Every small town has its quirks, according to Casey’s mother. Wyatt had assured him that the eyes were just another one of Samson’s.
“Oh yeah,” he said, the words knocking against the strawberry Jolly Rancher wedged in his teeth. “They appear to everyone who stays long enough. It’s just the town checking in on you.” When he grinned, his tongue was stained pink. “Congrats, you’re a real Samsonian now.” Casey, for his part, did not want to be a Samsonian, real or otherwise. He had never seen a cornfield before the move, but now, they seemed to eclipse his entire world. The crumbling brick school building with leaky faucets in the bathrooms and vulgar graffiti haloing the trashcans, the combination soccer field and tennis court with patches of dried brown grass large enough to sprawl in, the solitary strip mall hosting a defunct mattress store and an old-fashioned soda fountain, everything was bracketed by a sea of rustling plants in compact, uniform rows. This was a welcome change, according to his mother. Quieter than the city, a simpler way to go about life, and freer of temptations. His father had only nodded in agreement, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel as their car carved into the landscape, flinching at the uneven roads and sticking on the heat-softened tar. His only comment had been that city kids were often spoiled, and that the forced improvisation brought about by a glaring lack of anything interesting to do built character in young people. That was his pet complaint, held closer to his chest and more tenderly than he’d held Casey’s mother in years: the lack of character in children nowadays, and in Casey in particular. None of the other kids in the new neighborhood seemed to mind his supposed lack of character, not when his weekly allowance paid for seemingly endless arcade tickets and he had the entire second floor of their new—but actually quite old—farmhouse to himself to play Xbox and watch horror movies on demand through his mother’s account under the whirring of air conditioning. He was glad for the company, glad for the afternoons away from the butter-thick tension between his parents as they tried to rearrange a high-rise apartment’s worth of stuff into a two-story farmhouse with a weed thicket in the backyard, glad for the fact that most of them were terrible at Mario Kart, and no one had beaten his coveted high score yet. But he was not glad for the eyes that had begun to speckle themselves across the wall of his bedroom, blinking irises tracing his movement as he slouched on the cardboard boxes of stuff he’d promised to unpack before school started again, and was now fishing his pencils and scissors and binder clips from before running to meet Wyatt at the bus stop in the mornings. “When do they stop?” He attempted to pick a chunk of peanut butter sandwich from his teeth with the nail of his thumb. Samson Junior High was the old high school, according to Wyatt, though the current high school appeared to Casey to be only a couple of years younger, which meant there was outdoor seating by the cafeteria. They were sitting on the stone wall that snaked around the edge of the pavilion. It was a highly sought-after position, apparently, and they were lucky to get it. “Hours, weeks, months,” Wyatt said. “Depends.” Casey considered asking what it depended on but decided against it. Instead, he tore off another piece of his sandwich and rolled it into a ball between his fingers. Across the pavilion, a girl from his homeroom smiled shyly and waved three fingers. Casey waved back. Above her head, an eye the size of a tennis ball blinked open, brown with hints of honeyed veins flaring around the pupil. He lowered his hand and focused instead on cramming the brown crusts of his sandwich back into his lunch bag. “Another one?” There was a faint snap, the breaking of suction as Wyatt burrowed a molar into the softened Jolly Rancher and then pried it off. Casey nodded. “Jesus. Must think you’re really interesting.” “Great.” The brown eye had been joined by a smaller gray one, squinting in the sunlight. Casey tossed the brown paper sack into a nearby trashcan. Wyatt whistled approvingly at the shot. Wet grass snapped against Casey’s cleats, overgrown and spotted with dandelions. He’d never played outside before, and the morning dew and tingling coolness settled underneath his windbreaker like a second skin. His mother loitered a few feet away from the other parents, sipping sludgy thick coffee from a thermos. She took it strong, told him if it wasn’t thick as syrup it wouldn’t wake her up. She hadn’t seen any eyes yet, and was worried what it meant. The woman at the grocery store check-out had nodded sympathetically, half listening as she typed in the codes for grape tomatoes and bean sprouts. His mother needed this move to work like she needed to breathe. An eye blinked open on the cashier’s forehead, just above a gray caterpillar of eyebrow. Casey said nothing. “McClure, you’re up.” A brown eye, coffee dark and wide, blinked open as if just roused from sleep, within one of the hexagonal patches of the soccer ball. “Please, don’t.” Casey toed the edge of the ball, careful to avoid the eye. The pupil swayed back and forth in the cornea, never straying from his face. He hugged his arms to his chest and