The Eye Unseen

by Cynthia Tottleben

  “I didn’t know chickens had red blood. I mean, I guess I did from cooking and stuff, but not THIS red. In the packages from the store it usually seems somewhat yellowish-red, I think.”

  “Chicken blood?” Mom asked. She picked some bits of flesh off her nightstand and threw them in her bucket. “What are you talking about?”

  We faced each other, confused. I searched her eyes for some signal, whether she was Old or New Mom or Some Different Mom that I hadn’t met yet.

  “I just thought that this was….” I stammered.

  Mom said nothing but looked at me like I was speaking in riddles.

  “God came to visit me earlier tonight,” I confided, wanting to change the subject, but not really wanting to talk at all anymore.

  “Oh, Lucy, that’s wonderful. Tell me all about it.”

  Mom smiled, a fake display of happiness that could not compete with her discomfort. I had the feeling she wanted me to talk just to fill the air with sound other than our rags wiping against the paint. Mom never had interest in my life.

  But then again, who wouldn’t want to know about my personal relationship with a God that made house calls?

  “He actually scared me, at first. And Tippy. Boy, did He frighten her!”

  Mom tilted her head, quizzically. For a split second she looked just like one of the birds in my bedroom and I almost broke out into hysterics.

  “He came in through the closet while we were sleeping,” I explained. “Tippy barked her head off at Him. Of course, she had never met Him before, and it was very confusing for her.”

  “What did He say to you?”

  “Not much. He wanted to make sure I was feeling better.”

  “That’s it?”

  I didn’t know if Mom doubted me, or if I had been too simplistic and roused her suspicion. But then again, maybe my exhaustion was clouding my mind. I hadn’t worked this hard in a long time, could barely stay on my feet anymore.

  “Well, we talked about how I need to give myself to Him completely.”

  “Now, that’s what I would expect God to say. How did you respond?”

  Could I tell her that Tippy had an explosive reaction to God’s conversation or that it was all I could do not to hurl when He touched me?

  “Very politely.” Did all women have sex with God? If Mom found it absolutely normal that God wanted me to join Him physically, did that make it right? Or since she was batty, did that make the idea absolutely insane?

  I couldn’t ask her about it. Brandy had never warned me of God’s intentions. Tippy wanted to be left alone and pretend that our encounter with Him never occurred.

  “Sometimes, He scares me.” I let my thoughts grow wild.

  “I can certainly understand that. How wonderful is He? How powerful? I would probably cower in His presence.”

  “He certainly makes me tremble when He’s around.”

  But I couldn’t help but wonder, if God had had sex with so many women, how had He only had one son? What was the likelihood that throughout all of time, the billions upon billions of women that He had overseen and convinced to give themselves to Him, and He would only get one of them pregnant?

  I blushed. What if that was my role? Was that why He found me worthy of His attention?

  We finished her room. I started the washing machine, helped Mom put away the ladder, and checked on my dachshund. My body was ready to collapse.

  “Thank you for helping me, Lucy. I know that wasn’t an easy chore.”

  We stood on opposite sides of the hall, neither of us wanting to go back to bed.

  “Can I get my glass of water? I forgot it in your room,” I asked. Mom hated having me in her personal space, and even though I had just come from her room, I knew better than to walk in without asking.

  “Sure.”

  I hurried to her dresser. Spied God, shirtless, waiting under the blankets for Mom to come back. He patted the empty side of her bed and smiled at me.

  “You’ll sleep better now, Mom.”

  “I will?”

  “God’s in there, waiting for you. He’ll watch over you tonight. He must have known you were having a hard time.”

  She bent forward and kissed my forehead, but never batted an eye when Tippy and I headed to Brandy’s room so we could go back to sleep.

  * * *

  In the morning, after she had returned from the store, Mom made me join her in the kitchen.

  “Get on the chair!”

  Our camaraderie from the night before was long forgotten.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  Tippy and I exchanged worried glances. I didn’t spy any sage on the counter. Or cream.

  “Now, Lucy.”

  My eyes moved toward the door, but unfortunately Mom caught me looking.

  “I said now!” As her hand caught my cheek, I thought of the chickens outside her bedroom. They were gone when I got up this morning, the pile of bodies removed without so much as a trace.

  My stomach fell when I thought about her butchery. Could she have been slaughtering them for their blood, not their bodies? Was she going to purify me that way now?

  My shirt landed on the floor. I had figured it out. Knew what she was going to do to me. What else would you use chicken blood for but some kind of ritual? And what better to symbolize your fertility than blood?

  She was going to coat me in all that gore to prepare me for my pairing with God!

  Did that mean He would come after me today?

  Dread filled my heart. I didn’t want to do it. But how could I defy Him, when everyone I had ever met worshipped God as truth and love?

  “I’m sick and tired of looking at that mop of yours.” Mom surprised me.

  I looked up, saw the small box in her hand.

  “From now on you’re going to have chestnut hair, like your sister.”

  She put on the plastic gloves and starting oozing dye into my scalp. With her rolled-up sleeves so close to my head, I could see the scratch marks the chickens had left all over her forearms. They must have put up quite a struggle. Mom’s skin was a scabby mess.

  If she had been the same woman I’d worked with last night, I would have asked her if she wanted me to clean the wounds for her. As it was, I kept my mouth shut and decided to let her worry about them.

  While we waited for the color to set Mom retreated to her room and I stayed in the kitchen. The timer ticked away as I silently inspected the refrigerator. No big containers of blood filled the shelves. No chicken meat, no gizzards, no indication of what Mom had done with the bodies from last night.

  From across the room I tried to inspect the yard. Daylight flooded the kitchen and I had a fantastic view of the back, the fenced in area that Tippy used, even the shed.

  I figured that’s where she’d put them. Knowing that I couldn’t go outside and that, even if I could, the metal building was the last place I’d ever visit. What a perfect place to hide them.

  I could see them there. Close my eyes and envision the metal bar on the back wall, the one she’d tied me to when she locked me in. The hens were hanging there. Legs tied together and strung up to drain the blood from their headless necks. In the grasp of winter, they’d probably be just as cold as if Mom had put them in our freezer.

  I got goose bumps just thinking about eating them. Would she make me pluck the feathers? I wouldn’t even have the slightest idea how to go about it.

  Something jumped from behind the shed, and I had to cover my mouth to keep from screaming.

  A deer, sneaking forward to let me see her.

  I waved, sent her my best thoughts. Let her know I was feeling much better. That I was walking pretty normally again. Thanked her for her loyalty.

  We stared at each other until Mom came back to finish my dye job. As soon as she entered the kitchen, the deer slipped out of sight, almost magically, her movements so swift and silent that even Tippy didn’t react to her disappearance.

  Mom pulled me toward the sink and rinsed the col
or from my hair.

  “Much better!” she declared after I’d dried off and modeled my look for her.

  I became a brand new person. If Brandy were still around, we’d finally look like sisters. I couldn’t help but stare in the mirror, excited over my new locks. Hoping that maybe, just maybe, He wouldn’t recognize me when He came.

  * * *

  Tippy and I developed OCD.

  Our routine, which we executed at least twenty times a day, started with a quick inspection of the hallway in the mornings.

  We rolled out of bed, checked the hall for any sign of chickens, feathers, even poop—which we had never seen. Tippy could go on for hours about how everybody poops, even my ‘imaginary’ chickens, as she called them, since she had never really seen them. But these chickens never did.

  “Sometimes I get a funny feeling and think I see something out of the corner of my eye, but at least I’m not crazy like you are!” She chastised me when I asked her about the fowl Mom kept upstairs. “I don’t have them crawling all over me on the bed at night!”

  I started to pay more attention to Mom’s drawings. When I had first noticed them, I was so furious with her for keeping me locked away and not letting me eat that I didn’t do much more than glance at the walls when I walked past. With the stacks of corpses in the hall, I was often so concerned about stepping on them that I watched my feet more than the charcoal renderings.

  But the more stir-crazy I became, the more attention I paid to all the little details.

  For instance, the sideways chickens. Poised to strut up the wall. What was their purpose?

  Tippy and I could sit at the end of the hall, backs to the linen closet, and watch them move. Up the side of the door to Mom’s room, over the top, down again. A parade that never progressed. Were they protecting her? Keeping an eye out for strangers who might enter her room? Waiting for me?

  I named each one of them. Plucky, Picky, Pokey, Petals. Tippy played my game, if only to pass time, and selected E names for the ones on the west wall closest to Brandy’s room. Esther, Eliza, Eggy, Elaine. They pecked for food but did little else.

  The headless gals were hardest to pinpoint, as Tippy and I didn’t know a lot of decapitated folks to name them after. But given time we came up with a list, and called them Anne, Margaret, Catherine, Ms. Antoinette, Lady Jane, and Beatrice.

  We ignored the humans for days but eventually determined that if we were going to give the hens their own monikers, we’d better name the people, too. But we never said these out loud. I got the willies thinking about them chasing me with their bloody axes and didn’t want to rouse their attention with direct conversation. I even avoided eye contact. Which wasn’t hard, considering they didn’t have faces themselves.

  Funny how headless sorts can see just fine when they need to. Like Sissy, finding my bed at night, or always sensing when I needed a hug.

  “Holly, Barbie, Cathy, Betsy,” I yelled out the names of some of my favorite dolls, many of which were slumbering in our attic, finally noticing that most of the hens with heads were grouped together in fours.

  “But I swear that last week there were six of them on this wall,” I pointed out to Tippy.

  So we began to watch.

  We got up in the mornings, did our bathroom chores, ate breakfast, performed any odd duty Mom assigned, then made our way into the hall.

  I could read while we waited, but many days I found it too difficult to focus on the words. Instead I just sat on the hardwood floor, my dog in my lap, and waited for their world to come alive.

  Hens over Mom’s door. The people by mine, stock still, never moving. But as the days unfolded, watching Mom’s artwork became as thrilling as a soap opera, the greatest entertainment Tippy and I had had in months.

  Of course, I had to narrate it all to my dog. She had no desire to see the chickens, but once the story got rolling, she loved to listen to me talk.

