On rare occasion, the father spots a single, striped hot air balloon in the distance while drinking his coffee on the porch and calls to his two young children, and they sprint out from their bedrooms to gaze at this far off object hovering in the unbroken sky. They marvel at the balloon and wonder who could be sitting in its wicker basket. They soak in the disruption to their otherwise uniform world. Children love novelty, and the balloon is a welcome addition to the lives of the family in the little red and white house. Eventually, it moves along and disappears over the emerald green horizon.

The family moves along, too, even though they remain stationery at their home. The mother stitches patchwork quilts in the sunroom and the father paints and re-paints the white fence at the edge of the property and the children roll around in the perfect, perfectly perfect grass and daydream about when the balloon might return.

On other occasions, something else appears in the sky. When it arrives, the father and mother scream at their children to go inside. They all flee into the house. They close the door and shutter the blinds and wait for it to pass. The father says not to look at it, but sometimes the mother sneaks glimpses when he’s not paying attention.

Through the shutters, she sees two massive, strained eyes a hundred times the size of the Sun, filling the sky from horizon to horizon. Dendritic crimson veins bulge and pulse across expanses of pearly white. The pupils gulp in light like cosmic black holes, hungry for something, hungry for them maybe.

What horrifies the mother most of all, though, are the irises. Every time the father and mother plead for their children to hide and the titanic eyes arrive to stare at them… the irises are different. Brown like whiskey, green like the emerald grass, as blue as the uninterrupted sky. Shades of hazel and gray and gold and sometimes a swirling dual combination; sapphire with a ring of caramel around the edge of the pupil, for example.

After a long minute or two, the eyes disappear. The children stop crying and the father steps back onto the porch, ready to pick up his paint brush where he left it. Their idyllic world is idyllic again.

But the mother lingers by the window. She considers the legion of colossal gods that must live somewhere beyond the veil of their perfect blue sky. The gods take turns observing her family’s home, some kind of heavenly reconnaissance. And the mother asks herself, why why why?