"Everything Will Be Okay" was originally published in the now sadly defunct Vastarien magazine. I cannot recall the inspiration, but it goes to a really weird place before a sliver of body horror brings it home.
As Des Lewis notes here in his real-time review of the issue the tale was in:
***
"All of this and none of this. Some of this."
I am sure this must have the most shudderingly excruciation of an ending I have ever read, with genuine physical cringes induced. An ending that cruelly insists on perfecting this word-textured exercise in losing your own identity as well as that of the human woman you may have lived with so very very long (is there any other sort of woman than human?) -- a sort of extreme Senile Dementia transliterated into a memory of your younger self suffering it. Or even younger than that, when your mother told you the title of it. And now, you are old enough to understand that you no longer understand anything and memories lie...lie where?
"Not within. But on. On the inside of your eyelids."
***
Yes, this review made me smile.
Without further ado or a-don't, er...here ya go.
***
Everything Will Be Okay
A smudge, a blotch. But not. A silhouette etched in light. A negative
impression, flashpoint ghost—something moving as celluloid through a stuttering
projector. Silent film. But not. All of this and none of this. Some of this. A
silhouette, blurred edges. Uncertain allegiance.
“You’re sleeping.” The voice slips in with the stealth of a cat burglar.
Jimmied back door, shoes silent on carpeted floors. But there’s that moment, no
matter the cautions undertaken, when something is bumped, something is jostled.
You jolt upright.
“I’m not.” Eyes open to a different light than the dim view you’d
witnessed within. The television glare is accompanied by static sound, voices
slowly gaining clarity. Words as daggers in your ears, twisting to help them
take shape.
“You are.” She says this then proceeds to suck orange soda through a red
and white pin-striped straw. Bubbles battle ice cubes in the glass she holds in
her hand.
“No. I’m not.” But where were you? Not asleep, but not here. Not out
here. Not conscious of what you think of as the outside world, which creases
the unease that folds thoughts into tiny undefined origami.
There’s the slight hiss of water as if through a hole before the barrier
is compromised, the aural onslaught cacophonous: sound pours over you with the
sudden force of a ruptured dam. The hairs on your arms stand at attention.
Voices and music, the quirky, eerie soundtrack to the movie you are watching.
Were watching. With her. She pulls the straw from her thin lips as if she’s
about to say something, but no words follow. Nonetheless, you are compelled to
reiterate your status as awake.
“I’m not asleep. I wasn’t sleeping” But what were you doing? Where were
you? And what were you watching? What was that smudge, that blotch, the
undefined silhouette?
“All right, all right. Point made.” She grumbles; you can sense the
gurgling sound deep within her chest, perhaps winding through the esophagus, rising
to corrode the windpipe. “You picked the movie. You should watch it.” A potato
chip crunches between her teeth, somehow amplified in your ears. A crackling
assault. You remember a video of a small beetle’s carapace being crushed by the
pincers of a larger insect. You remember thinking, no, this cannot be what it
sounds like, but whoever did the sound design for this video really captured
the all-around sensation that, yes, this is the sound of a beetle’s carapace
being crushed by the pincers of a larger insect, before the insect picks the
innards out and eats them with twitching efficiency. You pull away from the
memory and narrow your focus toward the figures on the television screen. You
know these characters, know the movie, yet cannot place any of it within the
same bin of memory recollection occupied by the dead beetle.
“You okay?” The woman seated next to you is also familiar—your wife,
perhaps a girlfriend; the closeness of your bodies as well as her casual manner
while scratching an itch beneath her left breast signifies as much, but you
cannot place her name right now. At this minute, she’s no more substantial than
a stranger passing by on the sidewalk. But you can tell by the tilt of her head
and the steady gaze from her eyes her focus has also narrowed and sharpened.
You know what she is focused on and what you are focused on are not even within
the same orbit. Usually, one would be worried about such memory lapses, perhaps
victim to a stroke, but you sense nothing negative, only curiosity. The
characters on the screen meld with memory, congealing as toffee, something to
chew on. A caramel cube. Session 9. The movie is Session 9. One of your
favorites, or at least one you have often thought of in that way before, but
right now—who knows for sure?
