Sweet Romance18 min read
The Eye in April
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My father is dead.
His body was pulled from our bathroom drain.
A grown man's body, crushed into a narrow pipe, the kind of thing that shouldn't be possible. I held the letters he wrote me and found a hidden message stitched across four awkward sentences.
"Watch mother."
01
I woke to a noise in the night. Not a creak or the house settling — a soft tapping that sounded like fingernails on porcelain.
I slid from bed, the boards cold under my feet. "Hello?" I whispered. My voice was swallowed.
The bathroom door was ajar.
I leaned in, listening. The tapping stopped. The silence felt wrong. Then — a wet sound. A bubble, a rush.
"Thud," something knocked inside the pipes.
Blood pooled, bright and sudden, and I screamed. I couldn't stop the noise. It ripped out of me.
Half an hour later the police had cordoned the hallway. My mother stood beside me, arms wrapped around me like a shield. "It's okay, baby. It's okay," she told me, but her voice trembled.
They pried open the drain pipe. They dragged out a body, squeezed and broken, a man who no one could have forced into that gap unless magic or a machine had done it.
I stared until my eyes burned. There was a dark mole on the wrist — my father's wrist. I swallowed air I didn't feel I had the right to breathe.
"This is my father," I told the officer when he asked my name. The world went thin around the edges.
The house had no sign of struggle. The only clue was a single set of foreign footprints: size forty-one, flat-footed, a man of around one seventy-eight. The police said so.
The funeral was crowded. People paid their condolences. I sat alone in my room after everyone left and opened the stack of letters he had left for me — our private language. He was too busy with work for long talks, so we wrote.
Most letters were ordinary: "You were wild and sweet as a child." "Keep your dreams. They will push you forward." But one folded page felt wrong. The sentences were clumsy, hard to read.
"Childhood you were very naughty but cute.
"Many dreams are inside you; they push you.
"Mother and father both love you.
"Mother is getting old. Be more tolerant."
I read them three times. The first characters of each line spelled: WATCH MOTHER.
My chest turned cold. The page slid from my hands. Coincidence? My father's handwriting trembled in places I knew well.
My mother knocked and pushed the door open. She wore black and looked exhausted. Her eyes were puffy with crying.
"Laylah, come, we will see them off together," she said softly.
I balled the letter in my fist without thinking. "Okay," I said.
Mother's eyes tracked my hand. "What are you holding?" she asked, and she sounded small in a way I had never heard before.
"It was from Dad," I said. "Your letters… you know."
"You want to show me?" she asked, suddenly all softness.
I handed it over. She read. Tears filled her eyes. She pressed the paper back into my palms. "Your father loved us," she breathed. "He loved you."
Her face said nothing else, which was enough to uncoil some suspicion in me. I didn't want to doubt her. I didn't know how to.
After the funeral, I went to his study. I sifted through the things he had left. A notebook fell open and a scrap of paper fluttered out.
"Dear daughter," it read. "If you see this, I am probably gone. Look at the photograph we took a month ago. Forever, Dad."
My heart caught. A month. He had left a note as if he expected what followed. I carried the photo to the desk and froze.
We had been sitting side by side. He had smiled and said, "Let's take one, we never do." I had taken the picture. We were both looking at the camera with ordinary smiles. But the door behind us had a narrow gap. My eyes found it like a needle.
There, in the gap, an eye watched from the dark.
Not just a shadow. An eye set close to the wood, a face pressed to the jamb. The eye was wide, fixed on us like a coin.
My father must have seen it and left me that hint.
A cold fear spread through me. Who had been watching us that day? Who watched now?
I turned and found the study door cracked. I remembered closing it tight. My feet felt ice-cold.
On the floor, there was a piece of bright red nail polish. I picked it up with shaking fingers. It matched my mother's missing nail.
02
I couldn't accept the idea that she had been standing there watching me.
I stood at her bedroom door and listened. The room was dark. I slid to the floor and peered under the gap — because why wouldn't I. I saw a pair of eyes: clouded, streaming red capillaries, pupils blown like a dead fish's. They were not human. A corpse was tucked inside her room.
I jerked back hard; a pressure hit my calves.
