St. Lucy of El Paso
by Amy Barnes
These are not my real eyes. My mother stole them from the toy store, plucked from Barbies and Betsy Wetsy dolls, handfuls tucked in her wool coat pockets. Brown, green and blue glass marbles and plastic orbs, knocking around pinball machine style, click clack, all for me to choose from.
She shoplifted them because Father gives her only food money, but also so the meigas don’t come back and leave with more of me. I’m thankful they ignored my tongue. Mother was left with only teeth and gums, but got to keep her eyes. Buying food for my not-cursed siblings is more important than using precious coins to fill my ghoulish eye sockets.
I once hated the baby pink eyes I was born with, the ones she passed to me with snowy hair and palest skin, but they are a commodity-oddity. When they were gone, I grieved my sight.
“You had sunset eyes,” she reminisces.
I remember hating them, longing for ocean eyes or my brother’s dirt eyes. At home, her eyes mirrored mine, at least. At school, I was alone in a sea of blue, hazel and brown-eyed girls and boys.
“Let’s cut off Bunny’s lucky foot.”
My classmates’ nickname for me stung. I wasn’t scared of the cutting threat, but did feel like a caged Easter gift for their recess amusement. I had to stay out of the sun, doctor’s orders. I’m not sure how they found me in the shadows. Recess meant I had time to read about saints and martyrs like St. Lucy. She served up her eyeballs on a plate, a sacrifice to a God that apparently loved plated eyeballs. I imagined the lunch ladies had backroom eyeballs, served as mystery meat.
I didn’t return to school once my eyes were gone. When the noon church bells ring, Mama feeds me painted skulls I can see only with my mouth, melting until just sugar crystals linger, a spell. We both still have snowy owl ears to warn us when the women approach again, cackling for new prizes to steal. She braids our young-white hairs together, hiding our remaining senses, keeping us shadow-safe.
I pray to St. Lucy, the cursed woman I was named for. I imagine her still-palest-pink eyes, a match to mine before Father traded for the going-price: two goats, a formidable bowler hat and a bag of Pink Lady apples.
Amy Barnes has words at a variety of sites including The New Southern Fugitives, FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, X-R-A-Y, Anti-Heroin Chic, Museum of Americana, Penny Fiction, Elephants Never, Re-side, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Lunate Fiction, Rejection Lit, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, National Flash Flood Day and others. Her work has been long-listed at Reflex Press, Bath Flash Fiction, Retreat West and TSS Publishing. She volunteers at Fractured Lit, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, NFFD and Narratively. Her flash collection will be published in May, 2021 by ELJ Editions, Ltd.
