Eye and Socket
By Dan Stein

          It wasn’t that I wanted to kill Roy. It wasn’t that I hated him. It certainly wasn’t that. In fact, Roy was a good friend of mine. Had been for many years, ever since high school. It wasn’t until after his accident that the revulsion hit me. That was the time of the eye and the socket.

          It was a freak accident. Roy had taken his son to try out the boy’s new B.B. gun. It was October, I believe, right after the boy, Mikey’s, birthday. Roy told me the details later, but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. By then, I was already beginning to feel strange about Roy. Strange, in a way I couldn’t really understand. Anyway, it can be summed up pretty simply; Mikey fired the B.B. gun, Roy was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The shot put out Roy’s right eye. I know it sounds like the warning every mother gives their kids, but it happened.

          After that Roy was in the hospital for awhile. I visited him a couple of times. It wasn’t bad then. With the bandages covering that cavernous hole, I felt nothing but pity for Roy. He was deathly pale lying in that bed, all drugged up for the pain. No, it wasn’t bad then, not yet.

          Things went pretty well for awhile after that. My life went on. So did Roy’s. He got out of the hospital and returned to his family. Yeah, it was alright for awhile.

          It wasn’t long until Roy broke down. I don’t know if it was the accident that brought it to a head or if other things in his life were just catalyzed by it. Roy turned to the bottle, turned to drugs, even turned to roughing up his wife and kids. At that time I really didn’t have any idea what was going on. As I said, my life went on too.

          Eventually, Roy showed up at my door late one night. He was drunk and he told me his wife had kicked him out. He had gotten a glass eye by then and he had it in that night. It was the first time I’d seen him wearing it. I’ll admit the eye was a bit creepy, but I could handle it. I told Roy he could stay at my house for awhile. I’m not married and I have no kids, so it was my decision alone to make. It was a decision that I realize now should never have been made.

          As Roy and I sat talking that night, he did something that would become the object of my disgust, my rage, for the months that Roy inhabited my home. He went into the kitchen and returned with a glass. He then sat back down, across the dining table from me, and filled the glass with some kind of watery solution. It didn’t occur to me at first what he was about to do. I don’t really know what I thought he was doing. I was rambling, starting to feel a little tipsy myself from the liquor Roy had brought with him. As I talked, Roy reached up and plucked his glass eye from its socket.

          I stopped talking abruptly. All I could do was stare into the empty socket that seemed to envelop Roy’s entire face. It was mostly scarred over, but still a viscous red in some areas. Scabs crusted over places not yet healed fully. A thin string of film ran from the socket to the withdrawing eye. The film stretched longer and longer until it finally snapped and coated the back of the eye, joining the dried blood that was already on it. He placed the eye into the glass and the water turned pinkish and oily. Roy closed his eyelid, which sunk into the socket slowly and sickeningly.

          I sobered up in my shock at the appalling action Roy had just performed in front of me. Revulsion hit me bad enough to churn my stomach. It was putrid, that act; the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, and Roy had done it like it was natural, something he shouldn’t keep to himself. A thing that must, by its hideous nature alone, be kept hidden from the sight of others. To me, it was as though Roy had just committed some illicit and depraved form of blasphemy against everything I viewed as normality or even reality itself. It was unnatural, profane; offensive somehow to the very core of my sanity.

          I left quickly, making some excuse, and went to my bedroom. I stopped only to explain Roy’s sleeping arrangements to him. All the while he looked at me with one bleary eye. It followed my movements, the socket being drawn with it and directed at me. The glass eye sat in its watery container, still bobbing, as though it wanted to see what the rest of Roy was looking at.

          When I had reached the safety of my bedroom, I tried to rationalize my fear and disgust. Perhaps I was still a little drunk; maybe that was why I had reacted so irrationally, so madly. Surely it was only an initial shock that would pass given time. A simple flight of sudden emotion that I had been unprepared for. The act had taken me off guard; that was all. In time I would grow accustomed to it. Surely.

