The Eyes of Midnight

She nodded, and I feared she was going to fall to pieces the way she looked, so I waited a moment to let her collect herself.

"Sara, there are hundreds of paintings in this room, and you told me that you had only seen Anna's work a month ago in a magazine," I said, somewhat sternly. "How could you have possibly painted all these in a month?"

Her eyes glistened back at me, full of tears. Something was clearly tearing her apart.

"How could you paint all these in a month?" I said again.

"I didn't," she said softly. "I've been painting these since I was 12 years old."

I felt my knees get suddenly weak. How could she paint in the exact style of Anna—a very unique style—without ever having seen her work?

She had to be lying, or mistaken, or someone was pulling a giant hoax on me. Maybe she had seen Anna's work as a child and it had imprinted on her and she was some kind of genius mimic. Somehow she was using my dead wife to profit off of it all. My fingers were rubbing my temples as I tried to sort out the madness.

Sara walked slowly towards me. "I started having visions when I was 12. Visions of these eyes. They haunted me, haunted my thoughts, even my dreams. I didn't paint them, they painted themselves, using me to hold the brush. I've never even sold a single one."

Everything she said was confusing me more, I almost wanted her to stop talking so I could sort it out. But I also had to know what the hell was going on.

"I don't understand," I said rubbing my forehead. "This doesn't make sense."

"When I saw Anna's art in the magazine, I realized where my visions were coming from," she continued. She spoke so softly that I had to strain to hear.

I pushed two fingers hard into the center of my forehead. "So are you trying to say that my dead wife has been giving you visions of paintings?" I said.

"Not exactly," she mumbled, turning away from me. "Let me show you something else."

She walked over to an easel that was holding a covered painting. I followed behind her, my brain still whirling with all the data she was throwing at me.

"I painted this a year ago," she said. She reached up and pulled the canvas cover off, and my knees went weak once again.

I was staring into my own eyes. They were the exact color, shape, hue, it was like a photograph. Except for one thing. Showing up as a reflection in each pupil, you could see a man and a woman standing side by side, holding hands. As I stood there, completely stupefied, I realized that Sara was standing beside me, holding my hand. I looked closer into the pupil, looking at the detail. The people reflected in the pupils were me and Sara. Not only were we the exact reflection depicted in the painting, as I looked closer, I realized that the reflections in the pupil were wearing the exact same clothing as we had on.

I staggered back from the painting, completely overwhelmed. The room was spinning and I had to find a place to sit down. Luckily I collapsed into a chair before passing out. Sara came over and knelt in front of me. Her hands were on my knees and she looked up at me with deep concern.

"I didn't know how to tell you," she said. "I saw your picture in the magazine and I knew it was you. I found out you were going to Chicago and booked seats on the same flight." She stopped and smiled to herself. "I even bought two tickets, so we would have privacy to talk. After I met you, that night in the hotel...I suddenly realized what was happening to me."

My mind was still scrambling to make rational sense of all this. In a final, desperation grasp at a possible reason for all this, I settled on the idea that Sara was a deranged stalker who had somehow mimicked my wife's work and was probably going to kill me and bury me in the backyard. That made as much sense as anything. I tried to clear my head and start over.

"I still don't understand any of this," I said. "If these visions that you have that led you to create these paintings, if they aren't from my wife, where are you getting them from?"

Sara looked down for a few moments, collecting herself. She even reached up and took out her contact lenses, which had to be flooded from all the tears.

"The visions I'm having are not coming from Anna," she said softly. "I am Anna."

She looked up at me as she said it, and my whole body went completely cold as I looked into her teary eyes. One was blue. One was brown. She had been wearing colored lenses to hide it.

In a split second that seemed to last for an hour, everything became completely clear. Looking into her eyes immediately explained everything. Like I said at the beginning of the story, I had never seen another pair of eyes like Annas. Until now. And just like Anna had always said, the eyes are the windows to the soul, and looking into her eyes left me absolutely no doubt that I was looking at Anna.

I leaned down and swept Sara up into my arms, carried her to her bedroom and eased her down onto the bed. For the next four hours, we made love without speaking a word, stopping from time to time but never leaving each other's side. During the entire time, we never once, for more than a moment, stopped looking into each other's eyes. I was never warmer, never more aroused, never more satisfied. I was completely hypnotized, mesmerized. I was making love with my long dead wife, but I was also having sex with a beautiful young girl. She seemed to know just what to do, so it was almost like I was enjoying one of my controlled dreams.

When we finally stopped, we were on the bed, lying on our sides facing each other, looking deep into each other's eyes. It was midnight, dark and quiet.

"Do you know what today is?" she whispered.

I did not know what day it was. I did not know what month it was, or even what year it was. I did not know what was real or a dream, all I knew was that I was here, and Anna was here. I didn't care what was real or what was a dream, as long as I could be here with her.

"Today is the day I died, 22 years ago," Anna whispered.

I closed my eyes as the date suddenly hit me. Today was the anniversary of the wreck.

"Today is also the day I was born, 22 years ago," Sara said. "Today is my birthday."

Epilogue: Dr. Sara Williams was busy finishing up her rounds in the coma patient ward, affectionately known by the staff as the endless party zone. She was neatly dressed in a white blouse and a medium length black skirt, and her wavy brown hair framed up an attractive face. She pulled a chart off the bed of a patient and then checked a printout coming off of a machine hooked up to the patient.

"Hm," she said.

The attending nurse stepped up closer and looked over her shoulder at the printout. "What is it doctor?" she asked.

"Just an interesting anomaly with the brain activity for this patient," she said. "Every year at this time he has a spike in brain activity."

"What happened on this date that would cause that?" said the nurse.

"Twenty two years ago today he was in a really bad car accident, his wife was killed in the wreck," she said.

"Wow, that gives me chills," said the nurse.

As Sara put the chart back on the bed and walked towards the door of the room, she glanced up at the wall. Hanging up on the wall was a haunting painting of a pair of eyes, looking down towards the patient on the bed.

"Who knows," she said as she walked out the door. "Maybe he's having some really great dreams."