"Laylah," my mother's voice — and then she was there, leaning against my shoulder, head crooked and watching me with a face like a mask.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I miss Dad," I said. My voice broke. I wanted answers, but the words felt brittle.
She looked at me blankly and then softened. She hugged me and her skin was ice.
Her index finger had a missing fragment of nail. The shard on the study floor was hers.
My stomach rolled. I asked to sit in her room. She agreed and led me in, smiling like the woman I had grown up with.
She tucked her sleep dress off one shoulder. There was a yellow, strange tattoo there—twisted and odd, almost like a warped symbol. I'd never seen it.
Her hand moved, and the tattoo was hidden. My pulse felt like a drum. We sat on the bed and something scraped under the frame.
I asked, "Do you hear that?"
She did too. She told me to stay still. She knelt, then screamed. I stared into the bed void and felt the air stop.
Pinned to the floor under the bed was a woman. Her limbs had been stretched beyond nature and nailed to the floor like a grotesque star. She was alive and then not — lips pulled into a smile for a terrible second before her head slumped.
I could smell the iron in the room. My mother phoned the police.
They found a crushed napkin in the woman's mouth with a single name written: a neighbor — Findlay Finch. They arrested him.
Findlay had always been kind. He had no family left. He had cried at my father's funeral. When the officers came, he looked at me and mouthed a single word.
"Run."
He sounded terrified. He twisted from the officers and lunged at me, whispering in my ear, "Don't trust them. Go into the attic. All of you — go now."
They held him down. He was taken away in handcuffs. Later, in his house, I found a small hidden journal.
03
Findlay's diary opened like a door into a parallel ugly year.
"Someone watches us. Every April, three die. I counted the cuttings. I found the pattern. There were articles from 2019, 2020, 2021. April. Every April three die: one in the tank, one falling from small height but dead as if dropped from the sky, one gutted dry."
My scalp buzzed.
One month's entries detailed his fear. He wrote of the woman crouched at his bedside, smiling. He wrote that he found out the watchers were not strangers. Sometimes the watchers were the people who raised us.
The last page said, "It's April again. If you find this, leave. Do not stay near the people with the yellow mark."
I clutched the diary until a floorboard creaked outside.
I left the house in a daze that night and saw policemen at Findlay's door. He was being led out. He looked at me, big eyes snapping the world into focus, and he mouthed "Run" again.
"Who killed my father?" I asked my mother later that night. I needed the answer. I wanted a real voice, not the one that rearranged grief into calm.
"Findlay," she said, eyes wet. "They found murder tools in his place. Footprints match the one in our bathroom. He did this. He did this to your father."
Her voice rasped. She looked at me like someone searching for a lost coin.
Something prickled. Parts did not add up. Why would he leave nails and paper and blood at his own house? Why would he scream at me to run?
Then, the next day, Victoria Berry — Findlay's wife — died.
04
They found her inside the fridge. She was sitting like someone had placed her there willingly, her hands clutching her head.
Her scalp was gone. She had been decapitated alive, it seemed. The media called it gruesome. I watched the stretcher pass by and the sheet lift for a second when the wind flipped it back. Her eyes opened, glass bright.
On her arm was the same yellow mark I had seen on my mother. The same symbol.
The town newspaper printed a small notice: three dead in April. The old pattern held. But something was different this year. Two of the dead were local — Victoria and the other woman I found under my bed — not strangers.
That contradicted everything Findlay's diary had suggested. He had warned that the ritual took outsiders. My father had been an outsider once — he came to our town years ago, married my mother, and stayed. Now two locals were dead in April. Why?
Victoria's bank card contained a message scratched minutely into its metal: "Leave. Go as far as you can."
05
I wanted to leave.
I asked my mother if I could go to the city, to the university, to anything. "The world is large," I said.
Her face hardened. Her fingers dug into my shoulder. "You are staying," she said. "Your father is gone. Who will help me if you go?"
She pleaded like a net. Her eyes went frayed, red-veined.
"Okay," I said, because I didn't have a language for "I will not be trapped."
That night, somebody tried my door. Around midnight a shadow slid along the hallway like a fish.
The latch clicked twice like a broken tooth. No one came in. The silhouette left. I collapsed, mind rolling in dread.
At dawn my phone buzzed. A scheduled message arrived. It was from my father.
