I wrote the other day that I felt slightly hopeful again, and it felt good, so I thought I’d share with you the most hopeful thing I ever wrote. This short story was first published in Interzone sci-fi/fantasy magazine, and it believes that we as humans can learn, if we can look at the world the right way. I hope that’s true.
For Anna Bilsby, from Grandalf.
Eyes
Michael found the eyes swimming down the stream after a rain. He had been sitting on the bank watching the water run over the rocks and the eyes came bobbing along like little boats. He stood and watched them come and when they were even with him he waded into the water and fished them out.
They were perfectly good eyes, he saw. The eyelids were closed and they were a little shrivelly from being in the water, but the eyelashes, though wet, were long and black. At the back, where the eyes would attach to the brain, thin tendrils snaked out, as if they were only waiting to be reattached.
He was still holding the eyes when they blinked. A few last raindrops fell from the trees. His mother said there was a world inside every raindrop but he was wondering if the eyes had really blinked or he had only imagined it. The stream ran swift around him and when the eyes blinked again he almost dropped them back in the water.
Standing on the bank he said to the eyes, “Did you just blink?”
The eyes blinked again, then opened. The irises were blue, almost gray, like clouds caught on the edge of a storm.
His mother was watching the rain out the window when he went inside. She said the world was prettier after a shower. He had tucked the eyes inside his shirt and he could feel them blinking, the eyelashes tickling his skin. They were cold against him, but by the time he got to his room they were no longer shriveled from the water.
He sat on the edge of his bed and took out the eyes. He thought they could see him, which didn’t make sense, because he was sure those nerves or whatever they were at the back had to attach to something.
“Can you see me?” he said.
The eyes blinked.
“Does that mean yes?”
The eyes blinked again. Michael sat back on his bed. “Ok. One blink for yes, two blinks for no, no blinks for you don’t know. Do you understand?”
The eyes blinked.
“So, you’re a set of eyes.”
One blink.
“Are you boy eyes or girl eyes?”
No blinks.
“You don’t know?”
No blinks.
“Both?”
One blink. Michael wondered what that meant.
“How did you get here?”
By the time his mother came up the stairs it was growing dark and he had only found out that the eyes had come very far away and that they were very old. After dinner he learned they had once belonged to someone, and by the time his parents went to bed he had learned they could still see. They didn’t know how either. Normally they were hooked to a body and brain but, the eyes said, these were not normal times.
It took him almost three years to understand the whole story, but this is what he found out:
All the children in the village were born without eyes. For the first years of their lives, their parents explained the world to them: what a tree looks like, the color of the sky, the way clouds formed familiar shapes. Boys named Westin and Fletcher and Finn played games describing the world outside their windows, using words they learned from their parents: gnarled and bright and cerulean. Girls named Tina and Alina and Janae went around touching everything they came in contact with and so their descriptions rarely used words, but when they touched each other the feelings transferred.
When Finn was eleven his mother called for him. He was outside, trying to put into words what he thought the night sky might look like with the stars flung out over the vastness of space. When he came in to the house, his mother was standing with her hands behind her back. (How did he know her hands were behind her back? the boy asked, but the eyes didn’t blink.) Finn’s father stood beside her. Both of them were blinking quickly.
“It’s time for you to get your eyes,” Finn’s mother said, and Finn, not knowing what else to do, described to them the darkness of the world until he felt his mother’s hands on his face.
The ceremony was held in an old castle not far from the village. In the highest room of the highest tower, with only a handful of people in attendance—the mayor, the seer, the alchemist—Finn’s mother washed her face, then carefully dried her eyes. The seer asked if she was ready, and when Finn’s mother nodded he reached up and plucked out her eyes. (“Did it hurt?” the boy asked, and the eyes blinked twice to show it had not.)
The eyes did not remember what words the seer said, but Finn’s mother held the eyes in her hands and then crossed the room slowly and handed them to her son. Under the instruction of the alchemist, Finn raised the eyes to his face. He placed them in the empty sockets, where they settled into place. The alchemist wrapped Finn’s head with a bandage and told him to keep his new eyes shut. They walked home along a stone path beside the sea. Finn kept wondering what the castle looked like. He had an idea of the ocean from the sound of the waves breaking against the shore, but of the castle he did not know. He said he would come back some day and see.
