Tennis Eyeball [FICTOID]

The eye on Chester’s racquet blinked at him.

“Jesus!” Chester yelled, so startled he nearly dropped it.

“My name’s Ricardo,” his opponent said.  “Everybody knows that.”

“Look!” Chester said, turning his racquet so Ricardo could see it.

“Look at what?”

“Don’t you see it?  An eye!”

Ricardo squinted at the racquet.  “I don’t see anything.”

Chester looked at the racquet again.  The eye was gone.  “There was an eye here,” he said.  “It blinked at me.  I swear it!”

“Maybe it was just a trick of the light,” Ricardo said, bouncing a tennis ball impatiently on the court, eager for their match to begin.  “Sunlight hit it in such a way that the strings looked like an eye.  You ready or what?”

Chester looked his racquet over carefully.  “Yeah, I’m ready.”

As Ricardo hauled off to serve, Chester glanced at his racquet again.

The eye opened and looked at him, not angrily, but disappointed.

Ricardo’s serve sailed right past Chester.

“Hey, man, you going to play or what?”

“…forfeit…” Chester said, hurrying off the court.

He almost stuffed his racquet in its zipper bag but decided not to; he knew he wouldn’t like being stuffed in a dark bag.

Climbing in his car, he almost put the racquet on the front passenger seat but hesitated.

He didn’t want the eye looking at him as he drove, but he didn’t want sunlight to hit it, either.  He didn’t know what was going on, but until he figured it out he didn’t want to antagonize the eye.

God only knew what it was capable of.

Chester gently lay the racquet in the back, facing up, then wrapped a seatbelt around the shaft and clicked it into place so it wouldn’t bounce around on the ride back to his apartment.

He got home without incident, driving extra carefully.  He worried other residents at the apartment would see the eye, but fortunately no one used the stairs or hallway.

Ducking inside his apartment, he set the racquet upright in a chair, then pulled up another chair to sit in front of it.

The eye opened and looked around.  It seemed even more disappointed this time.

“This must be a dream…” Chester murmured.

“It is a dream,” said the eye, “but the question is, your dream or mine?

“There are grave implications for the non-sleeper.”

© Buzz Dixon