"Dear daughter," it read. "If you read this I am gone. Remember to look at our photos. There is something I want you to see."
My breath felt too loud. I went to the album and thumbed through the images. Childhood summers, birthdays, school pictures. In one summer group photo at age five, behind the tree there was a face. My mother's face. Watching. Another picture from a dental outing had my mother tucked two rows back in a roller-coaster shot. Every photograph: her presence hidden in corners, pressed into gaps, a head framing the edge like a thumbprint.
I vomited memory and images. Each page was a nail.
06
I ran.
I went first to my grandmother's, Miriam Komarov, who smelled of strong tea and menthol. She fed me milk and fretted. I lied and said I'd had a fight.
She guided me to her guest room. The lamp by the bed had a grotesque snake sculpture with many tentacles. I tried to sleep. At midnight the statue was at the foot of my bed. It broke apart when I flung it, and a darkness leaked — something red and wet.
I was not alone. Thin voices came from the walls. Then I heard my mother outside the house, whispering to Grandma. "She found out," I heard. "She has seen."
"Who?" Grandma's voice was almost reasonable. "Laylah?"
"She knows. She saw the photos. She knows we do it."
I pressed my ear to the wall as if I could siphon the liquor of truth out. "She won't be able to stop it," Mother said. "Once she sees the statue, she will belong."
I realized they were not whispering about ritual or Godlike visions. They spoke of Me — like I was a box of coins to be owned. I backed away.
My abdomen tightened. I felt like every hair had been pulled.
07
That night the bed under me breathed. My grandmother and mother slipped from under the bed and crawled like snakes. They smiled with mouths that did not belong to either.
"Laylah," my mother called on the other side of the door. "Are you awake?"
I kept still. My skin crawled. I slid out through the window and ran into the street, small and thin as fear.
Outside, the night was wrong. The sky shimmered colors that shouldn't belong in nature. Then the sky tore as if someone had pushed a knife into it. A great black pupil opened between the stars and watched me.
I fell to my knees and the world tightened. A pressure pressed on my skull. I blacked out.
08
When I opened my eyes, I was in a place with tiled floors and bright lights that smelled of antiseptic. My mother, my grandmother and almost everyone from the town hovered round a hospital bed. They smiled with mouths that were too wide.
"Laylah," my mother said. "Welcome."
"Where am I?" I asked, every nerve like a glass filament.
"This is the place where everyone born here becomes a member," my grandmother said. "You will be given the final test. It's your adult ritual."
They spread out, making room. The town formed a ring. In the center there stood a vast statue — the same snake-headed, tentacled thing I'd seen in my grandmother's parlor, magnified until my eyes watered.
"Mother, why? Why did you kill him?" I asked.
My mother looked at me not as a daughter but as a chosen one. "He was a sacrifice," she said. "A necessary loss. He gave us you." Her voice was flat with belief.
I felt something cold and mechanical push at my ribs, like an instruction to obey. A long knife was placed in my hand.
"Go and cut the throat of the bound man," my grandmother murmured. "This is your entry. He will be offered to our god."
The thing in the central cage was Findlay. He had been bound and gagged. His eyes flicked to me and he mouthed, "Run."
I could not explain the nausea that rose. I clamped my teeth together until taste filled my mouth. Part of me wanted to obey, to be safe in the cult, to be loved for belonging. Another part wanted him alive.
I remembered my father, who had left me those letters and photos. I remembered his careful, crooked handwriting telling me to watch mother.
I loosened the ropes with shaking hands, cutting the bonds off with the knife. I lifted him. My mother and the townspeople moved like a tide to stop us.
"Laylah, you cannot!" my mother shouted.
I dragged Findlay past them to the door. People screamed and lunged. Something inside him bent. His skin bulged like something beneath.
"Told you, run!" he croaked between gasps. "You must not come back! It spreads through the mark!"
09
We pushed through the door and out into the square. My legs burned. The town crowds reached for us with hands and faces I used to know. They were angels turned claws.
Findlay's voice became ragged. His skin began to split. Black eyes — dozens — pushed through his flesh. They stared at me like wet beads, full of anger.
"It is the god," he said. "It corrupts. Once it touches you, it will breed inside and mind will give way."
