Eyeball
Cat Tails #2
“She’ll grant you a wish,” you said over my shoulder. Adding in a sly jeer, “or curse you.”
I couldn’t look at her one marble white eye but the idea of it, an impression from the briefest glance, floats in my mind even now. Thirty five years later.
I was so angry at you that day. You’d run over my stuffed puppy, beloved Pokey, with your bike and popped his eye out. Grotesquely bursting the seams around it. An impossibly bright, hot, still morning. My dry wails rattling the inside of my head as the flies buzzed.
“I know who can fix his eye.” You whispered, hours later, me still pouting and refusing to even look at you.
I followed you down the street, wandering away from the sour, white, fatty smell of the butcher shop where our mother was eyeing slick, pink flesh for our tea. I followed you blindly, still filled with little sister love and forgiveness for your rotten violence. We went into the toy shop, the bell on the door letting out a single, solemn note. It was silent and cold, a black hole compared to the bared teeth of summer outside. There was nobody around so I followed you through a curtain into the back where Ms. West had a workshop. The air was thick with sawdust and, there amidst a maker’s chaos, sat a cat the colour of shadows.
”She’ll grant you a wish.”
I stared for a moment into her filmy, blind eye. When I remember it now, she was smiling but that cannot be right. Cat’s don’t smile. And because I was angry and perhaps because I was frightened and definitely because I was eight, I wished you were dead.
Now we are here. We are grown and we know better. I think about that moment as I sit in this hospital which smells of bleach covering sickness. We know things like our own imminent mortality. And still I wonder, my head full of rolling marble eyes, did I do this to you? Is that cat still sitting in the gloomy chaos, closing her good eye and nodding her head slowly.
One more wish, finally granted.