Three days later they took the bandages off. Finn blinked slowly, and the world swam into view. He saw his father, smiling down at him. He saw his mother, eyeless, and he was sad that for him to see she had to sacrifice her own eyes, but she knelt before him and took his hands in hers and said there was no sacrifice in the giving of eyes because she still remembered what the world looked like. She remembered what he looked like and she would know by the sound of his voice what kind of man he grew up to be. Then she stepped back and let Finn go out into the world and he walked around for hours looking at the trees and the color of the sky and the shape of clouds.
Within weeks all his friends had eyes. Fletcher stared for hours at the striations in small rocks and finally went off to school to become a geologist. Westin saved his allowance and bought a giant net to catch butterflies but he injured one once and so learned to stand still enough they would light on him. He would speak to them then, and they would stay for hours, lifting their wings, and some villagers said they could understand him and some said they could not, but no one really cared much because he was a beautiful sight, covered in yellow wings.
Alina had eyes but still listened to the small complaints around her. Tina cared for her aging grandmother, blind these last 50 years, and so did not come out to play much, but sometimes they would see her with her hand on her grandmother’s arm, rubbing softly as if to soothe her. All of them knew how vision could be transferred by touch, by a few words of comfort, and they knew Tina was giving sight back to her grandmother in her last days, even if they forgot that the eyes Tina wore had once belonged to the woman she touched.
Janae spent evenings in the kitchen with her father, who told her where the garlic was and how to chop the onions. And sometimes her mother was there, too, also sightless, for Janae had a younger brother with new eyes, and her mother had none now. At dinner, as they ate the food Janae had prepared with her mother and father watching, her little brother reached across the table to take their hands and they all closed their eyes while he thanked her for the food.
Finn’s eyes remembered the words for all things. And because they had been around so long, they knew words a boy would never know. And because they were passed from mother to son they saw the world the way a woman would see it, and they still liked for Finn to touch things. And because before they had belonged to Finn’s mother, they had belonged to Finn’s mother’s father, they liked, the way men did, to describe the world to the people around them. So at the end of each day Finn would tell his father and mother of the cliffs to the east, and the ocean beyond, how it stretched so far to the curve of the earth that only the best eyes could see the whales surfacing beyond the break, or the eagles so high overhead they were like small circling stars.
Finn and Fletcher grew to be best friends and often ranged far from home. They lay awake half the night staring at the sky. Finn said he wanted to go to sea. Fletcher said he needed to study the earth, the foundations on which they stood. When Westin came with them he said he would know more about the natural world, how a butterfly’s wings could keep so many people aloft. Tina wanted to care for others. Alina gave the best advice. Janae wanted to feed the hungry because of the look in their eyes when they were shown the small kindness of food.
In a year Finn’s sister took their father’s eyes. Westin also had a sister, and Janae had a brother, so soon, like all the adults in the village, their parents were blind. Leaving his parents in his sister’s care, Finn packed up and went to sea to support his family. He took a job on a ship and sent money back when he came to port. He saw the whales surfacing in the deep ocean. He saw sharks swimming alongside them. He heard the languages of a hundred nations in the ports of the world and he grew dark under the sun, his body inked with the images of all the places he had been. When he was 30 he bought his own ship—he named her the Oculus—and sailed home to see his family. His father shook his hand and held it. His mother ran her hands over the ink on him, but mostly she listened to his voice.
He did not stay long. His childhood friends were all gone. Janae cooked for the foreign consul, who was staying at the castle, refurbished now into a luxury hotel. Alina was on her way to becoming a great seer, for her eyes, like all their eyes, had been handed down generation by generation. They had seen men sail across the seas and they had seen kingdoms rise and fall and they had sat at the right hand of kings and they had been accused of witchcraft. Her visions tempered the hearts of the men she advised and so the great wars did not come. When she died years later a statue was erected in her honor and the eyes seemed so lifelike small children would climb it to touch them.
Westin disappeared into the rain forest and they never saw him again, though they heard, years later, that he had found the most beautiful butterfly in the world, one that, it was said, could heal you or hurt you, depending on how you looked at it. Fletcher found a cave system that went to the center of the earth and he stayed there for forty years. When he finally emerged he stood blinking under the sun. Eventually he would write of all the things he had seen—the ancient civilizations, the machinery that turned the earth around the sun—but for days he only looked at the sky. When he came home, once, before disappearing again into the ground, he said he could never get used to the sky, after having the earth above him for so long.
None of them ever had children. Finn spent his life at sea. He slept with a few women in a few ports but the call of the sea was too strong for him to stay. He spent days at a time standing on the foredeck with the salt spray breaking around him and only the horizon for company, but he did not need any more than that, only the big wide world out in front. Sometimes he took comfort in other sailors at sea, but of course no children came of that, and he was mostly happy, except when he thought of his eyes, and where they would go after he had sailed into the final west.
