your hands go to the straps of your back, thumbs hooking between the canvas and the soft cotton of your shirt. Comforting. “Pretty warm out tonight.”
They don’t say anything. There’s a glimmer of something where their eyes are, but you can’t say for sure whether that’s the reflection of light off their eyes or something else entirely.
“Bus?” You try. You clear your throat, embarrassed to have reduced your question to one word. It’s rude of you, like a parrot. Or so your mom says. “Hafila?”
The stranger leans onto the balls of their feet. That’s when the first wave of ice crawls up your spine. When they lean towards you and their long hair swings out from behind their shoulders, bringing the scent of dust and allspice with it.
You take a step back, stopping yourself from taking another. They haven’t done anything, just leaned forward, and you don’t want to spend this entire trip afraid of everyone. “Autobus?”
The stranger continues to watch you, hands hanging loosely at their sides beneath the bus sign. It suddenly occurs to you that they could do anything right now—the air is so much thinner than you think and it’d take no effort for them to just fall forward and onto you. Or leap forward and into you.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” you mutter to yourself. You force yourself to smile and look up, hands nervously dropping to your pockets. Another bad habit your mother discouraged—it ruined your posture. But, now, you find your salvation there. “Oh!”
The stranger doesn’t react to your exclamation, but you get the sense that they’re watching as you pull a bright, colored lump of foil from your pocket. You unwrap the kiss with fingers that tremble and pop it into your mouth. The burst of sweet is more comforting than distance ever could be and you feel a little more stable. A little more in control. A little more able to be who you want to be this trip.
You fish in your pocket for another kiss and hold it out on the palm of your hand. “Want one?”
The stranger doesn’t move for a long, long moment. Then, very slowly, they ease back so that they’re no longer leaning towards you.
You think that they might not understand. You point to your mouth where the first chocolate is dissolving and then to the wrapped one in your hand. “It’s chocolate. Here, I’m giving it to you.” You take a step forward, hand still outstretched, and grin on your face. “Take it.”
The stranger lifts one hand and, for a moment, you think they understood. You think that they’re going to take the candy and the icy chill wracking your body will dissipate under the taste of shared chocolate. But, instead, their wrist flips, hand rising until they are holding it out in the universal stop gesture. No thank you.
Something possesses you then. You need them to take the candy. You don’t know why, but they need to take it from you and they need to eat it because if they don’t…you don’t know. maybe it’s the desire to vanquish the ice in your spine, but they need to accept it now. You take a step forward, eyebrows raised to indicate your non-aggression. “Have it. It’s delicious.”
The stranger takes a step back, away from you, and then another, putting the distance you wanted between you.
With the distance comes awareness—you don’t know why you wanted them to have it so badly and you think you may have crossed a cultural line. Your hand wavers, dropping an inch or so with the kiss still sitting innocuously in your palm. “I’m so—“
Yellow light cuts across the dark, streaming from behind you. You can hear the bus now, easing to a crawl as it approaches, but, more importantly, you can see their face.
The stranger’s impassive, impassive face, looks as if it were carved from wax. Their lips are the same color as their cheeks, the same color as their chin, but their eyes—their eyes are black. Completely, soullessly black with no sclera or iris or light. The high beams of the bus, flooding the area with light, seems to vanish into the depths of those pupilless eyes and the cold overtakes you completely.
Not human, you think. You know it’s not human, whatever it is. This stranger. And you know, without a doubt, that whatever it is cant accept what you’ve offered, that it wants to take something that no entity on this planet can even ask for.
“Take it,” your numb lips say as the bus pulls up beside you.
The hollow-eyed stranger’s nothing mouth almost seems to curl. Then, without word or indication, they turn their back on you and, with no sound, walk across the broken glass and into the dark alley lying just ahead.
Your clammy hand closes around the cold chocolate. Your mouth is dry as you turn to get on the bus and, you notice, the bus driver won’t meet your eyes as he accepts your payment.
He shakes his head, looking straight forward. “No English.”
You swallow as best you can around your dry mouth and go to sit down. You don’t know what it was—don’t know what power prompted you to try and give what you tried to give—but you know two things.
One, you won’t be eating this piece of chocolate. No one will if you can help it.
Two, you will always wonder about those who refuse. Why they refuse. And you know, in your heart, that you will never be able to stop looking at their eyes, wondering and wondering and wondering.
The bus pulls away and you very carefully don’t look into the dark alley. You very carefully don’t see movement out of the corner of your eye. You very carefully never do again.
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