Eye
Fiction by Annie Zhang
That night I began to see through the skin of the world. At first I did not notice the sting in my nerves. The dark sky was cloudless, the moon bright and full. I turned the street corner towards my building. All of a sudden, the moon duplicated—then so did my hand and the rectangle of light from my phone. The entire street doubled before my eyes, the two visions floating apart.
I visited my sister the next morning. She worked as an optometrist in the CBD. She had me stare at an image of a grey road with a hot air balloon swelling on the horizon. As she fidgeted with the dials, my vision blurred in and out of focus.
‘Nothing seems too out of the ordinary,’ she said, frowning at the screen. She had not yet looked me in the eye. ‘Your astigmatism has worsened, that’s all. The edges around objects will appear blurry.’ Look at me. ‘When you see lights, they might elongate and look streaky. People find this often happens with streetlamps at night.’
My sister did not meet my eyes. She typed on her keyboard and ordered new lenses that would snap outlines back into clarity for me. I had no health insurance, but she fiddled with the numbers and sent me out the door.
I glanced back as the glass pane slid shut between us. My sister waved, but her gaze was still on her screen. She had not asked me about my job hunt, and I had not asked about her toddler or her dog or how she’d afforded a huge house in the northwestern suburbs. The computer illuminated half her face in blue light. As twins, we shared the same features, but I lacked the dewy glow of her complexion. Light threw itself on her face in such flattering angles.
My eyes played tricks on me for the rest of the week. Shadowy copies haloed the objects in my unit. I thought I had twice as many cupboards as I did. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a blurry second face. It was easiest to turn off all the lights, close my eyes, and lay down in the dark. In the unlit space, I felt myself relax, unknot.
The glasses arrived. That night, I glanced out my window at the streetlamp on the corner. Yellow streaks burst from it in all directions. That felt normal. I put on the new lenses and the streaking eased instantly. I turned and looked into the distance, where the city lights now crackled with clarity. I shifted my gaze to the red Westfield sign on Sydney Tower and traced the outline of each neon letter. Above my head was the waxing moon. Its ghostly second shadow was gone, settled back into the object.
Wait.
I frowned. Something else was up there. A strange bump in the night sky, between the clustering stars. Surely my eyes were deceiving me again. Straining on my tiptoes, I stretched my arm out the window and managed to graze the bump with a fingernail. Odd. It felt real enough.
✷
I looked out the window again the next morning, wearing my new glasses. The sky had lightened to a pale blue gradient. The bump was still there, still small and difficult to inspect. My curiosity grew. I zoomed in on the sky with my fingers, pressing my thumb and forefinger into its blue skin, fanning them open repeatedly. The sky enlarged, growing grainy and pixelated. The bump got bigger and bigger. I brushed away the wispy tail of a cloud and tapped at the bump. It moved, but did not give. What great secret could the sky be pregnant with? I tapped again, harder.
Rapidly, the sky split, unzipping to reveal the rotund protrusion of an eyeball, looming large over the city. Its brown iris stared down over the trees and buildings. I wondered: had we always lived like this, under the weight of a gaze? On the street, pedestrians screamed and ran and snapped photos on their phones. The eye twitched, spasmed, then abruptly dislodged. It fell and speared itself on the antenna spire of the Sydney Tower, smashing the Westfield sign and the building’s tiny windows. From the hole gaping between the clouds poured more eyes, smaller ones, in a great deluge.
The eyes rained down on the city and flooded the streets. They spilled through my open window and dispersed like marbles across my floors. I picked up a tiny fish eye from the ground, glaucous inside its gelatinous membrane. As children, my sister and I were told that their nutrients would help us ace our exams. She would dutifully eat her fish eyes, while I refused. Then I began to fail where she excelled, and I would cling to her while she ran ahead.
I stepped back from the window and surveyed the ground. Doll eyes and glass eyes gleamed from dusty corners. Other eyes I found seemed more human, with flat irises of brown and blue and green. Lint and fallen hair had stuck to their moist surfaces. I washed them in the sink and popped two in my mouth. The flavour was mild, the texture moist and creamy.
Outside, the great eye swivelled slowly on the spire, oozing mucus over the steel cables that braced the tower. Its gaze travelled towards me. Panic rose in my chest. I closed the window and drew my blinds.
I texted my sister. 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗼𝗸𝗮𝘆?? 𝗜 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿!!
She replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
I sent her a photo of the fish eye. 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝘆 𝗮𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. 𝗜 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗽 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀? 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗸𝗶𝗱 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲𝘀. 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝗵𝗮𝗵𝗮
She did not respond.
We had once been so close. We had shared a womb and a bedroom growing up. I kept on my shelf a photo of us. It had been taken at our tenth birthday celebration—me holding up five fingers to the camera while my sister held up the other five. My left cheek was dimpled and so was hers. We were wearing matching Sailor Moon shirts. The power had gone out that night and shadows clothed the corners of the frame. The only light in the photo came from the cake candles and the camera flash. Her face was lit up ghostly white, harsh and overexposed. Mine was in shadow.
Looking at the photo made me teary. My glasses began to fog. Removing them, I sobbed into the bowl of the sink. From the depths of the drain, an eye surfaced, meeting my gaze.
