What the Eyes Can’t By Peter Baltensperger

The darkness was everything, the dwelling place of glowing red eyes in the corners, phantoms winging their ways through the rooms. Damien Cross kept all his blinds shut, his heavy curtains drawn. It was the only way for him. He never went outside when the sun was shining. He looked after his necessities on the dullest, dreariest days, wore the darkest sunglasses he could find to keep the outside world at bay.

He brought a woman into his darkness, to find out, a periodic foray into the unknown. She held herself stiff, apprehensive. He could smell her uncertainty, her fear. She began to relax when he ran his hands over her body, and the smell diminished. He took her by the hand and led her into his bedroom. He started to peel off her clothes, layer by layer, and she still shivered. He thought of onions, thought of laying bare the luscious insides and inhaling her aura. He could already smell her emanations and wondered if she could feel the phantoms, see the red eyes.

After he finished the peeling, all his emotions concentrated in his hands, in his nose, on his tongue, in his mind, he put her on the bed and took her breasts into his hands. For the first time, he tasted her skin, saturated his tongue with her strong aromas, filled his nasal cavities with her scents of pure femininity; let his hands inhale the richness of her soft skin. He could feel the red eyes peering out of their corners, could sense the phantoms in the still air. The darkness was standing him in good stead, his safety in a confused world, the retreat for his mind.

He followed the woman’s scents from her neck and her breasts all the way down along her body, delighting in his discoveries, moving from aroma to aroma over her trembling body, her trembling legs. She sighed with obvious pleasure as he started to lick her sumptuous secretions. She still quivered under his ministrations, but her body told him she was enjoying his exploratory caresses, perhaps not as much as he did, but at least more and more. He molded himself against her until her luxurious scents enveloped him in his darkness, filled him with their opulence.

Afterwards, he folded her into his arms, for his warmth and for her protection, and helped her fall asleep, one hand on her breathing breast. He stayed awake to feel the phantoms gather on the bed, envelop her with their wings, wrapping her into a cocoon. She screamed in her sleep, flailed her arms and legs in fright, even though she didn’t see the glowing eyes come creeping out of their corners. He tightened his arms around her, closed his eyes, and listened to the darkness rotate through the night.

© 2014 Peter Baltensperger

Peter Baltensperger is a Canadian writer of Swiss origin and the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His latest book is a collection of flash fiction, Inside from the Outside, A Journey in Sudden Fiction (available from amazon). His work has appeared in print and on-line in several hundred publications around the world over the past several decades. Most recently, he has been published in print in such publications as The Big Book of New Short Horror, The Big Book of Bizarro, and Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, and on line in Apocrypha and Abstractions, The Medulla Review, Danse Macabre, and Black Heart Magazine, among many others. He writes, and has been writing all his life, because he loves to write, and because it constitutes an integral aspect of his personal quest. He makes his home in London, Canada with his wife Viki and their three cats.

 

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