evolving prose and mixing mediums
Eyelid
Category : Issue 5: Sins of the Father
Published by Caleb on 2008/11/30
Eyelid
(an excerpt from Stranger Will)
By Caleb Ross
Tiny William Lowson stretched his right eye open with masking tape. The strips frame his eyeball. He wants to see the world how his father sees it.
A teacher expresses concern to his father over the phone.
“Won’t you talk with me about it?”
“We are talking,” F. Lowson says.
“I mean in person.”
“No.”
F. Lowson lays the phone on the counter and turns to Tiny William, his own gaze limping in a gesture of unwanted confrontation. “That was Mrs. Blank,” he exhales. “Empty your pockets.”
Tiny William guts his jeans, skins them down to the lint. His father surveys the emptied contents, warns the boy of lying to his father, and demands that he empty his mouth as well. Tiny William opens and offers upon his tongue a tiny ball of salivated beige tape.
“You know not to keep things from me. I was punished for hiding things, once,” he points to his own right eye, shorn of its eyelid.
Tiny William has two eyelids; one more than his father.
F. Lowson is a small man, much smaller than would be necessary to detain an escaping convict, much less keep order amongst a group of them, but he speaks of his position as a prison security guard with great conviction. Though he’d come home each night, tired and weary, his right eye dried to dusty rubber, he managed nightly lessons for his boy.
“Hell, boy,” rubbing the dust from his naked eye, filling the socket with drops of liquid from a tiny bottle. “Saw a guy stabbed with his own toothbrush today. Right through his throat,” and Tiny William would listen, taking it all in. “Fine by me. That fucker was nothing, anyway.”
William swallowed his father’s stories. The eyelid, his father says, was punishment, ripped from his face when he was young, “about your age,” he’d say year after year after year. But to be honest, he’s nearly blind in that exposed eye. And to be more honest, he was born with the defect. “If anything,” William’s mother told him, “it was punishment, just a sort of an inborn charge against him because God knew he’d be bad.”
Prison paid for their house. If it weren’t for criminals, the Lowsons would brush their teeth with rigor mortis squirrel legs and gargle in soup kitchen bathrooms. Tiny William understood the nobility of his father’s occupation, which is why he wanted so badly to mimic it. After the call from his teacher, Tiny William falls to his bed, pulls a hidden roll of tape from under his pillow, and presses fresh strips to his face. His right eye stretched open like his dad. “Shut the fuck up, worthless childfucker,” he says to himself, his bedroom window posed as steel bars securing an outdoor prison cell.
With the tape off, he’s one of those childfuckers, those murderers, those thieves. “I’ll shut the fuck up when I want to shut the fuck up,” he tells his reflection in the glass.
These arguments end always in Tiny William adopting the criminal persona with intentions of crafting viscous shanks from aborted accumulatea. He filled the crevasses of his room with these items, pinning them under dirty clothes and blankets.
When his father gave haircuts, Tiny William would rescue each cluster from the trash. He kept all of his hair in the corner nearest his bed.
William would cut his toenails and fingernails every other day just to have them. That sting of a shorn nail sliced too close to the skin; William lived with that pain everyday. The moment it stopped, he’d cut again. These he kept at the furthest corner of his room, placing them low on the hierarchy because of their being easily attainable.
Under his pillow he kept outside collections; stuff unavailable from his father’s house. Miniature shampoo and lotion bottles, sample bars of soap, all the building blocks of improvised prison weapons. Toys, really. Just a boy’s imagination left to worship his father.
Tiny William would spend hours counting, organizing, displaying, melding, tying, knotting, balling, taping, cutting. His mind followed a strict pattern: listen for Dad, make a weapon, listen for Dad, hide a weapon, listen for Dad…
When it ended, Tiny William left his searched room with a bruise and open cuts he had been talked into believing he deserved.
Tiny William stopped asking for Christmas gifts. He just waited and accepted anything as the way it was supposed to be.
The night of the bedroom search F. Lowson calls Tiny William out into the back yard. He tells him to bring a lighter from the dining room table. Tiny William brings cigarettes too, hoping the sentiment might count for something. From the porch his father is only a silhouette pressed against a falling sun, setting but blazing still, struggling to make itself known for final moments. When Tiny William gets close enough to his father, close enough to reach out to his hand, he notices the pile. It is a small mound, meaning nothing until stepping close enough to see blue and white mayonnaise wrappers. He sees hair, plastic bottles, paper wrappers, everything that was him.
“You couldn’t trust your father,” F. Lowson says, grabbing the lighter from Tiny William’s hand. He offers the cigarettes, but this father denies them. “Might want to back up a little.”
He gives the lighter its small flame and within two blinks the entire pile glows.