          I went to bed, still unsure of the reason for my intense reaction, but calmed enough that I thought sleep was possible. I was right about finding sleep, but it was certainly not the kind I wanted. It was filled with hideous images of people tearing their eyes from their sockets. Some hurled the eyes to floor, crushing them like grapes. Others stuffed the eyes into their mouths and began slowly chewing, grinding the organs into a paste that dribbled down their chins. Still others simply held their eyes in their palms, seeming to offer them to me as obscene gifts. Only their sockets remained constant. Although freshly plucked, the sockets did not bleed. They did not expose muscle or bone. Instead they were covered with scar tissue that cracked and oozed. They were sockets just like Roy’s.

          It was the first time I had the dream, but far from the last. Even now, with Roy dead, I still have it. Over and over again, every night. It doesn’t change much; sometimes the faces are different, but the actions are always the same. Always the same tearing of the eyes. Always the same empty, emotionless stare of the dead sockets. Always the same.

          I awoke the next morning feeling more tired than when I’d went to sleep. Memories of the previous night’s event and following nightmares were still vivid, but in the morning’s light they were bearable. The whole thing seemed like an overreaction, nerves maybe. Yes, the socket was still repulsive, but I thought I could deal with it.

          I prepared to go to work. I showered, relieved myself, and combed my hair. The whole time I laughed quietly at my unfounded fears. I dressed and went into the living room, intending to cross it to the kitchen and have a quick breakfast.

          I didn’t make it to the kitchen. I stopped dead as I viewed Roy asleep on my couch. He was laying face up, socket toward me with the eyelids falling strangely open. His glass eye stared from its liquid cage as if marking me. The previous night’s feelings sped over me with the momentum of lunacy. The eye and its socket stared at me in silent reminder that they weren’t going anywhere. I stood frozen for nearly an hour watching Roy sleep, hypnotized by the oozing chasm of his face. I might have remained that way longer if something hadn’t startled me out of my fixation.

          A sudden gust of wind came, upsetting the liquid in the eye’s container. It caused the eye inside to start bobbing again. I didn’t feel any wind, but there must have been some. There was no other explanation for the eye’s sudden movement. That was what I thought then, at the beginning.

          Roused from my fugue and startled pretty badly, I nearly ran from the house. Shaken, I got into my car and drove to work. Visions of the socket and the eye haunted me even there. I was jumpy that first day, and many of my co-workers questioned if I was feeling alright. I assured them I was fine. I certainly couldn’t tell them the source of my fright, my revulsion at the socket. They would think I was insane.

          It was later as I looked into the bathroom mirror that I noticed how pale and drawn I looked. Had it really been enough of a fright to cause that? I tried to convince myself that it hadn’t. I went through the same pattern of thought that I had that morning. This time I couldn’t fool myself into believing Roy’s eye was acceptable. Still, I thought, when I get home he should have the eye back in. Yes, he should and that would be okay.

          Thankfully, when I arrived home I found Roy had replaced the eye. He confided in me that his boss had fired him that morning and said he’d spent the rest of the day looking for a new job. He was again depressed and again we drank and talked into the night. I felt only slightly uneasy then. With the glass eye firmly in its ruined hole I could relax a little. Still, thoughts of a repeated viewing of its removal tortured me throughout the conversation. I decided that I would take my leave before he did that again.

          Around ten-thirty the eye moved. This time I couldn’t explain it away with a breeze. Roy’s head was facing away from me when the eye turned suddenly in its socket to look directly at me. It stayed there fixing me with its stare. I felt as though it was looking into my very soul. Then, it dropped out of the socket and rolled across the table, trailing ichor. It stopped right in front of me, its fake iris and pupil directed up at my shocked face. I let out a small yelp of mixed surprise, fear, and disgust. Roy simply laughed and retrieved the eye. He replaced it in the socket with a nauseating sucking sound.

          I excused myself shortly after that. I went to bed and dreamed my horribly familiar dream. The next morning I found Roy asleep on the couch again. Just as before his eyelids were drawn strangely open over the emptiness in his face. That time I got out of the house before I could be mesmerized again. Another frantic, dread filled day of work followed. Mercifully, that night the eye and the socket were still. I was not that fortunate many of the nights that followed.

          For four months Roy, his socket, and his glass eye stayed. Events passed in both our lives, but none of them were of much importance. Not to me, at least. The only happenings that I remember well involved the eye and the socket.

