robin egg eyes

Robin Egg Eyes

Part I - Girl

Every day I watched him. With a steady gaze. He limped through the streets dragging a smooth black stone on a thin string behind him. It bounced and skipped across the uneven pavement in a way that almost made it come alive. Solemnly choked and bound, captive for eternity. The old man gripped the string between his left index finger and his thumb, shaking as if the stone were the heaviest thing in the world. Every once in a while he would pause in his aimless pursuit and scream this horrible scream. He would screech those three relentless words and my heart would quicken with a sickening intensity.

You killed her.

He would point a gnarled finger at a random passerby and smile this terrible smile. It would stretch across his face until every muscle in his face was shaking. It seems misleading to even call such a thing a smile. It was more like he was trying as hard as he could to show off every single one of his rotten yellow teeth. Then he would carefully screech this bizarre accusation with so much contempt that it almost convinced me every dull accusee had indeed committed some terrible crime!

People would scurry past, afraid of meeting his harrowed gaze. A painful mixture of fear and guilt would overcome them for the ten seconds in which they passed by, then almost just as quickly, he would cease to exist from their minds. Only a slight discomfort in the exciting jumble of their busy lives.

But if they had made the decision to meet his gaze, and decided to acknowledge him as a person, or even merely as a lost soul, they would have discovered something spectacular. The old man was hideous in every way imaginable except for one minor anomaly. A feature of such pulchritude, that if it were not for his truly unsettling demeanor, one would not be able to miss it. A dazzling pair of robin egg eyes. I had yet to see them up close, as I had not yet dared venture near, but even from afar I was struck by their ineffable beauty.

He never “harmed” anyone. To harm someone he would have had to be more than a voice repeating three inconsequential words, floating through crowds–a smooth silver ghost. I guess that's why I was not afraid of him. I am no stranger to ghosts.

Looking back, even though I could have never known what was to come of my life, I wish I had the sense to have just kept watching. But I was never good at simply observing life pass me by. I had to take the reins. So one morning, I did just that. 

I was walking down the street when I felt an overwhelming wave of dread wash over me. And there he was. A shadow. An unmistakable shadow. I turned cautiously; my feet shuffled in an awkward animated movement. I was rigid with fear as I allowed myself to meet his gaze. 

And just like that, everything melted away. Everything but those robin egg eyes. A blue so pristine I felt my own soul begin to sink like a rock, plummeting toward the endless abyss of that perfect blue. Scattered across the great blue abyss, dimly lit gold stars. They twinkled in a subtle way, so that from far away the speckles had looked dark and dull, but now with my new perspective I could see they still had light. They were not robin egg eyes at all. They were the night.

An eternity passed, eyes locked. I was waiting for something, but I did not know what. And then I saw it. A look I had never seen before on the old man's face. Recognition. Then what followed. Three words.

I killed you.

A sweeping fear crashed into me and I just froze. Had I heard him right?

I killed you.

The words repeated felt no more real than the first time.

I stumbled back, still in shock, and suddenly felt the violent urge to vomit. But I just stood there, eyes locked on my eyes. He was crying as he inched closer to me. My eyes fell to what I could now see only as the black rock of death. I could almost taste the deafeningly dull scrape of it dragging across the pavement. 

A dark round object flew toward my face. I was gone. I left my body peacefully. I was too ready to die. I tiptoed up into the air, now nothing but a weightless soul--a ghost-- and watched him swing the rock over and over and over…

A bright crimson river ran through the cracked streets. My blood seeping into the cold earth. Muffled screams followed as the shock of the occasion vanished. A nervous frenzy of dull, beige people briskly swept him away. Not one looked at me. They desperately avoided my empty gaze. A smile was the last thing I saw. Yellow teeth, now stained with blood. My blood.

Part II - Old Man

The day I lost my eyes, was the day I lost my soul. Both replaced by a blank, but beautiful void. Nobody knows what it’s like to see with darkness as your light. The opportunities became somehow endless when not restrained by what I could see. But I saw too much. That was the gift of the prophet: enlightenment. I had given everything to achieve such an obviously foolish wish. I knew what I was now, which only made me weaker. My quick decline in self-worth ejected me to a purgatory of my one creation. With my foresight, I was able to bend the meaning of life or death and it turned me into a monster. I lost track of my past and future, causing the present to become a tangled endless knot of the two. That is where I got lost. When my two worlds collided, and I conjured the girl I knew I would soon have to kill.