Alina sometimes thought about her eyes, but only how they could help others after she was gone. She spent her days walking the poorest streets, listening to the concerns there. Even as advisor to the king, which she eventually became, she rarely listened to his court, for she thought they were silly and sad and only concerned with themselves. She heard on the streets what she needed to hear, and she gave advice to all those who came in contact with her. Sometimes, when the weight of the world became too much, she went to Tina, who had opened a home for the elderly, and they touched each other in ways that went beyond sight, but did offer comfort, if of a different kind.
Finn saw his family once after his father died. His sister had a son, and Finn watched as her eyes were transferred to him. That night, he sat up late with his mother and sister, both of them blind now. His mother was withered and frail. His father’s absence hung all around them. He asked his mother what he should do with his eyes, for they all knew he would never have children, but she could not tell him. She said she could no longer see the future, and Finn touched her hand.
Later that same night, after his mother and sister had gone to bed, he went outside to sleep under the stars. Walking out of his house, he found Fletcher staring at the sky. A moment later Janae joined them, and then Alina and Tina, who told them of the butterfly Westin had found.
“They say it’s the most beautiful sight in the world,” she said, and they all looked at the stars. They had somehow grown old, and they laughed as they stood holding hands in the village where they had grown up, where men and women who had given up their eyes so their children could see slept under stars they could now only remember.
So it is with everything. Tina left before dawn, without a goodbye. She touched Janae’s shoulder. She hugged Alina hard. Finn and Fletcher were asleep so she did not wake them, and one by one Alina and Janae drifted off, and then Finn slipped out of his sleeping bag and left Fletcher.
He went back to sea. Fletcher went back into the earth. He lies there now, somewhere, his bones interred by the stones he so loved. Alina’s statue still stands. In her final year Tina was cared for in the home she had started, and the young nurses who watched her last breaths wept so hard the stones on the street outside turned into a stream. Janae started a small farm to supply her soup kitchen and when she died the children who called her grandmother buried her in the apple orchard, which was just starting to bloom. They say when the wind blows in spring, the apple blossoms fall like snow.
Finn sailed to the far corners of the world. He sailed to the land of ice and he sailed to the lands of summer. He took to drawing pictures of the people and places he had seen, and after he died the book of his drawings made it back to his village, where his sister’s son, who was just about to give up his eyes to his daughter, sat for days staring at the pages, describing the images to her.
When Finn died his shipmates buried him at sea. They put him in a small boat and lowered it over the side. They sang old sea shanties and they drank themselves stupid as he sailed away, over the far curve of the horizon, where the whales were surfacing above the waves.
Eventually, the little boat caught water. When it sank, Finn’s body went down to the bottom of the sea.
His eyes, though, worked their way out. They turned to look at him for a long time, and then they began to swim. The eyes do not measure years, but it seems they swam for many. They had seen much of the ocean with Finn, and though they did not know navigation or even where they were going, they kept swimming. They crossed the warm Pacific and the cold Atlantic and they turned into a small tributary emptying itself into the ocean. They avoided nets and drag lines and lobster traps. They grew sick at the pollution and they closed their eyelids against the chemicals in the water, but eventually they found themselves in a small stream that ran behind the houses of a small neighborhood in a medium-sized Midwestern city, where a small boy scooped them out and held them in his hands and finally carried them inside his house, where his mother was playing piano while it rained.
That was me, Michael thought, when he finally had the whole story. He was older than when he first found the eyes. For years he had kept them in a pouch he bought at a craftsman’s stall and lined with pillow stuffing so the eyes would be comfortable. He carried them with him at all times, and sometimes he took them out and asked them advice: should he ask Sally Ferguson out? Should he take pre-algebra or regular math? His mother wasn’t much help—she told him he had to make those decisions on his own, though she was happy to give advice. His father spent all night looking through his telescope and Michael wanted desperately to tell them both about the eyes but he didn’t know what they would say.
So at night he asked the eyes questions they could answer by blinking. And sometimes he thought he’d rather live in the world where parents passed down their eyes and sometimes he thought he would like to meet Finn and sail around by the stars.
He did ask Sally Ferguson out, and she said yes (the eyes said she would). He also took pre-algebra. He majored in astronomy in college, after his father gave him his own telescope. One summer night when he was still in junior high and hadn’t yet asked Sally Ferguson out, they set it up in the back yard and looked at the moon. His mother joined them and they took turns at the eyehole and afterward she and his father went upstairs holding hands. Later that night he brought the eyes down and held one up to the scope. He showed it Mars and Venus and the eyes looked for a long time, blinking twice every time he asked if they had seen enough and once when he asked if they wanted to see the moon or Mars again.