I carried him. We ran until the town blurred.
10
I woke up on a hospital bed, tubes in my arm and a nurse at my shoulder. I told her everything. "They forced me, the town — the god — the mark."
She listened with a professional softness. Outside, the world seemed ordinary again.
"Please," I said, weak and hollow, "Please help me. They will come."
The nurse hummed, and when she turned to radio, I gagged and threw up.
Something black and rubbery slid up my throat and out into her hand — a little tentacle. She screamed and dropped it. Her face folded.
"Help!" she cried. Doctors came, then men in white coats. They looked at me like I had chosen to break a test tube. The machine chirped and my chest was a closed room.
I felt my mind go thin. I tried to keep the memory of my father's face solid, like chalk, but the edges flared. I mouthed a plea.
"Kill me," I said. "Kill me before it learns to move."
The last thing I saw before my vision drowned was a black, curious fingertip on the nurse's neck. My words disappeared into a swell of black.
11
They took me, or I was taken. I don't remember after that. All I recall is the cold, the smell, the terrible slow frenzy of thought that wasn't mine.
But the town — it did not end with me.
Because I survived enough to speak later, the rumor spread. The tape of my confession leaked. The police returned to the town and dragged people out.
I will not pretend it happened neatly. It did not.
There was a day when they made them answer, in public, in the square they had used to celebrate harvests. A crowd gathered to see justice. It looked like electric weather: people murmured like bees and the air was sharp.
My mother and my grandmother were brought in, hands bound with rope, their yellow marks on display. They had been careful to hide them, but when their shirts were pulled open the ink glowed dull and unnerving.
"You killed my husband!" I said when a microphone was thrust before me. I stood on a scaffold while the town watched.
Mother did not cry with shame. She looked at me like a woman watching a play she had always directed. "He was a sacrifice," she said. "We are saved because of him."
Her supporter, who had been the mayor and the preacher rolled into one — Fielding Davidson — snarled, "We obeyed for our lives. We kept sickness away."
I felt my teeth flash.
Somebody from the crowd — a neighbor I had known since I was small, Cooper Cotton — stepped forward and spat.
"You're murderers," he said. "You let them sleep. You watched them die. You tell them it's necessary? Save yourselves."
Voices rose. People wanted spectacle. They wanted a story where those who turned their faces to darkness paid. What came next was not the neat courtroom drama the police pretended it would be. It was raw.
12
They led them to the center of the square. The statue stood nearby, cords and bolts still glinting. The police had removed some of its pieces, but the head — with blank dark eyes — remained.
A platform had been built for the sentencing. The prosecutor read statements. One by one the families of the dead were called to speak. They told of nights spent crying, of rushed funerals, of nightmares. There was a chorus of crying and blown rage.
Then they asked the mother to speak.
She smiled faintly and said, "I did what I had to so my child could live." Her voice held the same low warmth she had used to tuck me in as a child. The crowd hissed.
I remember a man in the crowd — Broderick Giordano — who had lost his brother years ago in one of those Aprils. He stepped forward. His eyes were metal.
"You made us complicit!" he shouted. "You dressed murder as salvation and called it mercy. Why? Where did your god come from? Who told you the price?"
They forced the grandmother to kneel. The mayor tried to soothe the crowd: "We are a town. We believed one thing for safety."
"Safety?" Broderick laughed like a saw. "You gave up your children."
The punishment was not meant to be purely legal; it was meant to be spectacle, a public undoing.
13
First, they removed the tattoos. The yellow marks were scarred with acid and salt and knives. Not a mere operation — more like a scraping. As they did it, the skin beneath seethed like mud. The women screamed.
Then they pulled out the old statue's heart — the carved disk of something like bone that had sat inside the idol. They shattered it in the square. When the stone cracked, people screamed as if the town's breath had been struck. A dark oil bled out, sticky and smelling like the sea after lightning.
Witnesses turned away; some pulled out phones and filmed. Others vomited. A handful of cultists tried to rush the crowd and free my mother and grandmother. They were met with blows.
The real humiliation was then: the townsfolk were forced to recount what they had done. Fielding read the names they had written — the births they had purchased — and the years of sick bargains. They read and read until the sun began to bruise.