“Everything will be okay.” You’re not sure why you say this. You’ve
never liked the expression. Everything will be okay—the sentence
portends catastrophe, tragedy. Everything will be okay is always a lie.
Soothing a restless child before turning out the lights and leaving said child
in the hands of the creatures that live in the closet, under the bed. The last
vestiges of a phone call about a loved one after a car accident, the one
reporting the news to you stating, “Everything will be okay,” when okay is not
even in the running any longer. A whisper before violence. A wink before
murder. An undefined silhouette that draws you back to it, its formation, its
purpose.
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘Everything will be okay?’” Apparently,
the woman who might be your wife or girlfriend—no, not a wife, there is no
wedding band—is not convinced. She places her hand on your wrist. Her concern
trembles through you. A passing sensation of nausea rises in you, then slides
back down into the churning acid within your stomach. “Are you okay, baby?”
“I’m…I’m fine.” You smile and nod toward the television and the movie,
though already you know you need to look inside for answers that might make
sense of whatever it is you are experiencing right now. You’re quite sure none
of this convinces her that you are okay.
You realize you’ve been sitting up and forward, as if an impaling post
has filled the space where your spine should be. You consciously make the
effort to settle back into your place on the sofa you are sharing with the
woman. (Is her name Carly? Maybe Candy? Maybe…) You still wear the smile, a
theater mask, to put her at ease. As if whatever is unraveling will ever allow
her to experience the sense of being “at ease” with you again. It does not
matter as you close your eyes.
The silhouette is back, still distorted around the edges, but at least
you define edges because there is movement. It is moving in its stuttering
manner; there’s no sense made in the movement. There is sound accompanying the
figure, though. Figure? Yes, figure. Muffled sound emanates from the figure.
You cannot make it out, but you are sure it’s something vocal, perhaps
language. Not just grunts or gargling in the throat. It is with a purpose. You
also note you can no longer hear the movie playing on the other side of your
eyelids. Your hearing is directed within. You sense as you concentrate you can
almost make out what the figure is saying, be it based in language or something
equally as expressive yet lacking normal verbal function.
“Hey!” The woman shakes you from your research. It is as if she’s
slipped a burning wire into your ear, prodding the brain, pushing you out of
sync with what you need to do. What you need to know.
Though you’ve opened your eyes again, and your face is adorned in a
smile, as before, it’s not you that is smiling. It is the flesh husk you
occupy. The flesh husk you’d rather discard so you can continue to investigate
without interference. The soundtrack from the movie, though the scene is mostly
quiet, screams at you. Screams.
“Perhaps we should just go to bed.” The woman’s presence has grown
irritating. Her constant interruptions are unacceptable. She fondles a potato
chip within the bag of potato chips, stops, and pulls her fingers past the
crinkled opening. You hear this and the mostly quiet scene and it’s as if all
sound from out there, from the outside, is being piped directly into your ears.
Your tympanic membranes quiver and you know if you shove your fingers in your
ears, it will do you no good. Worse yet, the woman will react in a way that
will only stall what you really need to be doing right now. Yet, along with the
sounds, the crystal clarity of your vision as you take this all in, the brusque
intrusion of light and images from the outside appalls you. It is as if your
eyes and ears are being dipped in flames and the process singes with the intent
of challenging your focus and aspirations, at the very core. What matters is
what lurks within. What matters is what lives within. You battle the inception
of peripheral stimulation and ignore the woman as you close your eyes again.
That’s when you understand that it’s technically not “within” where the
figure and sounds originate. The welcomed figure and sounds, not like what
surrounds you from the outside like a straitjacket. Your focus is keen. The
sounds dissipate and you are back to your eyelids, the inside of your eyelids,
where the image of the figure and the sounds that accompany it reside. Not
within. But on. On the inside of your eyelids. The figure resides on the inside
of your eyelids, where it is struggling to communicate to you. Struggling to
gain its own clarity, crispness of lines. Relay to you its message. You are
laser focused on the inside of your eyelids, pulling the left eyelid away from
the eye, watching the figure move, a little more distinction displayed, a
little less static in the vocal message—yes, now you know, it is vocal; it is
talking to you—but it is not enough. The action of pulling on the eyelid,
pulling it away from the eye, has brought more clarity, but not enough. Yet.
When her voice once again interferes with what is now your life’s goal,
the purpose of the life you’ve drifted through until the gift of intention
without question has been revealed to you—not quite revealed to you, but close;
so close--you watch from above, out of your body, as you reach over to the
scissors she’d used to cut open the bag of potato chips. You observe as you
take them in your hand, grip them with intent, only to pull back into yourself
as the woman says something you cannot make out and scoots away from you, arms
drawn up and shielding herself, before pushing herself up and off the sofa. You
smile, oh, you smile, form without function beyond casting illusions of
normalcy when normalcy is quite out of the question now. You laugh, further
heightening the lie, and she bleats at you, barks at you, and you set the
scissors down. You stare at them momentarily. Within this brief sequence of
events away from where you need to be, you have aligned a manner and method to
achieve your life’s goal, the purpose unclear until you understand the message
from the figure on the inside of your eyelids. But now…now you understand how
to go about attaining the knowledge you need. The knowledge it wishes to divulge
to you and you alone.
You rise from the sofa and head down the hallway toward the bathroom. As
you do this, there’s another blunt bark from the woman; or, at least, from
something behind you. All that matters is what is in front of you. What is
behind you is the past, and dead. Your future is taking shape just as the
figure and its message will take shape shortly. You know what you need to do.
You enter the bathroom and close the door; lock the door. You see
yourself in the mirror but there’s nothing there you can relate to anymore. The
face, the features, a dull façade with no substantial standing in your life as
you move forward to reveal your life’s true purpose. You open the
medicine cabinet, inspect the contents, and close it. You open the drawer to
your left and run your fingers over cotton balls and Q-tips, before shutting
it. You open the drawer to the right and immediately, your prize is revealed.
The woman whose vague existence filled the life you lived beyond the
inside of your eyelids, had filled the drawers with whatever necessities a
woman of her kind—human? Is there any other kind of woman? She is a blank slate
now, nothing more—might deem necessary. Within the collection of nonsense
items, there is one item that stands out. One item that will assist you in your
quest to know what you need to know in order to successfully attain your life’s
goals and purpose.
Tiny scissors.
For whatever she needed them for—trimming fingernails or stray hairs or
who really knows and, with that thought, does it really matter now?
There is no hesitation.
You take the tiny scissors into your fingers, slide the tip of your
thumb and up to the first knuckle of your pointer finger into the metal loops
and open and close the scissors.
You close your eyes and watch the figure move and think to yourself, it
seems more desperate, this movement. The figure seems more desperate.
There is no hesitation.
You raise the tiny scissors up toward your eyelids as you pull the
eyelid away from your left eye first, still watching the figure, seeing a
little bit more, making out a wee bit more sense out of its movements and the
sounds that accompany it, yet not enough. Yet. You think about how the slight
curvature of the scissors should perfectly accentuate the shape of your eyelid.
You think about how the scissors look so dainty, almost polite—the polite
scissors, you think, and laugh lightly, only acknowledged by a hitching of your
shoulders and a rumble in your chest because you do not hear anything besides
the mumbled sounds from the inside of your eyelid. You think, polite scissors
wouldn’t really hurt, but you know this is a lie. Just like “Everything Will Be
Okay,” which you repeat in your head, because you do not hear anything from
outside any longer.
Everything will be okay, but not during this stage of discovery.
Everything will be okay, but right now, this is going to hurt. But you
must do what you must do.
You open the blades as you pull the eyelid away from your left eye and
watch as one of the blades slides in front of your vision, blurry silver and
set in place. You are confident that in mere seconds, you will be able to hold the
severed eyelid away from the eye at just the proper distance to reveal all that
the figure and its message have to reveal to you: your life’s goals, your
life’s purpose.
You hold your breath and squeeze, closing the blades…
***
Does that hurt? I...I hope so. ;-)
Here's some creepy eye art by the Junji Ito because, well, creepy eye stuff is everywhere in this post.
