Dark Dreams

He Came for My Eyes

He came for my eyes.

I remember the burning feeling as he dug at the sockets with long, red-tipped fingers, his pale hair a canvas on which his wild, wide-eyed face uneasily sat, sneering at me, concentrating so deeply that his teeth looked like they might crack under the pressure of his clenched jaw...

There were other kids there but he only wanted me. 

Maybe I'd seen something the others hadn't. 

Something I wasn't meant to see. 

It should be frightening, right? 

An old man desperately digging at your eyes in an attempt to free them from the sockets...

And it was. It was terrifying. 

But... his tools, they were absurd. You see, he tried to remove my eyes with a cork – yes, the type you might find at the top of a wine bottle. And before he did that, he'd gently brush at them with a rough, fan-shaped brush, as if that would jostle them loose somehow. Then he'd wedge the cork into the space between the bridge of my nose and my inner eye. He'd wedge it in and then press, press and flick with the cork, whilst clawing at my eye with his other hand. 

This happened every night for a while. I'd be on the playground with friends and he'd show up, cork and brush ready. One night I awoke from the fear and I saw part of him there in front of me – just his head, floating a few feet up from the floor, his face aligned with mine, eyes wide, red, and desperate.

Screaming didn't make him go away.