#crane operator

He sighed deeply as he took in the atmosphere of this desolate place he called home. It smelled of dirty socks, old pizza, and stale air. The place really needed to be cleaned up, but it was a Monday evening, and it had been a long day. He felt a headache coming on.

Between plopping down the groceries on a counter and putting the stacks of boxes of frozen food away, scarfing down half a leftover sandwich from his lunch from down at the docks where Bob had been operating cranes almost non-stop for the past sixteen hours, and taking a shower, everything was a blur. None of it felt particularly relaxing until he had finished his shower. He dried his balding head off and carelessly chucked the towel over a chair just outside the bathroom. The crane operator sighed again when he looked at his bedroom clock and realized that it was already almost ten in the evening.

Incessant barking from the neighbor’s dog outside drew Bob to his bedroom window. He slipped a bland gray sweater over his head and peered through the blinds to see what was irritating the darned animal so much to trigger such a commotion.

Absolutely nothing.

It looked like Roger, the dog, was just barking at the empty road outside the neighbor’s fenced suburban home.

Something was wrong though. Bob felt this in a very primal way.

Just like with Marv’s wake-up calls at work. His work colleague Marv radioed him regularly because he and others tended to doze off on the job. Marv would say, ‘Open your eyes, jackass.’ That phrase startled Bob awake, and he would regain his bearings before he could cause any accidents with the crane. These awakenings from microsleep sent him into a brief panic mode in which he only acted upon raw instinct because his brain refused to process all sensory input, and he ended up with an aftertaste of fear once his mind had come back online.

Right now, he felt that same sensation, complete with the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. But Bob still could not see anything out on the street. The constant barking in the background intensified his headache. Bob saw a dark SUV drive by, and he gave up.

Bob returned to the kitchen and microwaved leftover spaghetti from the day before. He thumbed through news on his smartphone while waiting and then almost had a heart attack when he saw something move from the corner of his eye. He spun around a few times and wandered about his own home, checking to see if his eyes had played a trick on him, or if home invader had in fact began stalking around in here.

Seconds later, he was gripping a hockey bat in both hands and shouted into his messy rooms.

“Come out, motherfucker! I have a rifle,” he lied.

Nobody responded. The lights cut out. His fingers clamped around the hockey bat like he was holding on for his life, and he stumbled towards a wall to brace himself in the pitch-black darkness that engulfed him. The street lamps outside had gone out as well, and there was no moon in the sky that night. Creeping up and down the stairs to check the second story left him winded, and he thought to himself that he needed to finally lose weight. Then he thought that he often thought that and felt a twinge of self-loathing. Then he wondered if his headaches had some sort of connection with his weight gain since the divorce, because they had been getting worse lately. These idle thoughts did not last long because the suffocating darkness around him kept him on edge.

Bob inched along the hallway wall until he reached the living room and looked around. It was dead silent. Through narrowed eyes, he finally spotted someone sitting in there, staring out the window. He snuck up on the figure and pulled back with his bat, ready to strike with all his might.

So he did, and it connected with a very flat sound like a bag filled with wet meat falling from considerable height and hitting the asphalt. He had put so much force that he decapitated the intruder. The power and lights went back on and he saw the results of his mighty blow. He had knocked some balled up smelly work clothing off of a pile of others where he had carelessly flung them over the backrest of the couch before the weekend. The not-head he had severed from the non-existent body was a dirty T-shirt on the floor now. The barking outside continued, but he ignored it and returned to the kitchen.

After having calmed down, he made himself some instant coffee to lift his spirits and took a sip while he picked his phone back up again. It was dead. This made no sense because it had been almost eighty percent charged when he was looking at it earlier. Frustrated, he dropped it on the kitchen counter and scratched his head, wondering where he had left his phone’s charger. His gaze swept over his surroundings in search of the charger.