“Tomorrow,” he says, his face flashing to the sharp fire peaks growing in front of him, “tomorrow I’ll show you where all of this,” he points to the melting pile, “will take you.”
That which his father did for him was William’s, yes, he understood this. But above all it was his father’s gift. It was always his.
The next morning Tiny William wakes up with handcuffs dangling against his neck and a gun trigger dusting his left eyelash. The rest of F. Lowson’s uniform wrapped his angry body tight, the whole package being darker than Tiny William remembered it ever being before, all the way to a scuffed and dulled name badge reading F. Lowson.
“Get in the car,” he says. They ride to the prison in silence. No radio. No talking. Only the steady whistle of his father’s breath filling the space between them. They arrive. “Get out,” he says and steps down himself, dripping saline into his naked eye as he leads Tiny William to a set of enormous metal doors.
Everything smells like salt and metal inside the prison. They sink deep, past the free roaming personnel, past guards with guns and uniforms, through to the men trapped inside cells. These men are still. They move only their eyes, matching the sway of F. Lowson’s keys dangling from his belt alongside the gun and handcuffs; time kept by ticking eyes.
They sink deeper, past the airborne voices of dying inmates, unfamiliar words against which F. Lowson guards his son’s ears. The prisoners thin in size and number the deeper they fall into the prison. They pass rooms fronted by steel doors instead of bars. His father pushes deeper until even the echoes succumb to silence. They are as alone as F. Lowson wants them to be.
The father stops at the end of a long hallway. He points to the last of the steel doors. “Behind that door is the first man to keep things from his father.”
Tiny William sinks.
“Do you want to see him?”
Unwilling to allow choice, F. Lowson lifts his son anyway and pushes his eyes to the small sliding window at the top of the door.
The man lays dead. He lays curled as tight as a human skeleton would allow, pressed to the back wall. Tiny. Non-intrusive. He is a spider, dead with the reflex to reduce itself to as little a burden as possible.
Then, F. Lowson takes his gun from its holster. He slams the butt hard against the door. The sound brings alive the man inside. Tiny William always knew his father to have a magic trigger.
“He doesn’t move much anymore,” the father says. “Probably close to dead, this guy. The last thing he’ll see is one of those walls.”
The prison is a home of blind reality. And this truth only gains strength as they drip further down the hallway. F. Lowson pours into his son a little more fear with every doorway.
“Behind that door is the guy who invented lotion.”
“The man in there, they call him Shampoo,” he says.
Item by item F. Lowson disposes of what Tiny William had for so long cherished as a tribute to his father.
“That guy in there doesn’t like toothpicks. Says they get dirty and starting wrapping them up like you like,” he says. “Bad idea. Made the germs grow faster, actually. Like a greenhouse.”
Miles and years tend to nurture apathy. Big William waits in a motel room for his pregnant wife, back home, to pop, tossing a shampoo bottle between greasy hands. He wants to call her, to tell her where he is, but even he isn’t sure, really, where he is. She might still be sleeping, might be cradling his vacant bed sheet outline, might be eyes closed and still able to dream.
He wonders if she will tell their child the same thing he heard once from his mother: “Your father’s not terrible like genocide terrible. He’s terrible like kill just one guy terrible.”
(an excerpt from Stranger Will)
By Caleb Ross
Tiny William Lowson stretched his right eye open with masking tape. The strips frame his eyeball. He wants to see the world how his father sees it.
A teacher expresses concern to his father over the phone.
“Won’t you talk with me about it?”
“We are talking,” F. Lowson says.
“I mean in person.”
“No.”
F. Lowson lays the phone on the counter and turns to Tiny William, his own gaze limping in a gesture of unwanted confrontation. “That was Mrs. Blank,” he exhales. “Empty your pockets.”
Tiny William guts his jeans, skins them down to the lint. His father surveys the emptied contents, warns the boy of lying to his father, and demands that he empty his mouth as well. Tiny William opens and offers upon his tongue a tiny ball of salivated beige tape.
“You know not to keep things from me. I was punished for hiding things, once,” he points to his own right eye, shorn of its eyelid.
Tiny William has two eyelids; one more than his father.
F. Lowson is a small man, much smaller than would be necessary to detain an escaping convict, much less keep order amongst a group of them, but he speaks of his position as a prison security guard with great conviction. Though he’d come home each night, tired and weary, his right eye dried to dusty rubber, he managed nightly lessons for his boy.
“Hell, boy,” rubbing the dust from his naked eye, filling the socket with drops of liquid from a tiny bottle. “Saw a guy stabbed with his own toothbrush today. Right through his throat,” and Tiny William would listen, taking it all in. “Fine by me. That fucker was nothing, anyway.”
