#serial-novel

They didn’t have a name. Not officially, anyway. Featureless. That’s all they were. As in no face, no hands, not even a body to speak of. No one knew where they came from (at the time, at least, they didn’t). The odd thing about these featureless things -- if they were even real at all -- was that they appeared as if from no place at all. One moment they were not there and life was normal. Commuting, buying cell phones, eating tacos out of the hipster truck on Bleecker Street, for example. You could have been milling about, maybe even relaxing, and suddenly there it was. One of those things. 

They never went away.

Calev wasn’t exactly spacing out the first time he saw (felt?) one of the creatures. He was changing a diaper. Of all the things that should have been difficult to find, diapers were oddly not on the list. As though everyone stopped caring about baby hygiene all at once. Diaper boxes could be found everywhere. For the taking. No need to wrangle the last box out of anyone’s clutches as though it were a box of taco shells. This was the example going through his mind because just the week before, he had to do just that: wrestle a box of expired taco shells out of a 70 year old woman’s gnarled fingers. She tried to fight him for it, somehow imagining that even swinging her cane she had a chance at winning that particular encounter.

So he wasn’t under any pressure at the moment--fully concentrated as he was on his relatively calming task. His son (an obnoxious toddler who had only recently learned to say, “no”) somehow managed to squeeze out a softball sized turd. It smelled vaguely of rancid walnuts. The fresh wet-wipe had its own clean scent and it all smelled very familiar to Calev while he was going through the motions without giving any of it much thought.

This is why when he sensed the presence of the creatures he had heard so much about it didn’t even affect him for a few moments. And then it did. He wanted to be afraid, but what was there to be afraid of? Here was something that was little more than a presence. Menacing? Maybe, in the vaguest sense of the word. Definitely not terrifying as he had been led to believe by countless accounts. 

Why did these creatures cause the Island of Manhattan to turn into a pile of rubble and flames? Still raging, oddly, as though someone were there to stoke the fires even a whole year later. It was an odd juxtaposition with the dark figure hovering in front of him, while out the window was New York City flickering orange in the background.

Here was one of the “Featureless” as he had heard of them referred to. And it looked somewhat sad and pathetic. More curious than anything else. It seemed to be hovering over his head, examining what he was doing, like an overeager middle-manager. Calev was relatively tall. Not imposing, but tall enough that he walked around slightly slumped forward. He had an uneasy feeling that his head might be partially inside the thing hovering over him. He found it creepy because in addition to the smell of his baby’s poop and the baby wipes, there was a metallic odor all of a sudden that he hadn’t noticed before. He had the creepy sensation that what he was smelling emanated from the thing. If it had a body. If it were even real.

     “Hello,” Said Calev, because, honestly, what else was there to say? Was it even hovering there? It was more of a presence. Incorporeal at best. Definitely there -- he wasn’t imagining it. More annoying than anything. The overwhelming feeling was the sort of unease one gets when being stared at by a stranger in the park. 

     “Hello to you,” said the creature, against all odds. It was polite! It wasn’t sound waves, and it definitely wasn’t telepathy. Calev didn’t feel like something was probing his mind in any way. It was a feeling. “You can hear me?”

Calev didn’t know how to answer because it all felt like a hallucination to him. “I guess so, why? is that unusual?” As soon as he said this, it occurred to him just how strange it was to have such a banal, mudane exchange with what could only be described as a monster.

     “It is unusual. Not extremely so. Lots of people can hear us. But overall it is out of the ordinary.” 

     “You sound a lot like me. Are you mocking me?”

     “I am not mocking you. I don’t have a voice of my own. I don’t have language like you do. I’m communicating with you in a way you can understand.”

     “Can I have some privacy then? I’m changing a diaper.”

Just like that the apparition was gone, as though it were never there to begin with. Calev turned to Hana, his wife of three years, and said, “did you see that?”

     “The thing? I didn’t really see it. I felt it.”

     “Yeah. The thing. What an asshole.”

     “What did it want?”

     “No clue. I told it to go away and, poof! it went away. What the hell is everyone’s problem? There was nothing scary about it. Was that thing really worth ruining everything over?”

     “I don’t know. I always knew people were assholes. Did you finish with the diaper?”

     “Yeah. All clean. Pass me a taco shell?” 

     “I ate the last one. Sorry.”