by Z. Hunter Scribner
Gwendolyn had Agatha’s eyes, but had refused to look at them for close to a year. Antiope and Jenna received the valuable parts of the inheritance whereas Gwen got only the eyes, which were encased, like a matryoshka doll, first in an antique rolltop desk, then in a leather pouch, and finally within a semi-hardened block of resin like some long-extinct Jurassic botfly. She honestly hadn’t expected to get anything, but after that mysterious fungal infection took her mother’s sight the woman experienced a spiritual awakening and refashioned her entire life, selling off the stocks and abandoning creature comforts to raise chickens in a dilapidated cottage.
Gwen had never replied to the anxious, weepy emails Agatha had written during this period, full of embarrassingly earnest apologies and requests for reconciliation, when they were not full of quasi-religious ravings about how the mushrooms had gifted her a new kind of sight. Still, the epiphany seemed sincere, transforming her from the ruthless stockbroker who had refused to grieve the husband taken from her by a car crash into, essentially, a caricature of a hippie, festooned with turquoise necklaces and tie-dye shirts. Then again, after the infection metastasized and took her life her will had left the desk and eyes both to “her beloved son.”
When the FedEx truck delivered the desk, with the eyes already in their pouch locked beneath the tambour, Gwen fished them out. She examined them for an entire afternoon, intrigued by the strange fibrous roots trailing from the back of the eyeballs. Upon sending some photos to Antiope, who shared Gwen’s macabre, insatiable curiosity, she learned they were not in fact optic nerves but filaments of some kind, mycelial detritus.
The next day, her curiosity curdling into terror at the image of her mother as mushroom-stuffed revenant, Gwen locked the eyes back up. She began drinking to stave off the temptation to look, told herself she had it under control. Addiction ran in the family, but Gwen had thought, arrogantly, that given how radically different she was in other ways she simply must be different along every possible axis, that this was a piece of rotten inheritance she could avoid. Gin became a friend, the kind who encouraged you to spend your last dollar at the craps table. It told her she was allowed to be depressed—she had been orphaned by some stupid fucking fungus. And so what if the black-out-binges caused her vision to go spotty, or smear like a Monet? A small price to pay in exchange for dulling the hatchet-blade of grief buried in her back.
But, of course, it wasn’t the gin affecting her eyesight. It was glaucoma.
The doctors told Gwendolyn that had she come in sooner there might have been a chance of treatment; she had overlooked her symptoms, the pain indistinguishable from the perpetual hangover she had deliberately immersed herself in for six months, and now her eyes would have to go. She studiously ignored the implications of the upcoming procedure, left the books the nurse had given her languishing in the bathroom. She had failed high school Spanish, so how the hell was she supposed to learn braille?
After the surgery her sisters took turns caring for her, coming over to cook, clean, and shepherd Gwen’s faltering attempts to memorize the patterns of imperceptible bumps in the workbooks. In her less charitable moments, she almost thought they were glad she had been rendered an invalid, as now they had an excuse to dote on her like she was six again.
Most infuriating of all, neither of them could hear the ringing. Gwen thought she might be going insane, or else suffering from a malignant version of Daredevil’s bullshit superpowers, but eventually she tracked the sound to the leather pouch with her mother’s eyes. The lump of artificial amber wasn’t so frightening now that she couldn’t see it, and when held the ringing lessened in pitch, became an almost holy tone, like the baritone chime of a massive, distant bell.
Gwen began to spend most evenings clinging to the amber block for several hours at least, and worked like a madwoman until she had mastered braille well enough to work her new keyboard and the text-to-speech tool. Apparently some scientists thought mycelium was sentient even without a brain, without a nervous or limbic system. It had memory, for one thing, or something like it, an ability to retain information and alter its behavior. Agatha had been scientifically illiterate, but perhaps her ramblings were her only way to describe an entirely new sensory faculty, her vocabulary failing her? When Gwendolyn held the eyes, the ringing began to sound more and more like language. Though admittedly it was a foreign tongue, akin to the inscrutable intricacies of code, or the grammar governing the harmonies and dissonances of music.
She resisted the notion of testing her hypothesis—intellectually the idea was ludicrous, and the ringing was probably a hallucination of some kind, a psychosomatic manifestation of her own desperate anger over having lost her sight. Her willpower lasted two weeks.
When Antiope left for the night Gwen retrieved the eyes, smashing the amber apart. It was surprisingly easy, like tearing through a piece of wet clay. Palming the viscous orbs she lifted them to her face, pushing her eyelids apart and inserting them into her sockets. The filaments scraped against where her corneas once were, and then they moved, burrowing into her. She gasped, hearing a damp, inverted pop as the eyes settled into place.
At first there was nothing.
Then it struck her: a cacophony that rewrote the world in ecstatic clamor. The organism she had absorbed an infinitesimal fraction of was ancient beyond measure, indifferent to Gwendolyn, who was a mere ant. She screamed under the weight of it, a mountain of sound from a chorus of church towers the size of galaxies, the ringing of great and terrible bells, bells in the deep.
About the Author:
Z. Hunter Scribner is a PhD candidate in English literature and theory at the University of Denver, a writer of stories, and someone who happens to go by his middle name. Both his scholarship and his fiction interrogate the permeable borders between genres. His favorite apple is the Granny Smith, though he will defect if he ever discovers one that is greener and more delightfully sour.