My mother shifted as they read and her face lost smoothness. She blinked and I watched the change like weather. At first she held the same cold certainty. But then her eyes — those eyes that had watched me since the baby photos — flicked.
"You're lying," she said quietly at first, denial like a small animal. Then louder: "This is not right. They are making this up."
Her voice cracked. She stood on the scaffold and her knees gave. "No," she said. "No, you don't understand. I did this to save you. To save us. It was for the town."
The crowd pressed. The mayor — once their protector — had been unmasked as the ledger-keeper of names. He tried to explain away the ledger as "old medical records." The prosecutor read his entries of names, of trips and payments and "replacements."
My mother's face went through stages. Pride, then defensiveness, then fury. She wanted to be forgiven, then wanted to be believed, then wanted to be loved. Her mask cracked.
She reached toward me as if to touch my face. "Laylah," she said. "You are safe now. This was for you."
I stepped back. "Dad left me warnings," I said coldly into the microphone. "He told me to watch."
Her face crumbled into a new movement. Panic. "You don't have to do this," she said, and then she tried to scream apologies into the wind that had always carried the smells of baking bread and diesel. "We did it to stay alive."
Someone in the crowd began to shout, "Kill them!"
I did not want blood. I wanted truth. But justice wanted a ritual of its own. There was a call for a public display to remove the hold the cult had on the town.
They put the mayor and the preacher into stocks, then lowered their heads and poured bitter herbs down the throats of those who had ordered sacrifices. They made them confess names and locations. Each confession unspooled the village's sins into the air like smoke.
I watched my mother as the truth rolled across her face. It slipped from her lips that my father had known and had tried to hide things in the photos. "He left those photo hints to let you see," she cried, "so you would not be turned. I never meant—"
She fell into another phase: bargaining. "If you spare me, I will tell you everything. I will tell where the shrine is. I will give you the names of the ones who still worship."
The public listened with a hunger that felt old and hungry.
14
Humiliation shadows many faces differently. For some, it is agony; for others, the sudden exposure of a carefully kept secret is like a mirror. For my mother, the mirror was a slow destruction.
At first she still tried to stand proud. She still called it sacrifice. Then her voice began to shake. She said, "I did what I had to. He — your father — he knew."
"What did he know?" I demanded.
"That the mark spreads," she said, then tried to be loud: "He gave himself. It was the only way."
The crowd's mood shifted. Some softened into tears. Some shouted.
Then the surprising thing happened. People began to record the faces of the council who had in secret arranged the sacrifices with their phones. When the old ledger was read, one by one the town's pillars realized their names were there. They were not victims but accomplices.
Public punishment came in stages. First the financial: authorities froze assets. Next the ritual: they dragged out the old shrines and burned them. They scorched the statue in the town square with torches. The oil that bled out turned to steam and the priests who had adored it convulsed.
The worst part for my mother, and for the grandmother, was the social collapse. Neighbors spat. Children turned their faces. Those who had tutored my mother in the rites were arrested and stripped of their pension. The mayor was humiliated with his ledger strapped to his chest — anyone could read his hand.
My mother went through the steps people go through when they realize they are alone. At first shock, then anger — she shouted and raged, "You will not take away my family!" Then denial. Then bargaining. She promised to reveal everything. She promised the location of the smallest shrines hidden under floorboards.
Finally, she broke.
When the town people demanded the names of all the offerings taken each April, she could not answer. Her eyes slid. I heard a cough and then a whisper: "He loved us."
The crowd hissed. Someone threw tomato at her. The police, who had watched everything unfold, escorted her away.
It lasted long enough for a roast to be burned. Four hours of humiliation that left no one satisfied, only raw. People filmed, shouted, cried. Some wanted blood. Others wanted to make the pain public for the crime of secrecy.
15
There was no neat end. Not the way stories in novels promise. The town could not be cleansed merely by spectacle; the thing that had been worshiped was not a statue alone. The idol had a mind, and the yellow mark it had etched onto our flesh had planted a seed.
I thought this would be the last of it. I was wrong.
Four months later a new story surfaced. Files in a hospital showed more patients arriving with symptoms no clinic could explain — black filaments in cough, sudden starts where their eyes dilated too wide. They were not confined to our town.