That was when it hit him—he noticed what was wrong. His mouth agape, Bob walked up to the kitchen window like a person in a trance and stared at the sky outside. The power and lights cut out again, but this failed to distract him this time around. He watched in disbelief as the stars in the nightly sky slowly disappeared, cluster by cluster engulfed in a sea of unfathomable darkness. The stars were vanishing, and he looked on as it was happening. He squinted and tried his best to rationalize it, but he could see no clouds.

He cracked open the window and cold air poured in while he leaned out to watch the sky. After a few breaths, he left and fumbled around in a drawer till he returned to the open kitchen window with some binoculars. He adjusted them and gazed at the sky.

Cold sweat broke out on his forehead while he observed with growing discomfort that the stars were indeed turning into a vast, black nothingness. Now that the entire neighborhood was pitch-black from the power outage, there was no other way to explain it. The stars were disappearing.

The barking picked up again outside. Annoyed, Bob leaned out the window and shouted at the dog, “Shut the fuck up, Roger!” He saw the German shepherd barking at the sky and pacing around in circles on his neighbor’s lawn. The dog walked around the corner of his neighbor’s house and out of sight.

The barking ended with an abrupt whining sound that sounded like someone had just badly hurt the dog and silenced it in one fell swoop. This chilled Bob down to the bone, and he stared out into the darkness. He felt a twitch in his left eye from the strain, something he normally only experienced at work after shifts had gone on for over ten hours. The long and unsettling silence since the dog’s barking had been cut short caused Bob to spring into action and hastily close the window. Then he doubly made sure he had firmly locked it shut.

Digging into the same drawer he had produced the binoculars from, he produced a small yellow flashlight that flickered on and off when he turned it on. He slapped it a few times until it cast a solid beam of light, and he blinked until his eyes had adjusted. Using the flashlight to navigate his home, he checked every door and window to make sure that he was safely locked in within his own home and nobody could just walk in. Airing the place out would have to wait till tomorrow. Having no fresh air was probably not too good in the fight against his headache, but Bob decided the headache was the lesser of evils right now.

While passing through the rooms and returning to the kitchen, he saw something outside the study windows that looked like fire on the horizon in between some of the darkened buildings in the distance. Bob switched his flashlight off and squinted to see what that light was and then wondered if a fire had broken out, but it appeared more like a large, controlled bonfire with figures slowly shuffling around it.

Dismissing that, he went upstairs and flopped onto his bed. He felt a touch of winterly cold in his fingertips and toes and wrapped himself in the bed’s blankets that were in desperate need of a wash for over two weeks. Their smell paired with the throbbing sensation of his headache would not let him fall asleep immediately, so he got up again to set the battery-driven digital alarm clock on his nightstand. Just before getting back into bed, he swiveled once more and locked his bedroom door.

“You’re being paranoid,” he muttered to himself and returned to bed.

Bob woke up and wondered how much time had passed. The headache was still there, so he figured he had not slept much, though it felt like it had been several hours. The red digits on his alarm clock were dead, and its display had turned pitch black. The sun rose outside behind him, and he wandered over to the bedroom window with tired and stumbling steps, still half asleep.

He rubbed his eyes and surveyed his neighborhood. Some people were standing outside on the road, staring at the sky, and the sun cast bizarrely long shadows from the rows of houses.

Bob blinked, and so did the sun.

Forgetting you should never stare into the sun, it blinded him, leaving a glowing impression when his eyelids closed. The headache that had been plaguing him all this time was wiped away like it had never even been there. He blinked several times again, and it dawned on him that the center of the sun was a dark, oval shape. The sun blinked again.

What he looked at was no sun, but a giant eye. The people outside stood motionless—like a hypnotized crowd. Bob was not stunned. A deep-rooted sense of dread filled every fiber of his being when he watched helplessly as the sky itself moved, like the entire planet had been engulfed by something dwarfing this world. He felt panic overwhelming his senses, drowning out every last rational thought. The last thing he thought before the chorus of screams outside began and earthquakes started to rumble was simple:

The sky looked hungry.