The Eyes

Eccles, Chris. Arctic Fox, Blönduós. Digital image. Flickr: Eccylad. Flickr, 20 July 2010. Web. 21 Jan. 2015. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/53244388@N00/4831524565>.

The yellowed bones dangled, stripped of their pelt. Flesh, muscle, and soul decayed. Empty sockets yearned for eyes to fill them. Were they blue, like the depths of the oceans, or perhaps green as a hallowed forest? His mouth, once carrying secrets and kisses, was now bound in a perpetual, humorless grin. Every emotion, every thought that marred his porcelain skin with its advent, bleached a sickening, sterile white. Were his hands strong, his back firm, his hopes pure? The skeleton once moved within a living man, now known merely as ‘Homo Sapien.’

Such were the thoughts that occupied Everly’s mind as she moved like a whisper across the crooked wooden floors that hadn’t felt her weight in many years. Her gaze darted from squirrels to armadillos, from leopards to wombats. She was in a dead jungle, a zoo that reeked of formaldehyde and dusty furniture. Father’s museum had always fascinated her. It had become a sick obsession that itched at her mind and kept her awake at night. For years, she struggled to rid her head of the thousands of unblinking eyes that stared at her. But they never stopped staring.

She now moved her fingers delicately over the thick glass that contained her childhood pets. Their fur looked just as soft as the day they came home. Father used to duck through the back door, a rifle in one hand and a burlap sack in the other. She would bound down the stairs to see what Father had brought. What would it be today? Were her pleas for a snow fox finally heard? Father carefully placed his weapon on the counter, always meticulous in avoiding dents and scratches on his prized possession. He then coarsely grabbed the sack by the bottom and shook out its content. A flash of two polished black orbs held Everly’s eyes before the body met the counter’s surface. A red stain sullied its white pelt while the fox’s tongue lolled out of a lifeless face.

“He’s perfect! Oh Father, he’s just what I wanted! I’ll call him Theo!” Everly cried.

“Now, now. Let Father fix him and then you can play all day long.” A smile grew on his lips. The red puddle widened on the countertop.

Theo stared at her now through the transparent barrier that separated time and space. He was still as young, still as lively as when she took him to run around the rose bushes in the garden twenty years before. She would walk him to the top of the hill to be her audience as she laid on her stomach and rolled down to the bottom. These happy memories, though, began to plague her when she moved away from home; they were a sucking, pulling rot feeding on her maturing conscience. The same preservant Father rubbed into these creatures was smeared across her naive vision. It concealed the decay behind each ‘pet’ Father had given her smiling, and the blight of her playing with them as if nothing was amiss.

Father worked all day. She would catch a glimpse of his white lab coat through the basement keyhole before it disappeared behind a rack of flasks and tubes. That’s how she would know he was still there. That’s how she knew that Theo’s cold, glassy eyes hadn’t replaced the deep, brown ones of her only living companion, the eyes through which she had learned to see the world. She was lonely and tormented by a profound, cutting isolation. She needed someone. Mother had gone where the foxes are long ago and she needed a friend.

Everly swept through the rows, not a child but a flash of a child’s lingering pain. Faster and faster she moved. She was running. She ran among her bears and her lions. She danced with her bluebirds and waltzed with her wolves. She played with her childhood friends until her steps were retraced. Once again she met her fox before collapsing to the uneven floor. Thousands of eyes stared down at her. The eyes that had kept her up at night. The eyes that watched as she rolled down the hill. The eyes that held hers as Father emptied the burlap sack.

Everly gazed deeply into Theo’s eyes as she had done a hundred times. And the fox blinked.

The Storm Break

Marshall, Taylor. "Did God Send the Tornado? The Problem of Natural Evils." Taylor Marshall PhD. N.p., 21 May 2013. Web. <http://taylormarshall.com/2013/05/did-god-send-tornado-problem-of-natural.html>.

The old lady glanced down at her sandaled feet and, after a drawn-out exhale, she began.“It was a rather unremarkable morning. Daily occurrences passed without notice from the few early risers traversing the quiet streets of Charlesville. The last withered leaves of autumn fell in succession down to the road, illuminated by the first lights of dawn. The sleeping townspeople were roused by floods of warm light as the sun made its ascent. The dull murmur of human noise gradually grew louder until cars began to leave their driveways, mothers sent their children off to school, husbands kissed their wives goodbye. Yes, it had indeed seemed as though the world had been meticulously staged to look like a perfectly uneventful collection of hours.”

