By Michael Degnan

Fear entered the house on a Tuesday night, twisting through two windows my parents had opened after the sun went down. It spread from one room to the next like smoke. 

I was young, only three or four. I was playing with my hockey figures in the living room when my parents screamed in the kitchen. They yelled for it to get off, to leave. I ran to them, expecting to see an intruder. Instead, there was nothing. Only my parents slapping the air and flinching.

My parents were different after that night. They worried about what could go wrong, especially with money. We started eating cheap sliced bread instead of fresh loaves from the bakery down the street. We stopped eating ice cream. We stopped laughing too.

The fear reached me, but somehow it made me more powerful. I could see so much more. When I saw a bathtub, I could see beyond the room. I could see the pipes that curved through the walls and into the ground under our house, the copper pipes that I feared one day would suck me into the darkness. 

As I got older, I could see whether others were similarly afflicted. If they were, their faces were always covered in shadows. No matter where they were or how they turned, a soft patch of gray followed. I never mentioned this to my parents, and I don’t know if they could see it too. Their faces were darker than most.

In college, fear was everywhere, but I never met a girl as afraid as Jessica. Our professor was talking about temperance when I looked at her and her gentle smile, softened by a dab of dark gray. 

I invited her to the soccer field a few nights later. We spread out a blanket and lay down to look at the sky. I asked her what she was afraid of. She turned, perhaps wondering how I knew. She told me that she was afraid of trees, of getting stuck at the top and being unable to find the courage to step back down. She said that she was afraid of being forgotten, anxious that a person she met the previous week wouldn’t remember her name the next time they met. She paused and then said that she was afraid that I wouldn’t like her.

I took her hand and, as I stroked it, I was able to see further, beyond that night, beyond the next four years, somewhere into the soft distance. My heart beat faster, and the night swirled around me. I closed my eyes and saw an image of Jessica and me, older, sitting on a bench by a rocky outcropping in Maine, holding hands as waves crashed into coves and seagulls squawked overhead.

It was then, as Jessica leaned over to kiss me, that I realized that it wasn’t fear that let me see so far.

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Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Maudlin House, Literally Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere.