There are now eleven small orange eyes along my windowsill, and none of them blink at the same time, which I have decided is the most unsettling part.
She brought them in coiled around a cardboard spool, a long black cord with these little plastic bulbs spaced along it like beads, and I assumed, reasonably, that this was some kind of toy she had bought for me and was being slow about presenting. I sat very politely while she unwound the cord across the floor. I did not pounce on it even once, which I consider a significant act of restraint given how a cord like that practically begs to be dragged under the couch and never discussed again.
Then she stood on the little step stool and started looping it along my windowsill, over the curtain rod, down around the frame, and plugged the end of it into the wall, and the whole string came alive at once, every bulb glowing that thick orange color you get from a sky right before something bad happens to the weather. I backed up so fast I knocked my own tail against the radiator.
She laughed. I did not find it funny. I found it prudent.
For a while they just glowed, steady, and I was able to tolerate that. A glow is a fact. A glow does not require a response from me. I got back up onto the sill, gave each bulb a cursory sniff — warm, faintly like the inside of a lamp, nothing alive about the smell, which was reassuring — and settled in to supervise the rest of her evening with my usual professionalism.
Then, with no warning and no announcement, they started to pulse.
Not all together. That’s the part I want on record. If all eleven had dimmed and brightened in unison I could have filed it under weather, under electricity, under one of the many categories of household phenomena that don’t require my personal attention. Instead they went one at a time, in no pattern I could detect, a bulb near my paw going soft and low while one by the curtain rod surged bright, like something was moving down the line deciding which eye to use next.
I want to be fair to myself here. I did not run. I conducted a full and immediate reassessment of the situation, which from a distance might resemble running, but running implies panic and what I was doing was strategic relocation to the far end of the sill where I could observe the whole string at once without any one bulb getting the drop on me.
From that vantage point I watched for a long time. The pulsing wasn’t random, or it didn’t feel random — there was a rhythm to it, slow, almost like breathing, the kind of breathing something does when it is pretending to be asleep so you’ll let your guard down. I have never actually seen a thing pretend to sleep. I only know what it would look like if I did, and this was it.
I batted at the nearest bulb once, very quickly, the way you’d touch something to see if it noticed. It didn’t retreat. It didn’t brighten in alarm the way I expected a startled eye to. It just kept doing its slow pulse, completely unbothered by me, which was somehow worse than if it had reacted. I have dealt with things that fight back. I have never had to deal with something that simply continues not caring.
She came back through with a mug of something and caught me sitting bolt upright six inches from the glass, staring down a row of orange lights like we were negotiating terms. “They’re just lights, Oliver,” she said, which is exactly the kind of thing a person says about something they haven’t had to sit three feet from in the dark.
I let her touch one, to see what would happen to her. Nothing happened to her. She pressed her finger flat against the warm plastic and nothing closed around it, no sudden brightening, no retaliation. I found this both informative and somehow unsatisfying. If nothing was going to happen, I’d have liked to have known that from the start, rather than having to find it out through observation like everyone else in this house.
By the time it got properly dark outside, the whole string had settled into something closer to twinkling, a soft stagger of bright-dim-bright down the length of the sill, and the back room filled with this warm orange wash that made the window glass itself look lit from somewhere else entirely, like the night outside had caught a little color off it. I stopped treating each pulse as an individual threat requiring assessment and started treating the whole string as one long, slow-breathing thing, which was a demotion in alarm but not quite a promotion to comfort.
I ended up curled at the base of the sill where the cord ran along the baseboard, not because I trust it, but because it’s warm there in a way the rest of the floor isn’t, a low steady heat coming off the plug where it meets the wall. My tail kept flicking toward the nearest bulb every time it went soft, just to check that it came back. It always came back.
She turned off the lamp before bed and left the string plugged in, so the whole room is sitting right now in nothing but that orange pulse, eleven small lights taking turns, and from where I’m positioned I can see all of them without turning my head, which I intend to keep doing for as long as this arrangement is in effect.