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.