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

Once, I managed to look so high up into my head that I nearly made my left eye disappear, showing just the white sclera with thick, red veins.

That led to the discovery of two fascinating things.

First, I learned that I could move my left eye, the one just above the stitched slit, higher up than the right. Second, when I did that, I could make my stitched wound open, if only by a tiny bit. I thought this was an illusion at first, but after trying it a dozen more times, it seemed that it really did part just a fraction, a bright red color showing beneath it and the glint of something glassy.  Probably just a trick of the light.

With all this experimentation, I nearly forgot about the plastic bag in my pocket.

Extracting it, I noticed a yellowish liquid pooling at the bottom of the bag.  Also, its color had faded, its striking blueness giving way to a foggy whiteness.  Still, I had to acknowledge what the officer said: indeed, he once had an amazing set of eyes. Now, one of those eyes belonged to me, and I needed to hide it. I feared consequences and I followed all rules, even the ones not explicitly stated to me. I used the box containing the pieces of the unfinished Frankenstein model kit, and I placed the box inside a wood cabinet across from my bed, where it sat for years.

During that time, I hardly thought about it at all.  I practically forgot about it completely. Eventually, I lived in that house all alone, thanks to illness, disease, and death.

In the days that followed my accident, I somehow lost my way in school, and in spite of numerous interventions, I never did well.  I didn’t even graduate and soon after, took the only job I could find: a retail job in a store called Hellstorm Fireworks.

Most people think of fireworks as something sold only two or three times a year, but actually, people buy fireworks all the time.  What if, just for a lark, someone wanted to light off a Cornea Splitter or a Socket Rocket? They would need a special kind of store to help them satisfy that urge.

We did good business, and they paid me enough to get by, though I couldn’t keep up the house as diligently as I would have liked.  Not able to afford anything new, I kept all the old furniture, including the cabinet where I put the model kit box.  But like I said, I practically forgot all about it.

I liked my co-workers well enough, especially Jaycee, a girl my age.  We entertained each other with jokes when things slowed down.  We also speculated about the sort of spectacle that would result if someone decided to light every single one of the fireworks in the store at once.  Colors beyond the known spectrum, Jaycee suggested, but that sounded nuts to me. I reasoned that if we saw new colors, they wouldn’t look like colors to us.  They would look like—

“What?” she asked.

I didn’t have a clever answer, so I said the first thing that came to mind. “The color you see when you look at the back of your head.”

That answer didn’t impress her—it just seemed to puzzle her, in fact—so we both stood there bored for a moment until she suddenly asked me, right out of the blue, if I knew any eye tricks.

No one ever asked me before, and for a moment, I felt self-conscious, painfully aware of the slit under my left eye, wondering if its glaring presence on my face made her want to ask me this question.  But she smiled at me in a way that restored some of my already-meager confidence, and I confided in her that I could, in fact, look at the back of my head.

“What? No fucking way,” she said. “I demand you show me immediately.”

“I can’t exactly show you,” I said. “I mean, if I roll my eyes all the way into the back of my head and manage to look at my own brains, how would you know?”

She looked at me, obviously confused, so I continued: “If I look at my own brains, I’ll see them. But you won’t. I can’t exactly take a picture of the back of my head and show you.”

“Fine, Einstein,” she said. “How about I show you an eye trick of my own?  Then maybe you’ll find the courage to show me yours.”

“Okay, deal.” We shook hands to seal the agreement.  Then, taking a step back, she lowered her head and let her arms dangle at her side.  She looked like a diver preparing for a record-setting leap. I saw her shoulders rise and fall as she took first one deep breath, then a second one.

When she lifted her head, it took a moment to process the image before me.

Her eyes bulged out in an extraordinary, almost cartoonish way, practically a half-inch further out of their sockets.  They looked like enormous, bloated eggs, the whites dwarfing the bright blue irises, with angry networks of red blood vessels going everywhere.

No telling how she read the expression of horror on my face.  But she smiled wide and toothy, making a terrible spectacle.

Nothing could make it worse, I thought.

Until something did.

Her left eye suddenly popped out, as if it could no longer withstand the pressure she put on it.  It popped out and hung on her cheek, dangling by an optic nerve.

The smile remained, as if she didn’t even know it happened.

But if she wouldn’t react, I would.

I lunged forward, hoping to take hold of the eye and help prevent her from losing it.  I don’t know what I intended to do exactly.

And my fumbling made her react.

Using her hands, she covered her face, protecting herself.

From me, apparently.

When she lowered her hands, her eyes looked normal.

“What’re you doing?  Personal space, man,” she said, her left eye miraculously returned safely to its socket.  I had to hand it to her: