The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

eye stitched closed, only horror existed, and I couldn’t turn away, no matter how badly I wanted to do so.

This was, in part, because of his voice.  So matter-of-fact, almost happy, despite the injury he suffered.

“I had the most beautiful set of eyes,” he said, “until today.  Now, there’s just one, as you can see, thanks to that criminal today.  Everything going on around here, would you believe it’s because of one person, just one, single person?  When I woke up today, I had two of the most amazing eyes you’ve ever seen.  I owe more than my charm to those eyes—I owe my intuition to them, my ability to look at anyone and see what they want to hide.  People took one look at my eyes and would tell me anything. Now, look where it got me.  Mutilated forever.  Look here to get an idea of what I’ve lost.”

He pointed to his remaining eye as if he were showing off the prized piece of a coin collection, and I looked, if for no other reason than to avoid focusing on those awful stitches.  I had no medical experience, but even to me, the stitches looked rushed and amateurish, the work of a mad scientist working feverishly in a laboratory converted from an abandoned windmill.  The surviving eye looked like any normal eye, nothing special. A typical shade of blue.

“You look unimpressed,” continued the officer, and he used his finger to pull down on the lower lid to reveal the red tissue behind the lid.  “Baby Boy Blue, my mother used to call me,” he said.

At that moment, some kind of disturbance took place in another part of the hospital. A loud bang, as if a gun went off or someone lit a firecracker. Officer Baby Boy Blue calmly looked over his shoulder and considered the resulting ruckus, several policemen running in different directions, doctors and nurses following. Then he turned back to me.

His uniform looked so clean and unruffled. In fact, he must have read my thoughts because he said, “’Crazy how none of the goo got on my uniform. Like I said, just one person caused all of this. I just got unlucky, losing an eye. It just hung on my face, hanging by an optic nerve, so there was no choice but to cut it.”

“You cut it yourself?”

He seemed shocked by the sound of my voice but somehow pleased that I would finally interrupt him with a question.  He put on his sunglasses and responded with a hearty laugh, even though I hadn’t made a joke. “Oh, son. Keep up the wonderful spirit. You’ll need it. Life is full of changes, and no telling how long you’ll sit here with everything going on.  Here’s something to help you remember me forever.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a plastic bag, the kind normally used for a sandwich.  He placed it into my hand and turned to leave.  Or at least, he must have left at some point, because when I looked up after studying the bag’s contents, I no longer saw him there.

Inside the bag I saw a bloody mess of bluish white.

When I recognized the iris, I understood that he had left me with his eye.

And indeed, such a stunning blue.

The scar under my eye never went away.  It remained as a pink, slightly upraised line that, to me, looked like a slit that one could open up and peer into what lay underneath my face.

The doctor who closed the wound said that by the time I reached my current age I would see no scarring, no sign of the injury.  But obviously, he lied. Of course, I should make some allowances for that, given how flustered he looked while working on me.  No doubt all the activity occurring in the hospital exhausted him, making him inattentive.  Though much of the activity had died down, his hands shook and beads of sweat clung to his forehead.  At one point, he even made a mistake.  After sewing me up, he stared at my face with a troubled gaze.

“Look up,” he said.  “No, just with your eyes.  Now look down.”  He repeated these commands several times, trying to assess something he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—vocalize, and I did my best to follow them each time.

Then he said something that puzzled me.  “Now, look at the back of your head.”

How could I do that?

He told me two more times to look at the back of my head, and once I even turned my head, unsure of what exactly he wanted me to do, but that just seemed to fluster him more.  “You can’t, obviously. I have to redo it. I have to take everything out and redo it all,” he said, sounding profoundly tired. “I have to redo everything.” He began removing the stitches under my eye, the whole process starting over again.

Then once more, the commands began. “Look up.” I did. “Look down.” I did. “Now look at the back of your head.” Somehow, I suppose I did, because he looked satisfied this time.

At some point during all this, I must have transferred the plastic bag given to me by the police officer to my pocket because later, at home, I found it there. I didn’t dare take it out until after my mother collapsed in her bed, exhausted from what must have been twelve hours of waiting at the hospital. I felt tired, too, but I didn’t sleep.

Instead, I studied my new stitches in the bathroom mirror, noting how much they looked like the stitches the officer showed me. Perhaps the same doctor worked on us both. I moved my eyes the same way the doctor commanded me, trying to imagine what looked so wrong that he had to take all my stitches out. I even tried looking at the back of my head the way he commanded, but I still couldn’t fathom how he meant for me to do that. I tried it several different ways.