I and the eye

I used to have the luxury of lying to myself that I was normal before the eye appeared. Before the eye, I could look into the mirror and see a human. A misshapen, half-formed human, maybe, held together by bits of string and drugstore lipstick, but a human. And now I can’t even do that. 

Please don’t ask how the eye appeared. For the life of me, I can’t remember how it did. All I remember was that three weeks ago on a Wednesday, I woke up to the sound of my parents arguing in the living room and a strange sensation on my left hand. I remember feeling something slightly damp and protruding out from my skin. And there it was, as if it had always been there and I’ve just brought my attention to it. It spread all the way across my palm, from my thumb to my pinky finger, and was milky white all around, except for a small, pin-sized black dot which I now assume is its pupil. It had spider-leg eyelashes that felt brittle to the touch. 

I had screamed, of course, which caused my dad to come stumbling into my room, squinting at me, barking out a series of “what’s the matters”. Even then, just a minute after discovering the eye, I knew I had to hide it. So I stuffed my hand under my blanket and told him that I had seen another roach, to which he scoffed at and stumbled away. 

I started wearing gloves. The only gloves I could find in the house were my sister’s old skiing mittens, which made my hands sweat and made people cast funny looks my way. Just like that, I was not only the strange, quiet girl, but the strange, quiet girl who wore skiing mittens in the middle of June. 

My mom began to think I had OCD or something because of how virulent I became whenever she tried to take them off my hands. One time, I snapped at her when she began tugging at them at the dinner table. I threw my plate of Kraft dinner in the air and told her that if she ever tried to touch them again, I’d kill her. Of course, I’d never do such a thing, but my tone must’ve been pretty convincing because she started to cry, right there in front of my sister and I. 

“You’re just lucky your dad isn’t here right now,” she sniffled, her nose bright red. “You’re just goddamn lucky right now, Frances”. 

I didn’t care what my dad’s reaction would’ve been had my sister or my mom told him. There was nothing worse that he could do than what the eye had already done. 

It could see everything, you know. It could see through the ski mitt, it could even see through walls. And you know what? The thing never even blinked. I never had a rest from its vigorous gaze. I could see things that I had never wanted to see. I could see my sister crying herself to sleep through her bedroom wall. I could see my parents pushing each other around in the kitchen in silent fits of rage because they thought there was nobody around to see them. While walking down the street, the eye could see into people’s homes, through closed doors and blinds pulled tightly shut. 

Within a week, I couldn’t tell the difference from what I, with my own two brown eyes, was seeing, from what the parasite on my hand was seeing. Everything was completely blurred. I couldn’t tell if I had walked in on my mom with the neighbor or if the eye had seen it while I was hiding away in the attic, trying to peel the thing off my skin. 

There is one thing I’m sure that the eye, and only the eye, has seen, however. I don’t want to say it anymore, or even think about it, but I need to before I do this. I need to see the image in my mind again, stark and clear. 

A girl disappeared a week and a half ago. Big news for a small town like mine. It was in all the newspapers, was all you heard when you turned on the radio. And it wasn’t just any girl, it was Claire Thomas, the daughter of the mayor. And the way people said she disappeared was very peculiar. The official investigation states that thirteen-year-old Claire Thomas vanished without a trace in broad daylight, in her own backyard. 

There’s been plenty of theories, naturally. One of them being that she ran away. Just like that. But why would she? And where would she get to? How far could she have possibly gotten? And there’s been darker theories. Theories that say that somebody killed her, somebody that nobody would suspect. A friend, a neighbor, or, as the more insidious rumors state, maybe even Mayor Thomas himself. 

Only I and the eye know what truly happened the day that Claire Thomas disappeared. 

I like to walk the gated community that Claire had lived in. The sidewalks were always clean, no cigarette butts or crumpled up soda cans. Quiet homes with pretty lawns, dotted with flowers and white picket fences. It was also a little game of mine, to see whatever the eye saw inside these perfect houses, what fears and hurts and lies stirred inside those picturesque four walls. 

When I passed Claire’s backyard, the eye saw through the fence. I saw Claire, sitting on the back porch, in flip-flops and a ponytail, flicking through a magazine while her dog, a small, furry thing, sat next to her, watching a bug crawl up the side of her leg that she hadn’t noticed, when Claire got up, maybe to stretch her legs, maybe to see something. She got up and began to walk across the yard when a hole appeared in the ground, maybe four feet wide. Claire didn’t notice, even when the dog started barking. She stepped forwards, thinking her feet would mesh with the soft, dewy grass beneath her, but instead they landed on air.

She didn’t even have time to scream. She fell, and the ground swallowed her whole.

I want to tell someone. I want to tell someone what happened to Claire Thomas so badly. I want to tell someone so her family will feel better, so everybody would stop thinking that Mayor Thomas is a psycho daughter killer, and for my own goddamn sanity. 

But I can’t.

` I’m already strange enough, you see. If I start telling people that I saw the famous missing girl disappear by walking into a hole in the ground, and that I didn’t see it with my own eyes-no, oh no, I saw it with the eye on my hand, I’d be thrown in the nuthouse so quick my head would spin. 

So now I have only one solution. A haphazard, last minute, tossed together messily solution at best, I know, I know, but it’s all I got. I will immolate my other eyes. Maybe then the eye would go away. And won’t see anything. Doesn’t that just sound so beautiful? Not seeing anything? It’ll be as if I’m asleep. Peaceful. 

I hold my father’s lighter up to my face. The flame is blue and it dances for me. I watch it twirl with a smile. I hold it up using the hand with the eye, and I stare at myself in the mirror. I can be normal now. I won’t have to lie to myself. 

As I hold the flame up to my left eye, I feel something wet dripping down my hand. I glance down for a moment, and see that the eye on my hand is weeping. I never noticed it had a tear duct, but oddly enough, here it is crying, blinking as its eyelashes became wet with the salty liquid. 

I don’t have time to figure out why it is. I began to burn my eyelashes.