matchbook

he black trees slashed through the sunlight, more bared fangs than a forest, and just deep enough within them to be lost: a charming cottage where lived a young woman and her parents, until the day (how sad) her parents both died.

Illness, maybe; or murder-suicide. It’s possible she killed them herself. However it happened, the spectacle left the woman’s eyes open too wide, unable to close or look away as she buried their bodies.

          Their corpse-eyes hung open as well, she noticed. Maybe it was a catching thing.

#

          Though the garden soil was soft, the labor took her all day.

#

          Eyes gleamed out at her from every crack and corner of the night; her own eyes suddenly seeing far too much. (The sliver of a man’s shoulder just behind the bedroom door.) (The shape of a face in the window.) (A body shambling in the fog.) She locked all her locks. She checked and rechecked them. But it was her first time living alone and she couldn’t be convinced that all was safe, and so she burned the charming cottage to the ground.

          It was chill autumn and suddenly midnight. The woman stretched her hands to toast by the fire, but she should’ve known: When you burn something beautiful, its flames will never warm you.

          Her smoke braided with the fog, and so the ravenous light wavered on solid air, painfully bright against eyes she couldn’t blink. The fire spooked birds from their nests and bats from their chambers. Mice and other under-creatures: threads pulled from a tapestry of burrows, warrens, and thickets.

          The fire drew things as well.

          The ground rumbled beneath the woman’s feet, a sensation that built into a young man atop a golden horse, galloping out of the woods.

          The man was dazzling. All those gold rings shining on his fingers. That lush velvet doublet and those handsome leather boots. Even so, the woman thought to run, to hide.

          “Hurry now,” the man called, the cottage roof spasming in an ejaculation of sparks, “I’ll get you safe.”

          The woman quivered, a doe in her soul. All she wanted in the world was to be safe. To no longer see shadows gaining shape just out the corner of her eye.

          “Look at you in the firelight,” said the man. “It’s like you’re made of gold.”

          Her eyes widened impossibly farther open. Made of gold, she would never be safe. Just look at the man’s gold rings, his golden horse. Given the chance, he’d snip her golden toes for buttons. He’d shear her golden pubic hair for floss.

          “I’m not real,” she told him, desperate. “You’re dreaming.”

          “I am?” replied the grinning man. “Dreaming, really?”

          She pointed a glowing finger at her parents’ twin graves. “Behold your own closed eyes.”

          The man wanted to scoff or smirk, but he couldn’t. It was suddenly all too plain how very much indeed the two dark mounds resembled a pair of massive, closed eyes upon a massive, earthen face.

          “Open them,” she dared him. “Open them if you don’t believe me.”

#

          If later, in his cups, the man could’ve told you about that night, he wouldn’t remember crying out or rearing back or abandoning the woman to her flames. He would only remember what he could never admit: There’d been another light in the forest that night. A light that’d not come from the flames but peeking out from the feet of those graves, as if from beneath the crack of a door. Or from the seams of a pair of giant, slow-opening eyes.

#

          Smoke clogged the man’s path as he galloped away, but he couldn’t blink against the grit. He rode until dawn, until exhaustion, until the air was clear, and still, he couldn’t close his eyes. Couldn’t outrun the thought that, whenever he opened them next, it would be to the darkness of that garden soil.

          He stared into his campfire that night, pinching his eyelids apart when he could no longer lift them on their own, finally carving the lids off altogether when his arms failed him as well. Blood fell around his face, a pair of red hands cupping his cheeks. He gaped at the tiny crescents of lashes and flesh in his trembling palm, and saw only that woman, her graves. (Those eyes.)

          The morning found him, and he rode onward, into the next hour and the next, a gilded revenant with peeled-apple eyes.

          A loose boy gaped at him from the roadside; morbidly enthralled.

          For years afterward, the boy’s father beat him for his endless crying about the man with the eyes, the man with the too-open eyes.

          This boy grew, and with him, his visions of the man with the eyes, until it was all he could see. Until he couldn’t bear to see any more. The once-boy gouged out his once-crying eyes with a sharpened spoon and buried the soft bulbs each in their own grave. And even then. Even still.

#

          His wife found him dead by the river one night, a tadpole swimming circles in his empty left socket. She thought to bury him beside his eyes, but no. She hadn’t visited that place since first discovering him there, weeping blood into the night-blackened ground.

          She could’ve sworn, though she would never say—she’d seen the tiny graves blink.

#

          The widow died hardly a year later. (A nervous condition, her neighbors said. A sleepwalker and seeing things and ever since her husband.) An odd tree grew near the widow’s home—sprung up where her husband had spooned out his eyes—and they buried her beneath it. A rugged beauty, heavy with bloodred apples, each bright as a flame. Apples that reach out from their branches as a hand might reach to haul you onto a horse. Apples that are wet and lush as eyes. Take a bite, and there is the crispest pop. Take a bite, and there is the richest gush. Take a bite, and oh, how they open.