A Black Eye. A Drowned Eye.
It begins with a sore throat. Trouble swallowing. An abscess.
Then an enormous bloodshot eye growing out of the abscess and overtaking the rest of her.
She is very peculiar!
Her husband is furious that he can’t understand what she is looking for.
Though her pupil widens like a mouth, she can’t scream.
She rolls into the sea.
At the bottom of the sea she meets a fish.
“What are you looking at?” the fish says.
She is looking at the hook protruding from the fish’s throat.
“This isn’t what it feels like,” the fish says.
But it is. She is caught in a fish net. She is flailing on the deck of a fishing boat. She is set raw on a dinner plate, looking up at the cyclops.
“It says here you are very peculiar,” the cyclops says, holding this story in front of her.
She begins at It begins…
Everything is exactly how it happened except for the fish? Where is the fish?
The cyclops drinks a glass of water.
At the bottom of the glass is an enormous eye, badly swollen and all sorts of blue.
A black eye. A drowned eye.
She would like to knock on the glass at the eye.
She is overwhelmed by heartsick for her vanished hands.
…wanting out like a fish inside a fish tank but with hands, knocking and clawing.
The cyclops has her pinned to the plate with the fork.
Somewhere there is the knife. The hook is still in too.
Michael Credico is the author of Heartland Calamitous (Autumn House Press, 2020). His fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hobart, New Ohio Review, NOÖ Journal, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and others. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Cover Photo by Bernard Spragg
NEW SOUTH 
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