She took another breath and continued on in her old Southern drawl, “I felt something that day. A spark in the air, a near undetectable static prick and yet still, I could feel it as I rose unsteadily from my bed. I remember wiping the sensation from my face, my arms, my hands and ambling downstairs uneasily.

“‘Father?’ I called as I walked groggily to the kitchen.

“‘Father?’ my voice echoed forlornly through the still house, mixed with the metal clang of spoon against bowl while I ate my cereal. I always used to roll my tired, hazel eyes at his habitual absence. He wasn’t ever home.

“‘He still isn’t back,’I meant to think, but the words slipped slyly through my lips. I returned to my bedroom to change into my school uniform. The stiff polyester of my plaid skirt abraded my dry, pale skin, and I let out my usual, seven AM ‘ugh.’ A glance to the mirror, showing a mass of frizzy auburn locks, provoked another moan.” The old lady’s eyes trailed off, and she laughed without humor.

“I heard the familiar click of the lock as I opened the door to go. It was then that it began. The hall light fizzled out, and I was left in the dull morning sun’s haze. A thunderous crash sounded from a few miles off, followed by a cacophony of piercing sirens. I fell against the door in shock. Nobody would have thought Charlesville. We were a little town in the South, and the harshest weather we had ever experienced was summer showers. Yes, the scientists did warn us about the effects of our actions, but people never listen.

“I tried desperately to collect myself when a second gust shook our house to its very foundation. A family picture smashed down to the floor. A crystal vase abloom with dead flowers toppled, dousing me with a drizzle of dirty water. I ran to the street and merged with the crowd of the panicked and hysterical. I recall following their eyes up to the blackened clouds, and gazing with horror at the sight I beheld.

“Through the overhanging trees, the sky was storming with thick, swirling tornadoes, their sickly shadows imprinted on the tarmac, moving closer by the second. My head swam in a sudden wave of nausea, and I tilted it back down only to find I was now alone. The townspeople had all bolted to their homes to collect their children and flee while they still could. I stood, petrified, before another blast stirred me into action. I ran to my neighbors’ house as they were just pulling out of their garage.

“‘Mr. Johnson! Mr. Johnson please!’I pleaded through the glass window. Mr. Johnson briefly shut his eyes as if to say ‘I hear you, but I won’t change my mind.’

“‘Please, Mrs. Johnson, my dad isn’t home, he has the car, I don’t know what to do. Please let me come with you. I have no where to go. My dad..’ My words came stumbling out one on top of the other as I was sprinting alongside the ever-hastening car. They finally escaped their long driveway, and left me desolate, coughing up their grey exhaust.

“In choking tears, I came back to the deserted main street. I collapsed in heaving sobs, my shaking hands grasping the ends of my skirt. The roar of the storm was deafening, its increasing volume speeding time and the world was set in droning fast-motion. I felt the hollow, disabling awareness that I was completely alone. As fast as my legs could take me, I ran home. As the houses of the departed passed by in a colorless blur, the tornados reached the quiet streets of Charlesville. Invisible hands pushed my thin, wispy body and I flew five yards, landing on my side. Oh god, the pain screamed. I let out a cry of pure agony and pushed up from the gravel. There was no time to lose. In my dazed, slightly concussed mind, that notion shone with complete clarity. It was do or die.

“Behind me, trees were being uprooted and spiralling to the ground, houses were crumbling. The newly paved road was severed into chunks of black rock and the sky was thick with ash and debris. The world was being churned into a throng of physical chaos, and all I could do was run.”

The old woman’s face lit up, and she gazed into the middle distance with a hint of a smile at her lips.

“But then, in the midst of all this destruction and tumult, the tornado suddenly stood still. Perfectly, blessedly still. The tremendous sound died out like smoke in the breeze as the tornado stopped rotating around its axis. I looked around in astonishment, before realizing that this was my chance. I reached my house, still intact, and barreled down to the basement. I threw myself in a room stocked with peas and bottled water, and I waited.” She closed her eyes, and sat in thought for a while before continuing.

“The tornado began again on its path of death, and I sat, holding my breath for my inevitable end. But it never came. Oh yes, the house was gone. Charlesville had ceased to exist in a matter of minutes, because we didn’t listen. We were warned, yet still in our innate stubbornness, we decided not to listen to the men in white coats. All was lost because of it, and now there are so few of us left.”