looked up at the sky, foot twitching. “What do you want from me?” “McClure!” Casey looked back at the ball, the eye wide and far too trusting. Kicking it felt better than he’d like to let on, the mental image of the eye squeezing shut as it strained against the net before dropping back into the mud. “Sorry,” he muttered, and wished he meant it more, before jogging back for the next round of drills. His mother did not talk much on the drive back, instead opting to drum her fingers against the steering wheel every time the car stalled at a stop sign, and squint into the halo of fog settling over the distant cornfields. Blue sapphire studs glittered against her ears. “Are you happy here?” She blinked, trying to snap the question into focus like she was sitting at the optometrist, comparing two lenses. “It’s good to get out of the city,” she finally said, which wasn’t really an answer. “I grew up in a town like this.” A pause. “What about you? Are you happy?” Casey shrugged. “I’d like you to be happy. I’m sorry if I’ve been distant. Your father and I—none of this is your fault.” A stop sign outside the car blinked, the disk now a moss-colored iris, orange roots running through the color and fanning out from the pupil. Casey stared back, clenching his jaw so his teeth hurt. “I’m happy,” he said, biting the end of the sentence hard, not looking away from the eye. It stared back, unblinking. Casey’s school back in the city had made everyone wear ID cards on lanyards around their neck and scan them to open doors. To avoid class, kids huddled in bathroom stalls or slunk into the back of the library or into the computer lab. In Samson, skipping class was as easy as jumping the ledge during lunch and not looking back. Wyatt led Casey to the cornfield, where no one could see the curls of cigarette smoke through the folds of leaves, and the Walmart where the security camera above the door didn’t work, and no one could tell if he stuffed king-sized Hershey bars into the pockets of his sweatshirt. The candy was less than two dollars a pop, and Casey could’ve paid for it. Wyatt rolled his eyes and muttered city kid when he brought this up, which Casey was beginning to learn was Wyatt-speak for end of discussion. “Why’d you even move, though?” A brown, greasy tennis ball smacked against the stone side of the building, bouncing back into Wyatt’s hand. “Everyone I know from Samson is desperate to get out.” Casey sucked the melting chocolate off the end of his thumb. “My mom wanted a change. My dad kinda owed her.” “Owed her for what?” Sound carried in their new farmhouse, but with the whole upstairs to himself, there was space to hide from it. In their high-rise apartment, all Casey could do was turn up the volume on the television, the chime of Mario Kart interspersed with arguing. I’m not mad at her, Frederick, I’m mad at you. Jesus Christ, what are you going to tell Casey? Shell bounce. What are you going to tell your son? Yoshi pass. Casey? Casey doesn’t notice shit. It’d take a goddamn miracle for that kid to think about anything but his video games and his—New High Score. Casey shrugged. “Who knows? Parent stuff.” He held out his palm for the tennis ball and threw it against the wall as hard as he could. It bounced back past them, into the parking lot, and down the empty blacktop where the parking space lines had been worn down to slightly discolored strips of asphalt. Wyatt whistled low. “Yeah, I can see that.” “Shit. Sorry. I’ll get it.” By the time he’d scooped it up, it had rolled far enough to see the entire signage of the Walmart, in all its fly-infested flickering neon glory. The hollow of the second ‘a’ narrowed, iris the shade of seaweed. Casey dribbled the ball, stooping to catch it on the third bounce. “Are you going to tell on us for skipping?” It was a stupid question. According to his father, Casey was excellent at those. The eyes followed, they observed him unnervingly, but there was no way to communicate with or to them. All they could do was watch things come apart in silence, peeling away like layers of taffy. “Look, I know, okay? But I made a friend and I need this to work out. So does Mom. She’s been through enough. You’ve seen it.” The eye blinked once. Casey decided to interpret it as acquiescence. Casey’s father drove him to out-of-town games. The car rides were long, with only droning news stations on the radio, and an abyss of corn out the windows. His father did not speak but did sigh at the electric chirps of Pokemon. “Do you do anything besides play on that thing?” “I play soccer.” Casey had meant the answer in earnest, but his mother had always told him that being literal-minded made him sound like a smart-ass. His father always said that it was the only way he was ever going to be mistaken for one. “Put it up, and ease off the attitude.” Casey folded the game console and tucked it back into the drink holder cubby. He rubbed his socks against the floor, picking up static. His cleats were muddy, and he’d had to throw them in a plastic grocery bag before getting in the car. Samson was wedged inconspicuously amidst a sea of cornfields, the only identifiable severance between them a rickety sign suspended on rusted chains just outside the city limits. Someone had sliced over the ‘o’ in ‘county’ with red spray