Fae Eyes

A short story for the EYE SEE YOU challenge (1,200 words)

This is my entry for the Top in Fiction Friday 13th horror fest “Eye See You”.

Photo credit: Sarah Trummer on pexels.com

The first thing I see when I open my eye is the canopy above my bed, painted to look like a sky full of stars. I turn my head to look at the fine spider-silk drapes, the colour of melancholy and magic.

Then I open my other eye, and I'm back in my room at Brookwood, in my bed with the thin mattress and the metal frame. The walls and floor are bare, and the window is small and high on the wall. I know the other room is real, though, because, if I close my bad eye, I can see it again: grey stone walls hung with tapestries, a thick rug on the floor, and an enormous window that looks out over forests and fields, all the way to hazy blue mountains.

An orderly will come soon because it will be time for breakfast.

I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. I give my eyes a good rub, really screwing my knuckles in, until I can see pretty shapes behind the lid of my bad eye. My eyes are always itchy in the mornings, ever since Nurse Heidi brought that new blanket. I give it a look of distaste. It’s very ugly—coarse and brown. I close my bad eye and it becomes a beautiful patchwork bedspread, made up of squares of darkness stitched together with threads of lost hope.

It's Monday. Today I have to visit Dr Garrett.

I don't mind. I like his office. There are pictures on the walls of beaches and the sea. There are even photographs on his desk of people who don't work at Brookwood. There aren't pictures or photographs anywhere else in the building, and no mirrors either. Mirrors upset people.

I like Dr Garrett, too. Most of the time. I like the way he smiles at me and never raises his voice. I don't like it when he asks me too many questions, though.

"How are you today?" he says kindly when I sit down in the comfy chair. This question is OK, because the answer is easy.

"I'm fine," I say. "Only my eyes are a little itchy. I think I have an allergy to the new blanket Nurse Heidi put on my bed."

Dr Garrett considers this. He always considers what I say before he replies. I like that, because it means he listens to me.

"But you know you only have one eye, don't you, Esther?" he says at last. "You lost the left one in an accident when you were a little girl."

I frown. I think he's told me this before, but I'm still not sure I believe him.

"Can you tell me about the accident?" he asks.

I shake my head—no. I can't. With both my eyes open, I can't remember being a little girl at all. But when I close my bad eye, I remember: a pine forest, spiral staircases, halls of stone. My mother had a beak like a sea eagle, and my father's skin was the vibrant green of algae on stagnant water. I didn't have a bad eye then. I had two golden eyes, and wings like an Atlas moth growing from between my shoulder blades.

"What are you doing?" Dr Garrett asks me as I sit there, squinting into my memories.

"Remembering," I say.

"What do you remember?"

I open my bad eye, so I'm not telling a lie.

"Nothing," I say.

I've told Dr Garrett about my special eye before. He says it's called a 'coping mechanism'. I’m not stupid. I know that means he thinks I'm imagining everything I see with it, so I don't tell him anymore.

---

On Mondays, we have treacle sponge pudding for dessert. They give us each a pale pink plastic spoon to eat with—no knives, no forks, nothing metal.

I only eat the treacle part, but Miriam, who sits opposite me, eats all of hers, and then she eats my sponge too. Miriam is fat and she dribbles. She says she wishes there was custard.

I don't think I've ever eaten custard, but if I close my bad eye, I remember desserts of spun sugar made to look like insects. I remember the taste of candied plums and apricots, and the sight of stars strung on creepers over banqueting tables. There was dancing, and music so divine that it made me feel like fractures were running across the surface of my soul.

There definitely wasn't any custard.

---

On the mornings I don't see Dr Garrett, I'm allowed to go outside. I walk around and around the big garden. It's very boring, especially now in autumn when all the flowers are dead and the sky is overcast. It's overcast when I close my bad eye too, but the dreariness is somehow exquisite.

There's no garden when I close my right eye. I'm in a pine forest and the ravens are singing. Glow-worms glimmer in the shadows and butterflies fall like blossom from the sky. A fox, watching me intently, raises his hat in greeting.

On Tuesdays, we have rice pudding for dessert. I hate rice pudding. It's like someone vomited in a bowl and sprinkled cinnamon on it. I push my bowl towards Miriam, and I put the pale pink plastic spoon in my pocket.

---

Back in my room after dinner, I sit on the canopy bed with the spider-silk drapes. The dark wood of the bedposts is carved to resemble branches covered in creeping vines. I run my fingers over the patchwork bedspread.

I’ve been thinking, going through the facts in my head.

Fact 1: Dr Garrett says my special eye is a 'coping mechanism', but I have memories of the place it shows me. How can I have memories of a place that isn't real?

Fact 2: Dr Garrett has a file about me. If he says I lost my eye in an accident, it must be because he read it in the file, and so it must be true.

I lie back on the bed, looking only through my special eye, and stare at the painting of the starry heavens above me. I wonder who painted it. I don’t remember that. Was it my mother, with the beak of a sea eagle? I decide I will ask her when I see her.

Now, I'm looking up at the fine cracks on the ceiling of my room at Brookwood. I take the pale pink spoon out of my pocket and look at that, too, for a long time. Through my bad eye, it's just a shiny plastic implement for shovelling food into open mouths, but through my special eye, it is an ornate metal key, cold and heavy between my thumb and forefinger.

Keys are for unlocking things, so I know what I have to do. I open my bad eye wide, as wide as it can go. I think of all the enchanting things that await me in a world where I can no longer see the strip-lit corridors of Brookwood, or smell bleach and rice pudding. Then, slowly, carefully, I push the plastic handle into my right eye, so that I can see.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, and would like more dark stories of Faerie, consider checking out The Contract, Changeling or The Goblin Market.