  The birds with beaks hated the headless bunch and would often chase them, forcing them into the less detailed land by the bathroom door. Lady Jane and Ms. Antoinette were inseparable and stood up to the other gals, but Eliza could run them off just by fluffing her feathers.

  They had cliques and their own status within those cliques, just like the girls at school. Plucky played with Holly, but the others didn’t want her on their turf and would peck at her for coming near. Cathy chastised Holly every time she brought Plucky over, her wings spread and eyes blazing with fury.

  The groups snuck around, stealing food. A few of them even laid eggs and tried desperately to hide them from the others, often beside the banister or in the corner by my room.

  Mom preferred that we made no noise, and we moved around upstairs as quietly as falling leaves, watching our girls, checking on all the indicators that told us of the outside world.

  Every night we checked the Hanley house for Christmas lights. About fifty times. Knowing December hadn’t passed kept Tippy sated. She loved getting gifts and felt elated at the whole idea of Mom faking Santa Claus for us this year, having a special day where we all got along and had endless piles of food and cookies to comfort us.

  We monitored our water bottles. Collected odds-and-ends, snacks that we could hide away. Listened to Mom’s movements, her routines, the times she slid out of them, ruffling our feathers, as Tippy and I never knew what she kept up her sleeve.

  I followed the moon, but Tippy claimed she could feel her pull in her every bone and didn’t need to witness her path through the sky. Sometimes I quizzed her on whether our friend was waning or waxing, but my dog would have none of that.

  “That is so trivial. Why would you even ask?” Tippy often crawled up on her high horse, and sometimes it took days for her to come down.

  I couldn’t fall asleep if my toothbrush was facing toward the toilet and got up about fifteen times to check it. Always moving around silently, on tippy toes, trying not to wake Mother.

  Or put the farmyard on high alert. I couldn’t imagine the beating I would take if the chickens noted my presence and roused Mom with their vigilante clucking act.

  Tippy refused to let our door be closed. I didn’t really blame her, but she pushed at it a hundred times a day, ensuring she had a path just the size of her body to squeeze through, that the latch never had the opportunity to find purchase, to lock us back in.

  After meals I checked the refrigerator, just to make sure it was well stocked and that Mom hadn’t pulled any of our feathered friends out of the shed yet. I was getting too attached to our chickens to start gorging on them.

  Not that I would ever turn my head at a good meal. Neither of us would do that. I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t feeding me my own friends. Random chickens from someone else’s house, yes. My chickens, no.

  Although I knew that someday it would come to that.

  Better the chickens than Tippy.

  If she ever tried to hurt my dog, I’d have to kill her.

  Chapter 30

  Evelyn

  After warming my gullet with a hearty drink, I often found myself in whatever boarding room I’d taken, sitting in front of the mirror, analyzing myself. My totally unencumbered and rather bizarre life. How I’d spent my best years chasing a story that climaxed with my own transformation into the star of the ancient plot.

  I couldn’t have cared less anymore about the long-lost idiot relative of mine who had somehow found her way to Japan, infected the world with her children, then suffered her own death at the hands of her middle daughter, the one destined to kill three of her neighbors while they slept at night. Or that wench in Maine who worked in an infirmary and sealed the fate of twenty-six patients, all dying of some lung ailment that would have taken them eventually, anyway.

  The only reason I kept researching was the cloak travel offered. Who would suspect a woman brave enough to voyage the world—alone even, a scholar whose purse knew no dearth? Who would look at my handsome face and make any comparison to the monsters that inhabited my extended bloodlin
e?

  What freedom came with my lack of address. My ability to jump onto a train, a boat, or simply toot my horn and pull back onto the road that lead further into the countryside, through the wilderness, to the edge of the world where the days were skirted by nothing but ice and the darkness of the forever sea?

  The familiar black eternity that hardened into the volcanic stone I called my heart.

  No, even if I were caught blood-covered with my talons out, people would not point fingers. They were the same in every city I dropped my dimes, filthy with their hands held out in expectation, a mob rendered silent by their stupidity and stunned by the fact that I carried my own books. I at once hated the humans that shared my earth and envied their pain, the sultriness of their tears, that I could take them to an entirely different plane with the use of my straight razor, a lick of fire, or by simply draining all of the fluid from their eyes.

  Which I was wont to do.

  I devoured a child in Hong Kong, five hours after I had slaughtered her in my bathtub.

  Plied the fingernails out of an old man’s hands while he wept his apologies for touching me earlier in the bar. No one ever discovered his remains.

  In east Texas I purchased a young woman and kept her with me for three weeks but tired of her whining and left her scalp on a fence post when I drove out of town.

  The other women in my family were pathetic. Weaklings. Amateurs. The only ones I held the slightest respect for were those who had felt him like I had. The ones consumed by the devil. Those that had risen to the occasion and experienced the lust brought on by a fresh kill.

  He and I had grown quite close. I could feel him grow inside me, take over my skin, empower me to collect souls without any weapon other than my own hands, and turn to him for conversation while I did so. That he could reside within me and stare at me from his own body at the same time struck me as incredibly profound, so overwhelming it left me breathless, almost ashamed of my human vulnerabilities, my inability to perform such amazing feats without his assistance.