If I Had Eyes, I’d Eat You by Billy Mitch
It was just there one day, outside my window, where the old oak tree spills over. Out there as if I couldn’t see it—watching me the way it does. Raised from the grass with eyes much like my own, it exists without blinking, without breathing, yet it stares; god it stares. I thought I’d only dreamt it at first, you know, those terrible lucid imaginings of fantasy; thought I’d been stuck in some sort of feverish nightmare with heavy limbs. No. This thing, it is real. I’ve gathered the nerve to visit it a time or two. It’s pink flesh as pale as my own, and so far, harmless, but, that could change. Just a fat, bulbous head sprout from the wispy soil as if it were a ripe turnip, but with those glinting, wet eyes as sprite and bright as the blazing sun. What does it want from me? I think it wants something. It has to, why else would it be in my backyard the way it is. I speak to it, poke at it with one of the yard sticks, I even scream at it, but it, it just stares, with those eyes, those horrible bulging eyes. I’ve tried digging it up, but the roots of it, they run too deep and are too thick to sink into. I’ve tried cutting it with the axe I keep in the toolshed, yet, it does not wound; unbreakable, I set it on fire with a jug of gasoline, and still it does not burn.
The worst part is, I’m the only one who can see it. The hideousness of its gaze—the bruised texture of it’s moist meaty facade, all of it, invisible to anybody else. And I’m not crazy, I know that it is not all in my head, that what I’m seeing is more than just a delusion. It shape shifts to hide, disguising itself from my friends and neighbors, there is nowhere I can turn to for help. And I’ve grown to believe that, that is its plan. To drive me mad, until what, I do not know, but I can’t keep on like this, without not much more than a wink of sleep, I feel myself nodding off in places I’ve never been; sleepwalking, and the piercing bellyaches that follow are torturous. I blame it. I curse it. I abuse it with hammers, hatchets, and even more fire—gouging out those eyes that only regenerate. But after all of that, it still exists.
The neighbors are getting concerned again, and honestly, I don’t blame them. The noises I make at night, trying to rid it from the dirt, from my life, would set anyone on edge. They’ll call the cops again, I know it, and I’ll explain myself for the dozenth time, that there is a human head planted in the dirt with marble-flared eyeholes, and they’ll tell me what they always tell me; to knock it off. If only I could make them see it. Fuck, I have to make someone believe it. The malicious entity that channels its pain behind the dark pockets of my eyes, and that never leaves me be, is goddamned real.
I beg to it, hell, I even pray to it, but it changes nothing. The only thing that has been made worse are my episodes of sleepwalking—to doze and awake again with a horrible taste in my mouth. The other night, I had wandered for over an hour into an open pasture, miles away, only to be awoken by a screeching truck horn. Luckily, the fellow who drove it was kind of enough to offer me a ride back, but everything was so foggy after that, as if I had been drugged. Still, I’d remain awake, much like the head, I could never shut my eyes, and recently, it was as if had trouble even blinking. I practiced in the mirror to squeeze my eyelids shut, but the pain of doing so, it forced me to stop. Because of that, I haven’t been able to close them for days—only when I drift away and return again; each time for longer periods, and more and more often, to experience the sick that hogs the spaces of my mouth.
I don’t even know what day it is anymore, the week, the month, only that each time I’m able to open them, I’m standing in the backyard, nose to nose with it, and today when I returned to consciousness, it’s clammy cold lips were pressed against mine, and I could feel something slither from inside my guts; like a shivering warmth, like a tongue to wag deep inside my belly and pull forth something from inside, with jaws that yawned open like a cavity; it siphoned a pair of legs, arms and a torso—birthed from within me to enter it’s own gasping throat. That taste, that horrible fucking taste, it only quenched my disgust when it reeled itself out of me.
I collapsed shortly after, to fall into another blackout, where I’d awake, hours later, in the wispy weeds. My head throbbed, but I’d grown used to that. It was the way the intact body before me stood, upright with my moving parts, that muted all sound inside me. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even blink—I could only stare.
