In the beginning, you think it’s a mosquito bite, although you never saw the insect or felt the sting. The pimple is the size of a marble, red as raw flesh, and it gives you an itch so bad you wish you could tear your skin off.
“Yes, it’s infected,” the doctor says. “But don’t worry. Carbuncles are an expected side effect of the PMOS treatment.” He prescribes you some topical antibiotics and sends you home.
At night, you wake up convulsing in feverish spasms, your flesh throbbing underneath your skin, fraying the fibers of your muscles, tearing nerve and sinew apart, a reddish ooze seeping out your pores. Your back bends forward and you cross your arms by reflex, wrapping yourself in a desperate embrace as you scratch your legs, your arms, your face, your nails carving the peripheries of the bumps that emerge from beneath your skin. And as you scratch, your skin peels, and the thin epidermis layer detach from your body like a cicada’s shell and waft to the ground.
And what lies underneath isn’t your raw flesh, but exactly one hundred eyes, scattered throughout your arms, torso, and legs. Each one of them is colored with the same dark brown hue of your own eyes, as if they’d sucked out your melanin, stolen it straight from your genetic code.
Driven by morbid curiosity, you raise your right index finger and poke the eyeball in the middle of your left palm. The eyeball reddens and waters and burns, a tear rolling down your wrist. Next you clench your fist. And you squeeze it tightly, so hard that your nails scratch and dig into your own palms and your fingers start cramping.
When you finally let go, the eye is still staring at you.
* * *
You resolve to take them out by force.
You grab every spoon, knife, and tweezers you can find in the house and take a plastic chair into the shower. You put an old rag between your teeth and bite it as hard as you can. Then you lift one of the spoons, suck in as much air as you can fit in your lungs, and you start. You begin with the one in your left hand, right on the eyelids’ commissure.
Carving in, you find out the eye is jointed to your flesh through an optic nerve. So, when you’ve at last managed to place the spoon behind the retina and pull the eyeball out, you take your knife and chop off the nerve with a single slash. It hurts like hell, but only for a brief instant, during the fleeting fraction of a second it took for you to cut the flesh that bound you to the eye and feed it with your nutrients like it had been an umbilical cord.
The next ones are easier, quicker. You have both of your hands free now, and you deliver those knife slashes as if they were gusts of wind. Your skin heals as soon as each eyeball is detached, raised scars forming where the optical nerves used to be, the remaining fibers intertwining with each other and shaping reddish, tight knots.
And the eyeballs float, light as soap bubbles, swaying to the rhythm of the gentle air currents that filter in under the door, always staring at you as if you were their center of gravity. You let them fill the room as you pop them all out of your body, one by one.
Ninety-seven.
Ninety-eight.
Ninety-nine.
The last eye is on your back, out of your visual field. You do your best to remove it without piercing it, but you fail. Ooze seeps out your now open wound and spills down your back, thick drops hitting the vinyl floor below.
And strange as it may seem, you can’t help but grieve, pressure crushing your throat and chest, tears welling up in the corners of the eyes you still have.
You realize, only then, that every single one of them is important to you. Flesh of your flesh, cultivated within your entrails. They’re yours. You’re theirs. And no matter where they go, whenever they have grown old enough to leave the nest of you, they will always carry you with them.
* * *
Over the course of the next few days, the eyes grow their own dermis layers to protect themselves from the elements, from the impurities in the dry summer breeze. Tiny hairs begin to grow at the edge of the eyelids, spreading and curling as they turn into frames. And in their corners small bumps are formed, and soon they become tear ducts to keep the eyes moist and clean.
Right when you think there’s not much more your eyes can grow, thin veils of skin take shape at the back of each eyeball, and now they’ve got wings, and when they flap they buzz in unison as if they were a large swarm of mosquitoes.
The last major physical change is the materialization of their probosces. Sharp, elongated, and hollow as needles, formed at the center of the lower eyelids. You understand, instinctively, that it is through those tubes that they must be fed, but they refuse to drink the water you offer to them.
They’re parasites, after all.
You prick the tip of your finger with a knife and offer your own blood, because little is the pain compared to the fear of mourning those who you’ve birthed. Yet the eyeballs still refuse to consume what’s come out of you, because that would be an abomination, cannibalism.
Thus, knowing that keeping your children would kill them, and that watching them starve to death would kill you as well, you look at them one last time. Then, you open every door and window in your house and let them go.
* * *
Ⓒ Abigail Guerrero