Little Eyes Everywhere

(Flash Fiction)

(Photo by El S on Unsplash)

My younger sister, Sophia, lost her right eye to cancer when she was only two years old. Luckily, her cancer never returned, and she quickly adjusted to prosthetics and often left them everywhere, much to my dismay.

Not that it bothered me that she lost her eye, I just had a weird aversion to eyes ever since a bug flew into one of mine and its guts exploded inside and caused a wicked infection.

Now I’m kinda glad I wear glasses so I don’t have to worry about that or touching my eye, but anyway that’s beside the point. As younger sisters do, she liked to make it a point of grossing me out by leaving her eye prosthetics everywhere or trying to get me to touch where her eye had been. She knew that was the only thing in this world that truly grossed me out, and she liked to use that to her advantage. Blood, guts, snot, or rotten smells didn’t bother me in the slightest. But eyes, that piece of knowledge became her everything and my kryptonite.

My mom thought her “innocent pranks” of leaving her prosthetics was a coping mechanism to get over the loss of her eye, while dad thought it was the common occurrence of younger siblings playing a cruel joke. Either way, she was never reprimanded for it and kept on leaving them for me to find.

As she grew older, she began feeling self-conscious about her eye. My mom tried to get her fun prosthetic colors to stand out, like gold or rainbow, but she didn’t want those. She wanted to be normal.

At eight years old, she started resenting me. My parents chalked it up to simple sisterly disagreements, but the only emotion she ever showed me was anger. This never-ending wave of hate never let up and continued well into our teens.

“Did you know you can scoop someone’s eyes out?”

“Eww Soph. That’s nasty.”

“I think it’s fascinating. I saw this police training video where they were teaching people how to gauge an attacker’s eye out to defend yourself.”

I turned toward her, disgust surely written on my face. “Why the hell did you watch that?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I thought it was cool.” She then had a wicked smile flash on her face. “I want to try it out on you.”

I scoffed. “You’re funny, you know how much I hate eyes.”

“Come on, I’m not going to actually scoop your eye out, I just wanna see if it’s as easy as they made it seem.”

I ticked my head to the side. “I promise, I’ll stop when you want me to.” She added.

I don’t know why I caved or why she was so hell-bent on trying this maneuver out but seconds later I was lying on the cushions of the couch while she hovered over me. A wider smile now encompassed her face as her hands slowly started coming closer to my face.

I flinched as she was a mere inches from touching me and she rolled her eyes. “Stop, I haven’t even touched you. You can’t move like that, or I will end up hurting you.”

I inhaled a shaky breath and tried to relax as much as I could, refraining from moving a centimeter. Her hand then touched my eyeball, putting a little pressure on it as I gasped at the sharp pain coming from the corner. “Okay Sophia, that’s enough. You’ve had your fun.” I said, trying to ignore the growing pain that was beginning to radiate in my eye. In response, she pressed even harder.

“Soph, get off of me! I mean it get off.” I reached up to pull her hand off my face, but her arm didn’t budge and remained locked in place as I started seeing white spots.

As I started to panic, I swore I heard her whisper under her breath, “You could look like me.”

The pain got so unbearable that I couldn’t take it anymore and bucked her off, throwing her to the floor as she landed with a thud.

“What the fuck was that?” I screamed, blinking my eyes rapidly as the pain started to slowly subside.

“I was just messing around, you didn’t have to throw me off.”

“Messing around?” I looked over in the mirror and got a good look of my eye. A blood vessel had popped, my eye now pooled with blood, and I had a bruise already forming underneath my bottom eyelashes.

“You weren’t messing around, and you and I both know it.” I spat, anger growing in my veins as she rolled her eyes at me once more. “You know what Sophia? I’m sick of you constantly making everything about losing your eye. You lost your eye, big deal! You could’ve died, but all you lost was one eye. You should be grateful, but instead, you’re being a “pick me” and making everything about you and I’m tired of it!”

I yelled, my breath heaving as I stared at her. She sniffed and picked herself off the floor and left without saying a word.

After that fight, we stopped talking. We put as much distance as we could between one another, but over the last few months, I keep finding prosthetic eyes wherever I look. I’ve found five strewn across my apartment and a few at my office at work.

One night, after finding one on my nightstand, I checked every square inch of my apartment to see if she was lurking in one of the shadows. Terrified, I came up with nothing and had a difficult time falling asleep. A few hours later, I woke up and tried to turn on my side when I couldn’t move. My eyes sprung open and I attempted to sit up but my arm was handcuffed to the bedpost. As I tried to rip my arm loose, the tug on my face made me keenly aware that my mouth was duct-taped. Sophia was standing by the window, a devilish smile on her face as she turned around to greet me.

“Hey, sis.”

I watched in horror as she then sat on my chest and pushed her grimy fingers into both of my eyes, pressing as hard as she could. Seconds later, my vision went completely dark.