The leaked video of my mother's humiliation had spread. People in other counties who had once felt strange at the thought of an idol found a pattern. An old, slow sponge of infection had been sitting in the world, waiting for cracks.
16
There are things a confession cannot fix. Truth is not always a cure. The thing that crawled out of people when their skins cracked, the tentacles and the black eyes, traveled in silence. It was in photographs, in the shadows of people who loved, in the small gestures of caretakers.
My last memory of my father is of his hand, rough and warm, folding a letter and hiding the message inside a sentence. He knew to warn me and he did it in a place that would be easy to dismiss.
The punishment had been public. The town had stripped itself of complicit power. For the first time in decades, inspections were held. Priests were questioned. Shrines were smashed.
My mother and grandmother were taken to trial. They were convicted of multiple counts: conspiracy, manslaughter, abduction. The punishment was long. They were to spend years in custody and be monitored. People called it justice. It was.
But in a small room, years later, I saw a photograph of my mother, pale, behind glass. The yellow mark was faded but present. She looked at me through the lens with a thin recognition, like a prisoner remembering a map.
When I held the journal of Findlay Finch in my hands, I felt the sickening truth: the god they worshipped was not a god. It was a pattern. It had no mercy. It corrupted love into hunger and protection into possession.
17
In the appendices of things we call evidence, they found other names: a ledger kept by the mayor, a small wooden heart hidden in the statue, a map to a cavern where the original sacrifice took place decades earlier. The police dug the ground and found bones long turned to dirt and a carved stone blacker than anything natural.
They burned the idols they could find. They poured acid on the marks. They plastered the photographs of my mother's face across bulletins with warnings.
The town changed. People who had once looked the other way looked outward now. The annual April deaths did not stop overnight; some deaths continued in the months that followed, as if a seed had been whetted inside people and took time to sprout.
But there was justice as well. My mother's public punishment removed her authority. People stopped the secrecy and told the laws. The priest who arranged the Offerings was jailed and later screamed in his cell about "service" and "salvation".
18
What happened to me? I was hospitalized. I had moments when I thought I felt it move inside my skull — a tickle at the back of my eyes that felt like something learning.
"Nurse," I told the woman who sat by my bed, her face young and kind.
She held my hand. "What do you see?"
"Black," I said. "An eye like a pupil and some tentacles. Please," I begged. "If I become a carrier, people will die."
"I will help you," she said softly.
I vomited again. A black strand came out like seaweed.
She screamed. The hospital went into chaos. I remember saying one last thing.
"Kill me," I whispered. "Kill me before it learns."
They did not. They couldn't — laws and horror made them hesitate. I watched a world that wanted my story enough to burn but not to end me.
19
The public punishment was messy and it was necessary. It stripped the facade from those who thought secrecy could keep them safe. My mother was humiliated, forced to confess, her rituals torn away. She went through the stages of reaction everyone does when the mirror shows what they denied: denial, anger, bargaining, collapse, pleading, final quietness.
She begged. She was stripped of the yellow mark's final vestiges, and for a long while the town breathed as if freed. But the thing had gone farther than anyone realized. It had learned from us and made plans.
The last record I saw, months later, was a small note tucked into an evidence file: "Some tremors continue in old houses. Some who snore in their sleep drool with black in the morning. The infection is slow and has been seeded through photographs and time."
I left the town. There were nights I dreamed of my father's handwriting guiding me like a compass. He had wanted to save me by showing me the watchword. I had not believed him at first. Then I did.
In the end the thing, whatever it was, may have spread. Or maybe the arrests and the public shaming slowed it enough. I do not know.
This is my journal of truth.
I hide the last photograph he took. In it I am next to him, smiling, and in the gap by the door an eye is nearly closed. He wrote, "Watch mother."
I kept his letter for years. I read it like a prayer. Sometimes I think I hear a small scrape under the floorboards at night and see a sliver of yellow beneath the carpet where a patch of skin was stamped long ago.
I cannot go back. The world is crooked in a way I cannot fix. The statue's head was broken and buried, but perhaps it is never so completely gone.
If you see a yellow mark on a shoulder, leave. If you find a photograph with someone in the background who should not be there, burn it.
Please, watch the people who watch you.
The End
— Thank you for reading —