Unseeing Eye
I had lost sight of the road, but I continued to drudge through the gravel that crunched and shifted below my feet. I could tell that there was a curb to my left that disintegrated when I stepped onto them. I repeatedly stumbled over the crumbling sides of the road to practice catching myself for the rare occasion where something convinces my foot that there is nothing to trip over as it’s taking a step. I could not understand the fact that although I could clearly see the streetlights bleeding into orange pools that collected around the poles, I was effectively blind to anything else in my immediate area. The road had vanished as a particularly interesting spot on the wall does during a dull conversation, but the conversation was over and there was no road in sight.
Off in the distance, a light peered out from behind the forestry. In the lake of impenetrable black that I was drowning in, the flash ripped me from my thoughts. As instantaneously as I had noticed the glimmer seeping through the barrage of trees off in the distance, it slipped off of the face of the earth and left me alone in the claustrophobic darkness again.
A colony of miniscule droplets swarmed my body as the fog substantiated, kissing my cheek, clinging to the fabric of my shirt before becoming one with it. The lamps were leaking quicksand into the pools, legions of gamboge granules fluttered aimlessly toward the puddles below. As I wandered forward, doing my best impression of someone who hadn’t developed a case of selective blindness, the drizzle began to give me the impression that I was confined to a space that ended immediately beyond my flesh. This worried me.
I hadn’t even thought about my heartbeat before it abruptly stopped during my bout with inexplicable dread. My lungs began to collapse as I panicked and waited for the ordeal to be over. There had been times where I lived through eternities in a matter of seconds like this. My muscles began to lay way to fatigue, at which point I decided to crouch on my hands and knees for good measure. As I did this, my heart began to bang against my ribcage, as if it was trying to escape. The passage to my vacant lungs was still blocked off, but at least I could be sure that I was alive again.
I was sure that I was not alone at this point. Even for someone in my state of blindness, suffocation makes it easy to examine the world about them in intense detail. While I paid close attention to my surroundings to take the edge off of this involuntary asphyxiation, I developed a sense of genuine intuition that allowed me to see without seeing.
I could feel the presence directly behind me. It overtook my shaky crawl without effort and proceeded to force a mask lined with pins onto my face. I could not reject the mask as I was incapacitated by fear and breathlessness. Paralyzation struck me when the mask was able to cling to my face without assistance, electrifying not only the points where the needles pricked me but also the immediate surrounding areas. I attempted to take refuge by going on a journey of several hundred years towards the only sight I could make out: the leaky streetlamps.
My arms on the verge of collapsing, I pulled myself forward towards the oval at the bottom of the leak’s path. I could feel the road beneath me begin to sway. Rocks pressed into my palms, cutting deep into them, but I didn’t notice. What I did make note of was the fact that I was reaching the breakpoint of this ordeal as stars began to crash into the earth and danced around just beyond my mask. My convulsing heart rate had dried out at this point, pumping useless, deoxygenated blood to my weakening muscles. My stomach churned and pierced itself in my determined odyssey. The stars began to overcome the earth; at this point there were as many stars as there were beads of rain in the night’s drizzle.
Suddenly I noticed something directly in front of me. A vibrant, reddish set of fingers had entered the puddle by the lamp post. Out of astonishment I gasped. The flurry of stars that had descended on me before intermingled with the gravel and dissipated. The edges of the mask’s spikes began to soften as it melted, glazing my face over, drenching it.
Shallowly breathing, I started to come to my senses and regain my strength. I touch my face to feel for the mask only to come back with sopping fingertips. The cold of the night became more and more apparent as the eve prickled my exposed skin. Now that I was in a state where I could more readily control my body, I had lost the confidence that I had when breathing was an impossibility. I couldn’t tell for certain if it really was the road that I was kneeling on, if I was really alone or not, or if there was anything happening in my immediate surroundings.
I tried to find anything outside of the lamp’s glow to no avail. Choosing not to stand for fear of heights I continued to crawl onward to the next puddle of light. Exiting the glare and crawling under the vantablack veil, I began the next arduous pilgrimage. The sand caked my hands to form a protective screen, compressing, infiltrating my palms and becoming one with my skin as I made my way forward.
Something knocked against my knuckles before it attempted to run away, clanging as it went. I quickly chased after it and it must have realized that I was on its tail since it promptly gave up on the escape attempt. I reached out trying to find the object in the dark, waving my trembling hand back and forth before finally coming upon it.
I gingerly grasped it and began to turn it over in my hands. I didn’t do this for identification purposes—at least not initially—but to know that there was something else there. The glossy surface of the object was chilled to the point where it singed my hand when I touched it. My conquest to extend the world beyond my flesh was too strong for this to deter me. I could tell that it was broken in half because of the jagged edges at the bottom that sliced into my hand as I went to inspect the opening. The inside was moist yet uneventful. The outside felt familiar, and it wasn’t until I clasped my hand around the top of the object that I realized that it was a broken bottle.
Pleased with my success of discovery I took the opportunity to relax. I sprawled out and stretched with the bottle in my right hand. After releasing a deep sigh that soothed and unlocked my taut muscles, I opened my eyes.
On the sterile black canvas of the night sky, I noticed the sliver of the crescent moon for the first time. Tomorrow it will rise as a new moon, undoubtedly. Although the sight was so miniscule that it was practically nonexistent, I reveled in the fact that the world had grown so immensely in such a short period of time. After imploding from what I knew of before and condensing itself into the limits of my human shell, it hesitantly stretched out to include the bottle that I had taken in before spreading out over several thousand miles to reach the moon.
While I surveyed my new discovery, I could see that the silver hair that lingered in the sky was thinning out. Shadows were invading and the world was ready to shrink again. The white string retreated into itself and was almost gone when vermillion hues lit the opposite side of the moon’s sphere. The strip vanished as the new light flowed over the surface of the moon, illuminating it in its entirety. I raised the bottle to my right eye, using it as a telescope.
The moon espoused itself as two beings. Formerly aligned, they began to slowly swing back and forth, trading sides of the oval where they intersected. The oval surged in lucidity alongside the dulled crescents to either side of it. The wavering intensified immensely and the crescents disappeared, forming the moon into an oblong ellipse. Slowing down, the two beings were divided into three once again before settling down even further into realignment.
A small point on the side of the moon where the maroon had creeped in caught fire. The light of the flames descended on me and funneled down the bottle, singing my eye. Snapping upright, I let the bottle fall to the ground where it shattered. I brought my hands to my now closed eyes to stifle the pain of my right and to protect my left. The afterimage that remained in my right eye bled over into the left, leaving me with nothing but a neon glow.
When I accepted the pain as fact, I mustered up the courage to open my eyes. Peering past the oversaturated painting the flash had left me with, I saw with my left eye. The empty road I was sitting on, the crooked posture of the lampposts, the pile of broken glass directly next to me. I looked to where the moon was, but I could not spot it because of the overwhelming presence of the sun. My left eye grew weepy, almost out of sympathy for my blinded eye that was still seething in pain. My vision grew blurred behind the tears. I gradually leaned back into the caress of the road and squeezed my eyes shut.
Linear Mode
