Eyes
Flash Fiction
As he set down the cake on the table the mother joked she’d been drilling her lungs to blow out all the eighty candles she thought he’d bring along for her birthday today.
He greeted the joke with a grin, nodding. No candles, he said. How like candles the tendons ringing her neck seemed anyway, so lithe and taut, translucent. The mother asked if there were that many. She felt about the neck with a prattle of gnarly fingers. She hadn’t looked in a mirror for years
--the boon of living all by herself in a home high up here, beyond civilization.
At dusk when they parted she wouldn’t come up to the car as she usually would. Negotiating the third bend downhill, he gazed back up the gentle rise where the house stood. No, the mother wasn’t out in the veranda. Nor were the lights on. In the little coop out on the brink up there was the lone hint of life: the great crowing and flapping and stirring of her fat white hens readying for the night.
Long before he could hit the freeway the heavens opened. The air in the car hummed to a hazy chill. The rolled-up windows wept neon torrents, and amid the motor’s raging grunts the tires squelched. In no time the windscreen began to fog up, making it doubly hard to see ahead.
He cursed and stirred. The wipers woke up and set to work. With vengeful alacrity the wiggly streams replenished the momentary sweeps of clarity.
And then it caught his notice. The eyes.
His own eyes, mirrored in the misty glass. They were fixed squarely on him and he couldn’t rid himself of the sensation that they kept staring even as he pulled away his gaze and sent it elsewhere. Eyes were never his prominent feature. Here they braved a history of blandness and flared, quizzical and contemptuous, sharp and shaped, bloated by a thousand drops. Are these eyes even his? They hovered on a smudgy, molten face that lacked a mouth.
Once again he flipped on the wipers, and watched them fail. He stooped to snatch a wad of rag and strove to scour it all in frantic circles. His shoulders groaned, lips collapsed, spine revolted in stacks of hurt.
He stole a glance at the eyes again, and now found them blood-red, swamped.
Letting out a groan he pulled over.
He hopped out and floundered up a step or two before breaking into a staggered run, eyes squeezed against the blinding rain.
