Stranger Companion

 

            I couldn’t tell how long she’d been staring at me. I first noticed her through the crowd, a shadow behind human bodies flowing across the park. She might have been a tree or a pole or a trash can to my indifference, another texture of scenery ignored with the rest.

            I became aware of her only by accident, a glace, a chance, across the current of business suites passing. She may have been there an hour, my eyes hadn’t come up in that long.

            Surprising, to me, more then her presence, was the strength of her insistence. Not simply a look, or a gaze, or any variety of curiosity. Her stare was possession. She did not see me, she owned me and my motions and my moment.

            Had she been a man I might have been frightened, for a man who owns a woman with his eyes has always been dangerous. But what woman looks upon another with such authority?

            My stranger companion seemed in the middle of motion, hips turned, legs half through stride, one hand holding the strap of a bag laying beside her foot, half fallen but not.

            Something strange held hollow space in her eyes. Something strange and perhaps foreign, her eyes seemed unnatural with darkness, but even as I saw them, in a moment she was gone.

            Not as darkness vanishes with light, but as rodents know light is coming and slip away in the last shadows. In a moment she was gone completely, and I began to wonder if she had really been there at all.

 

Explanation:
February 2009. This was a twenty minute prompt based on the line, “I could not tell,” but of course I had to shorten that with a contraction. I was in the Woolworth Building at the time, and felt it was really cool to be in that historical building. I wanted to write something based in City Hall Park across the street and bring the Woolworth Building into it, but I never did.

I don’t really know who or what the watching woman is, but I didn’t want her to be outwardly supernatural. Somehow she just got creepier as I wrote her.