          One morning, as Roy lay sleeping, the glass holding the eye tipped itself over and spilled. The eye rolled to my feet as if daring me to pick it up and return it to the glass. I didn’t.

          Another time I was woken up early in the morning. I saw Roy standing in my doorway. He was snoring and at first I thought he must have been sleepwalking. I turned on the small lamp I keep next to my bed and found Roy was definitely asleep. The socket, on the other hand, was not. It gazed sightlessly into my room, searching for me. I froze, wanting to scream at Roy to wake up, but my voice was gone. I could do nothing but lie in terror as it stared at me. One hand was behind Roy’s back and I watched it move around to the front. The hand held the glass eye in its container. Socket and eye surveyed me. After several minutes of mind-erasing fear it simply turned and left.

          Other things happened. They slowly chipped away at my sanity. I began to reach an inevitable conclusion from all these things. I had to get rid of the eye and the socket for my own sake. There was malice in those things. How or why I didn’t know. Truthfully, I didn’t even care then. Freeing myself from their torment was all that really mattered to me. In my addled state the solution of kicking Roy out never occurred to me. No, the only solution I could see was destroying the source itself, Roy.

          Still, it took several weeks before terror finally gave me enough courage to end Roy’s life. Finally, I decided to slit his throat while he slept. After another of our blurred nights of drinking and talking, I sat in my bedroom, waiting for an indication that Roy was asleep. Soon, alcoholic snoring began. I drew my pocket knife and crept into the living room.

          No longer needing the sight of Roy’s ruined face to fuel my rage, I tip-toed closer and closer to the couch. Knife and mind at the ready, I did not even see that the glass eye had somehow left its liquid prison and placed itself in my path. I stepped on it with a loud crunch. Roy awakened at the noise and saw the knife in my hand. Even in his drunken state he must have understood what I intended because he screamed for help and raised his hands defensively. I jumped on him before he could get up off the couch. I stabbed downward, but his hand caught my arm and stopped it. His other hand shot up and he dug his fingers into my face. Sudden, dark pain filled one side of my face, but in my madness it didn’t matter. All that mattered then was to finish it; to destroy the socket that was even then directed at me.

          I grabbed the knife with my free hand and stabbed it deep into Roy’s neck. He coughed and bled and after a few minutes was still. The eyelid closed over the socket; it was finally gone. Exhaustion and pain overtook me then and for the first time I wondered what Roy had done to my face. I reached up to feel the damage even as I looked around the room distractedly. I saw a bloody lump on the ground not a foot from the couch. I felt the raw open wound on my face as I wondered why the glass eye was so bloody and how it could still be whole when I had just stepped on it. After another moment I realized it wasn’t Roy’s glass eye at all. It was mine. Roy had put out my eye in our struggle.

          Not knowing what else to do, I called nine-one-one and told them that Roy had attacked and injured me. I told them I had been forced to kill him in self-defense. The emergency crew arrived. They saw my injury and recognized Roy’s body. I began to understand from their reactions that I was going to get away with what I did; they believed my story completely. Later, I learned that Roy had a history with the police, having been arrested several times for violent, drunken behavior. That only contributed to my story, so they didn’t investigate too deeply into it. I had gotten away with it.

          Honestly, not much of that interested me. I hadn’t really cared about what was going to happen after I rid myself of the socket and the eye. My real concern was for my own injured eye. The doctors couldn’t save it and I was fitted for a glass eye of my own. One that would fit into my own scabbed, oozing, gaping socket. The irony didn’t escape me. I’d gotten away scot free from the police, but what about the eye? Would my own glass eye bring me more terror, a new penance?

          Even now as I lie in this hospital bed my glass eye is sitting in a container on the desk next to me. I won’t be able to put it in for awhile, but the nurse deposited it here several days ago so I could get used to the sight of it. Little does she know that the sight of it is the only thing I will never get used to. I haven’t slept since she brought it; I can’t. I have to watch it to make sure it isn’t like Roy’s eye. I have to keep watching it. Keep watching it.

          Slowly, the eye turns in its container and fixes me with its angry stare.