true seeing
14 July 2011 at 10:45 pm (Daily Stories)
When I was young, my mother used to tuck my hair behind my ear and tell me fairy tales. She always ended with, “There is magic in the world. You just have to open your eyes wide enough to see it.”
She disappeared on my seventh birthday. They never found her body.
As I grew up, her words stayed with me. I taught myself to watch, and the more I opened my eyes to drink in other people’s faces, the more I began to see: they were not human faces. Beetle eyes. Purple smiles. Cheekbones sharp as knives. The mask of human flesh stretched thin over their real faces, and I widened my eyes to see.
One day, a woman with spider mandibles stopped me in the street and asked, “What am I?”
I told her, “You’re an insect.”
Word of me spread. Soon I was being hailed down by everyone, perfect strangers, acquaintances, and asked the same question each time: “What am I?”
I always answered. “You’re a tiger. You’re a banshee. You’re a cyclops.”
In a whole world where no one knew what they were, I was the only one who could tell them. Some wept when they learned the truth. Others laughed. One girl, a jewel-haired harpy, pulled a gun out of her purse and shot herself in the head. Her blood splattered me blue-green. Afterwards, I curled up on my bed and cried for days.
When I came out again, the same question besieged me on all sides. “What am I?”
I told them, “You’re human. What else would you be?”
A look I had never seen before crossed their faces: happiness. And then, the more I looked, the more their bizzare faces dissolved, the more solid their skin grew, and before I knew it, they were beaming at me with two eyes and one nose and one mouth each, and they had never looked happier.
So. Ask anyone, and you’ll get the same answer.
It’s true enough if you want.
