What a beautiful day it was when that child first cried. Just the smallest scatter of pale clouds in the sky, just warm enough weather that the option of a sweater was up to the wearer, not the temperature, just the smallest flock of crows chirping outside the window. There would be no memory of her birth that would not be painted in the golden hues of nostalgia.
From the beginning, she was bright. Quiet, but lack of conversation can always be made up for with other proof of life. Most were content to watch her sit on a chair so tall for a toddler that her legs dangled, fawn over her sorted tools and toothy smile. Was she strange? Sure, but she was sure to grow into it with a bit of makeup and bandaged knees tucked under a sundress. The best ones always start out that way, they whisper over coffee in the foggy mornings.
Maybe today it would be unusual, but in those days children had two options. Run around and wait for the sun to come down, or follow their parents to work and not cause a fuss. School would start in the fall, but that was for older kids. Anything that she needed to learn at that age she could learn from her parents or the garden.
At first they tried to turn her loose, find some neighborhood kids to make friends with and be back for dinner. Yet, every morning she cried until her dad put her in the passenger seat of the old buggy and drove them both down to the old morgue.
Not everyone thought it was the proper place for a young lady, surrounded by corpses and all manner of body parts. Her father was a push over though, so proud to have his only child so interested in his work usually considered so taboo. They came around too, once they saw the way she helped by passing him tools, makeup, clothes. It was endearing, once you looked past the bloodstained aprons and mottled faces, lips parted with nothing to say.
The first time, it was the sheriff who brought them the corpse. Found it on the side of the road he said, likely an out of towner. No one could identify it, mauled to bits and smashed to pieces, though they saw the whole town through their doors that week in a desperate attempt to find a relative.
He muttered over the body for days as it lay packed in ice. No matter how many ways he looked at it, it was nothing a human could have done. In a rare moment, she suggested that it could have been a wild animal. The bears don’t attack if not antagonised, common knowledge of course, but someone unfamiliar with those forests wouldn’t have known and scared them. Lucky or unlucky, no one noticed the blood crusted under her nails when she folded her hands together in conclusion.
They called the sheriff back in, he agrees, and it’s a done deal. And if the body is cremated with blood dripping out of shallow sockets instead of eyes, then no one notices.
Over the course of the year, as the trees dropped their leaves and grew them back while snow ran into gutters as water, the pair of morticians saw probably half a dozen more bodies like the first. Families only in the fact that they had none anyone could see. Each one cremated and set loose in the forest by a father in a dusty suit and his daughter in a bloody apron, cradling an urn in her palms before getting the go ahead to dump it. Only witnessed by seven screeching crows circling above the trees.
Each and every one cremated without eyes to see themselves being laid to rest. But maybe not everyone wants to watch that happen, so who knows how they would have reacted if they still had beating hearts to see it.
I think it might be clear now, where their eyes are going; out of their sockets and into the pocket of a young child’s skirt. Hidden and protected under a wax lined apron, far away from her father’s gentle gaze. All those stories of demonic young girls, thirsty for blood, must have come from somewhere. But I assure you, this story has nothing to do with demons. Quite the opposite.
Coincidentally enough, it was their neighbor who laid on the work table next. The older one, with a purse full of candy no one could ever seem to buy at the general store. It was harder for her to hoist herself onto the table, sinking fingertips and nails into that vulnerable socket. Not because her father was more attentive to this body or anything like that, of course not, but because it’s harder to rip the eyes out of something that you saw be alive.
When she sat back on her ankles, two dripping spheres in her little palms that were really too young to have committed so much violence, might have been the first time she really considered what she was doing. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then does taking them out mean that the soul is open for taking? What does it say about gripping them between two bruised fingers?
We’ll never really know what she thought of what she was doing, but we know she slid back off the table just in time to avoid the ovens, slipping the eyes back into her pocket, safe from anyone who might pry into just what purpose a child had around such a gruesome sight.
Now, here’s the part where she’s supposed to grow up. And she did, as not even the tallest tales can do much when set against the wheel of time. Grew up with a scalpel in her hand and eyes in her pockets. Started going to school, started scraping her knees against concrete brawling against boys who tried to tell her no one wanted a girl to stink of death. Started growing out her hair, only to have to clip it back once the bell rang so she could take the scenic route back to the mortuary and not have the wind whip strands into her face. Graduated, moved to her own apartment over the morgue, took over the practice. Everything she was and wasn’t supposed to do.
That’s when the judging starts, really. After she grows into a skin that doesn’t fit her as loosely as that old apron used to, a skin that fits well enough so that no matter how dark the rose colored glasses it must be acknowledged that she is alive.
Trades in long skirts for pants, for no other reason except that she wants her thighs to stop chafing under gas lamps that burn late into the night just to keep watch over her new glasses and methodical fingers popping out eyes. Yes, she gave up grappling for them years ago, once she grew a bit and found that simply pushing them out was more efficient.
Less painful, one would like to think too, but no one really knows.
I’m sure we’re all wondering by now, what are they for? What could possibly be worth it to rip the eyes off a poor dead creature?
The latter I can’t tell you, however the first is more of a who than a what. In those early hours of morning she leans over her partner, brushes the hair off her face with a kiss, before sliding out of bed and into work boots. She leaves the nightgown on, potentially for the aesthetics, but more arguably because it’s easier to pretend you’re not doing anything wrong if you don’t get ready for it. Under the gaze of a moon on the good nights, or the glare of rain on the bad ones, she walks past the old buggy in favor of her bike. Eyes sit protected in the inner pockets of her coat that trails behind her on the ride to the center of the forest.
Watchful as ever, they sit up on the tree branches, silent as she approaches with a dropped bicycle and bed head. Carefully, the eyes are extraced from the pocket and held out in two hands covered in rough calluses and scars.
As one the crows descend on their meal.