Sally majored in biology, but preferred to write poetry. They were married in March in the backyard by the stream. It had rained the night before and the minister had to raise his voice over the sound of the stream and his mother cried a little. She played the piano in the evening for them all, after dinner, and when they gathered to listen to her Michael felt like he were looking down from far away.
One night, just before they were married, he showed Sally the eyes. He told her the whole story—Finn and Fletcher and Westin, Tina and Alina and Janae. She cried near the end. She held the eyes in her hands. She had taken a job in a laboratory that studied the small structures science could not reproduce: the tensile strength of spider webs, the carrying capacities of ants, the migratory flights of Monarch butterflies, but said she had never heard of anything like this.
When his daughter Sarah was born he took the eyes out so they could see her. He thought he saw a tear in the corner of one eye, but it might also have been in his own. As she grew up, he asked the eyes questions: are children always this exhausting? Do all fathers feel love as vast as the blackness of space? Sometimes they answered yes or no. Sometimes they did not blink.
One day, when Sarah was four or five, a butterfly landed on her arm. He and Sally had bought a house not unlike the one he had grown up in, with a stream just beyond the back yard and a telescope set up on the deck. His daughter raised her arm slowly so she could see the butterfly more closely. It lifted its wings several times before flying off, and later that night Michael told her a story of a man who found the most beautiful butterfly in the world.
Other nights he told her of a man who sailed the seven seas, and still other nights of a woman who spent all her years caring for people. In Kindergarten she came home with a donation box she had made—the school was holding a fund drive for kids who could not afford lunches, and she wanted to help. She had misspelled “hungry.” She set the box on the floor of the living room and Michael didn’t have the heart to tell her he and Sally were the only ones who would ever see it, so they dropped in a few dollars each day, and when she came home and asked who had put in the money, he said it was Finn or Fletcher or Alina or Tina or Janae.
By the time Sarah was 13 she knew they were only stories, but some nights, at dinner, she’d say something about sailing the world or exploring the earth or joining the Peace Corps. Those nights he’d go out to the telescope and, with the eyes held up so they could see too, stare at distant worlds until the ache inside him went away. He asked the eyes if the feeling would ever ease and the eyes blinked once, but he wasn’t sure, there under so many stars.
When she disappeared into the heart of Africa, he let the eyes read her letters, and when her son was born he held the eyes up to see. When Michael’s mother died he left the eyes alone for weeks in his grief. Sally could not console him, nor could his daughter, until finally he asked the eyes how they had ever gotten over being a part of someone and then having to leave them. The eyes, of course, could not answer, but they looked at him so long he thought he understood.
In the way of such things, Sally did not wake up one morning. Michael’s grandson was on the Arctic shelf and so could not make it back for the funeral, but Sarah was there, and they sat beside the stream until it got dark and then they looked through the telescope until she said “Aren’t you going to let the eyes take a turn?”
He looked at her, startled. She put a hand on his cheek.
“You’re not very good at hiding things, Dad,” she said, and reached into his coat and took out the pouch with the eyes.
He told her the whole story then: about fathers giving eyes to their daughters, mothers giving eyes to their sons. About seeing the world and the people in it. About trying to understand the stars above us and the earth we stand on. About finding something beautiful. She laid her head on his shoulder. Soon she would be gone again, this time to the steppes of Siberia or the mountains of Antarctica. He suspected she was searching for Finn. For a new way to see the world. For something in a story, something inside her she could not quite define.
She was gone the day he felt a twinge in his chest, and gone when it gripped his heart. He went down to the stream. He sat on its banks and remembered being a boy who had found a set of eyes after a rain. He took the eyes out and held them for a moment before easing them into the water, where they floated gently down the stream. He wished he could see the world, just once, through his mother’s eyes, could share his own sight with his daughter, so he sat on the edge of the stream and watched the water run over the rocks, the light dance on the surface. He thought about everything that was beautiful, everything that ended.
Such a powerful story about love, sacrifice, and loss. And the way you used eyes as a metaphor for inner vision indeed conveyed hope, Paul. Beautiful prose. Grateful to have stumbled upon you and your work here on Substack recently.
This was a beautiful read. It pulled my heart strings. I will read it again and again. I see art supporting it in a book. Thank you.