Left Eye: An Obituary

Left Eye died peacefully by enucleation under sedation on June 5, 1975. Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the eyeball.

Born on September 11, 1965, Left Eye enjoyed an uneventful childhood in suburban New Jersey, until the fateful afternoon of March 22, 1975, when he was pierced by an errant javelin fashioned from a small tree branch, thrown with no malice by a boy in his neighborhood. By all rights dead on arrival at Holy Name Hospital, Left Eye remained on life support for months as teams of medical professionals searched in vain for a cure.

Left Eye is survived by identical twin Right Eye, who will bear the burden of handling all vision duties until succumbing to myopia and the need for corrective lenses by age twelve; Right Eye’s adopted twin, an acrylic shell that conforms to the shape of the empty eye socket, iris painted the same russet brown with an espresso ring (the host body will fight anyone who refers to this as a “glass eye”); a lifetime of ropy discharge, viscous as finger paint, pooling in the voided socket; a thin ridgeline of frozen mucous, crusting across the eyeball to announce the arrival of winter; the perpetual feeling that an alien life form inhabits the barren socket; fear of meeting new people;  fear of telling people; fear that everyone can tell; fear that everyone is staring at it; fear that it is staring at everyone, even when Right Eye is looking somewhere else; fear that you will pull it out to show everyone after a few too many beers; fear of never being able to forget that time you did pull it out to freak out everyone, after a few more than a few too many beers; fear of being the other; fear of never fitting in; fear that those last words would be true even if Left Eye had never died.

Jim Parisi is an unemployed editor who lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. Much of Jim’s free time is spent coaching Little League softball. His fiction has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, and The Good Life Review. 

A Song for Jim