paint, which itself had been left long enough for the traces of rain against dust to have left an impression. In the remaining untarnished ‘o’s’, a set of matching hazel eyes traced their movement, speckled with color like tortoiseshell cats. “Have you seen any eyes yet?” “Don’t mention them to your mother. She’s gotten herself worked up about it; like it means anything she hasn’t seen any.” Casey’s father flicked his turn signal belatedly as they pulled into the side road that led to their neighborhood. “I haven’t asked her.” There was an unspoken but I asked you his father did not respond to. “I don’t understand why anyone would even want to be watched like that.” “Yeah,” Casey said, picking his fingernails into the mud crusted on the ankles of his socks. “I can see why you wouldn’t.” His father pursed his lips into a thin, gray line. They made the next turn sharper than necessary, the bag of muddied cleats thumping to the side in the backseat. “I don’t know what your mother told you–” “Nothing. She didn’t tell me anything.” It wasn’t true; she’d explained it before the move when he was tucking his books of Guinness World Records and slumping clay bowl from art class into a box labeled ‘C - bedroom.’ He’d focused on the books, the way the edges of the spines had worn down to the cardboard. She hadn’t told him anything he hadn’t known, hadn’t seen himself. He’d refused to meet her eyes, and she’d thought it was from shock. “Casey–” His voice eased back with the breaks of the car, the ‘y’ a soft exhale as they pulled to a stop. Casey unclicked his seatbelt and slid out the door. “Thanks for the ride.” In his room upstairs, a fog blue eye the size of a golf ball stared down from above his nightstand. Casey grabbed a pillow and smacked it over the cornea. The eye blinked, growing red and glossy. Casey hugged the pillow to his chest and watched it continue to blink until a single tear dripped and rolled down the side of the wall. “Sorry,” he said, smearing a hand down his own face to relieve the stinging behind his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He hadn’t known he could. The next time it blinked, the eye did not open again. The tear remained, however, and Casey watched it slide down to the floor. “Casey, come look!” Rain lulled against the windows, his mother stood in the doorway to his bedroom, hair slipping out of a loose ponytail like sand from an hourglass, piling in blonde curls on her shoulders. Casey looked over at the clock on his bedside table, the blinking 10:00 discordant with the gray streaks poking underneath the blinds. “Have you not gotten up yet?” “No, I’m up.” It was a terrible lie. He flicked salt from the corners of his eyes. “What is it?” She lead him down the narrow, thumping stairs into the front room, where a pile of flattened cardboard boxes haloed the coffee table. On top of the glass surface, a single intact box sat, its contents scattered around: his grandmother’s collection of Precious Moments figurines, emerging from layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper like they’d had to claw their way out. “It’s the last box,” his mother said, tugging once at a half-grown-out bang that had slipped forward past her ear. “We’re officially moved in.” She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply the wetness they hadn’t figured out how to block entirely with the first-floor windows, face smoothed with relief. When she opened them again, they were watery, wet, and then disappeared behind her fingers as she sunk into a sitting position on the couch. “Mom?” Casey’s mouth was dry and tasted of sleep. “Are you okay?” “I don’t know,” she told the fingers, the words dripping like the raindrops snaking down the windowpanes, “what I’m doing wrong.” Her middle and index fingers split, shuttering her eyes. “I can’t see them. I can’t see anything.” “Hey.” He eased next to her on the couch, moving a figurine of a small boy with ginger hair sleeping in the curve of the moon, a blanket tucked under his chin. “Mom, don’t worry about it, okay? It doesn’t mean anything; it’s not important.” “I didn’t see anything for so long.” She swallowed, looking up into the bronze curl of the chandelier. “And I just feel so goddamn stupid.” Above her head, a sky blue eye blinked open, the size of a soccer ball, and pressed into the frame of an old family photo, Casey a squirming toddler in a shark bathing suit, squeezed between his parents under a striped umbrella. He hated that eye, more than he remembered hating any of them. But it was easier to look into than his mother’s. “I saw.” She stilled. On the couch, the figurines shifted with the cushions. “I saw them, and I didn’t tell you because I thought it would ruin everything. So it’s not your fault,” he squeezed his face tight and closed before looking back at her. They had the same eyes, a muddied color somewhere between green and brown. “It’s mine.” Is that what you wanted? The photo from the beach blinked, and the eye was gone. In it instead was their reflection on the couch, his mother’s hands curling into his hair and pulling his head into her shoulders. She inhaled slowly, like she was preparing to say something, but froze. Her gaze fixated on a spot on the wall just opposite the mantel. When Casey looked over, he couldn’t see a thing. |