Returning to the couch, I wiped my glasses and put them back on. I looked at oblongs for the rest of the day. My house was filled with oblongs, I realised. The fridge, the laptop, the phone. My drawers, my cupboards, my tupperware. I was haunted by rectangular containers. I lived in a rectangular container. I imagined my building viewed from above by the eye, 6.3x4.2m packing cubes squished into squat concrete. As a child, I had always longed to be close to the city centre. My sister now lived in a sprawling house in Epping, with a grassy backyard and an orange tree.
In the oblong that glowed in my hand, I searched for videos of blue moving water. The suspiring sea. A cruise along a river. A translucent shape bobbed beneath the waves. A jellyfish? No. It was an eye the size of a fist.
I locked my phone, but then the lamps in my house began to blink. I turned them all off, plunging the unit into gloom. I breathed out, letting myself unfold beneath the shut eyelid of the dark. Our childhood home had been plagued by power outages and I had learned to find solace in darkness. I became something else in a lightless room. ‘Everything we see is light reflecting,’ my sister had explained once, starry-eyed, when she first began studying optometry. Back then I was still repeating units to finish high school. ‘Light reflects off surfaces and strikes the retinas in our eyes.’
But I did not want light to touch me, to reflect off me and give me a shape. I found safety in its absence. I was used to shadow, and to standing in hers. In darkness I could unravel, unbind myself from form, forget my own shape. Forget that I had one at all.
That night I dreamed of that birthday from many years ago. After we had blown out our ten candles, we had begged our parents to keep the house dark for a game of hide-and-seek. My sister counted to twenty as I shut myself in a kitchen cupboard. No light entered and I felt myself unknot, as I often did in darkness, unfurling around my rectangular container. ‘I’m coming to find you,’ my sister laughed as she entered the kitchen. ‘You’re inside the cupboard, aren’t you?’ She kneeled on the ground and pulled open the door. Her hand reached out toward my face—but then it passed through me, meeting only empty air. I heard her sharp gasp. She stared at what I was, eyes wide with terror. I held her gaze in the dark.
She stood up and closed the door with trembling hands. At the sound of her faltering footsteps, I smiled. She was walking away, trying a different room.
✷
I woke to the pitter-patter of eyes on my window. Mine blinked open. Was it morning already? The frames of my glasses had left impressions in my cheeks. I untangled my limbs on the couch and checked my phone. My sister had still not responded. I pulled up the blinds and peered through the oblong window at the world beyond.
Eyes covered roofs like coats of snow. They piled up in gutters like ping pong balls. More were still falling from the hole between the clouds. I traced a circle around a patch of sky, duplicated the selection and pasted it over and over again, covering the void. I was proud of my handiwork.
But then I tapped too hard on the grainy sky and the whole thing cracked, like the screen of a phone. Ah. As usual, the sky was just pixels. Hundreds of tiny parts adding up to a whole.
The great eye remained speared on the tower. It revolved on its axis, the pupil slowly turning west. I thought of my sister, her gaze fixed resolutely on her screen. My heart pounded. The eye would face me. The eye would look at me. I stood and waited.
Our gazes met. I stared into the brown radial of its iris, the deep black abyss at its centre. I felt a strange sensation around my face. A film was melting away before my eyes, but as it disappeared, my vision did not clear—it clouded. The lenses of my glasses were dissolving in their frames like sugar. I removed the empty plastic shell from my face. Then I stood motionless, basking in the full force of the eye’s great stare, losing myself in the black hole of its pupil when I experienced a rippling sensation all throughout my body. My arms blurred. I felt myself expanding, streaking out in all directions, like a streetlamp on the road at night. Everything we saw was only light reflecting, and I, too, was only light reflecting. I distorted. Diffused. There was no I. There was only what I had been, the shadowy duplicate, ghosting out of the container that had once housed me ...
But then the eye’s great stare moved away. I was siphoned into the body once more, sipped back into the shoes of my feet, the gloves of my hands, the bones and muscle I wore every day. I gasped, slurping air into my mouth. I had lungs again. A throat, a face.
Out the window, the eye had turned away and stilled, focusing on a far-off point. A hollow feeling rang inside my chest. I had been so afraid, yet it had barely looked at me. I followed the eye’s gaze and saw, rising out of the green fringes at the edge of the city, a splendid hot air balloon. Red and yellow and bulbous, it flared into the sky.
I grabbed my keys and got in my car. I drove down a grey highway spiralling into the suburbs. At first the trees that lined the road were spiked with white eyes, but the landscape emptied as time went on. I continued driving. Near Epping, the suburban houses deleted themselves and vibrant fields of green unfolded, endless and stretching. The cracked sky above was so blue it hurt to look at. In my rear-view mirror, the pupil of the great eye stayed fixed on the horizon, on the fissures in the world’s blue skin. The hot air balloon rose, ever in the distance. I never seemed to get any closer. The balloon’s shape fuzzed in and out of focus, and so did I.
Annie Zhang is a writer and editor living on unceded Darug land. She has been published in Overland, Island and Debris Magazine, among others. She is interested in monsters, hauntings and surreal encounters.