Author: Bella Melardi
"If your left eye causes you to sin, tear it out." I stared too long into the sun, my eye burning under its weight. It started to melt, to slip from my control. The doctors called it Coat’s disease, a name that sounds less like a diagnosis and more repentance. Sometimes, I wonder if I did something terrible in another life, and this. this slow fading. Was the punishment for my past mistakes.
Close your right eye. A mantra I’ve known since I was young. It’s what the doctors said, what the classmates said, once they discovered that I couldn't see from it. I shut my good eye obediently.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" People would ask. Darkness dressed in silence. A black hole oozing absence. Antimatter etched into vision.
"I can’t see," I tell them, but they insist on testing me anyway. Then, with the smallest movement, I open my good eye. A middle finger stares back at me.
A lighthouse. Jarring jagged and scarring. A red bleeding beacon. A warning written in flesh. And I am the storm it condemns, the water that refuses calm.
I laugh and say it’s funny. But that doesn’t make this feeling go away. A fertile gnawing fatigue. My throat the soil, my yawns blossoming from my tongue. I wonder if I’m as broken as they make me out to be.