William swallowed his father’s stories. The eyelid, his father says, was punishment, ripped from his face when he was young, “about your age,” he’d say year after year after year. But to be honest, he’s nearly blind in that exposed eye. And to be more honest, he was born with the defect. “If anything,” William’s mother told him, “it was punishment, just a sort of an inborn charge against him because God knew he’d be bad.”
Prison paid for their house. If it weren’t for criminals, the Lowsons would brush their teeth with rigor mortis squirrel legs and gargle in soup kitchen bathrooms. Tiny William understood the nobility of his father’s occupation, which is why he wanted so badly to mimic it. After the call from his teacher, Tiny William falls to his bed, pulls a hidden roll of tape from under his pillow, and presses fresh strips to his face. His right eye stretched open like his dad. “Shut the fuck up, worthless childfucker,” he says to himself, his bedroom window posed as steel bars securing an outdoor prison cell.
With the tape off, he’s one of those childfuckers, those murderers, those thieves. “I’ll shut the fuck up when I want to shut the fuck up,” he tells his reflection in the glass.
These arguments end always in Tiny William adopting the criminal persona with intentions of crafting viscous shanks from aborted accumulatea. He filled the crevasses of his room with these items, pinning them under dirty clothes and blankets.
When his father gave haircuts, Tiny William would rescue each cluster from the trash. He kept all of his hair in the corner nearest his bed.
William would cut his toenails and fingernails every other day just to have them. That sting of a shorn nail sliced too close to the skin; William lived with that pain everyday. The moment it stopped, he’d cut again. These he kept at the furthest corner of his room, placing them low on the hierarchy because of their being easily attainable.
Under his pillow he kept outside collections; stuff unavailable from his father’s house. Miniature shampoo and lotion bottles, sample bars of soap, all the building blocks of improvised prison weapons. Toys, really. Just a boy’s imagination left to worship his father.
Tiny William would spend hours counting, organizing, displaying, melding, tying, knotting, balling, taping, cutting. His mind followed a strict pattern: listen for Dad, make a weapon, listen for Dad, hide a weapon, listen for Dad…
When it ended, Tiny William left his searched room with a bruise and open cuts he had been talked into believing he deserved.
Tiny William stopped asking for Christmas gifts. He just waited and accepted anything as the way it was supposed to be.
The night of the bedroom search F. Lowson calls Tiny William out into the back yard. He tells him to bring a lighter from the dining room table. Tiny William brings cigarettes too, hoping the sentiment might count for something. From the porch his father is only a silhouette pressed against a falling sun, setting but blazing still, struggling to make itself known for final moments. When Tiny William gets close enough to his father, close enough to reach out to his hand, he notices the pile. It is a small mound, meaning nothing until stepping close enough to see blue and white mayonnaise wrappers. He sees hair, plastic bottles, paper wrappers, everything that was him.
“You couldn’t trust your father,” F. Lowson says, grabbing the lighter from Tiny William’s hand. He offers the cigarettes, but this father denies them. “Might want to back up a little.”
He gives the lighter its small flame and within two blinks the entire pile glows.
“Tomorrow,” he says, his face flashing to the sharp fire peaks growing in front of him, “tomorrow I’ll show you where all of this,” he points to the melting pile, “will take you.”
That which his father did for him was William’s, yes, he understood this. But above all it was his father’s gift. It was always his.
The next morning Tiny William wakes up with handcuffs dangling against his neck and a gun trigger dusting his left eyelash. The rest of F. Lowson’s uniform wrapped his angry body tight, the whole package being darker than Tiny William remembered it ever being before, all the way to a scuffed and dulled name badge reading F. Lowson.
“Get in the car,” he says. They ride to the prison in silence. No radio. No talking. Only the steady whistle of his father’s breath filling the space between them. They arrive. “Get out,” he says and steps down himself, dripping saline into his naked eye as he leads Tiny William to a set of enormous metal doors.
Everything smells like salt and metal inside the prison. They sink deep, past the free roaming personnel, past guards with guns and uniforms, through to the men trapped inside cells. These men are still. They move only their eyes, matching the sway of F. Lowson’s keys dangling from his belt alongside the gun and handcuffs; time kept by ticking eyes.
They sink deeper, past the airborne voices of dying inmates, unfamiliar words against which F. Lowson guards his son’s ears. The prisoners thin in size and number the deeper they fall into the prison. They pass rooms fronted by steel doors instead of bars. His father pushes deeper until even the echoes succumb to silence. They are as alone as F. Lowson wants them to be.
The father stops at the end of a long hallway. He points to the last of the steel doors. “Behind that door is the first man to keep things from his father.”
Tiny William sinks.
“Do you want to see him?”
Unwilling to allow choice, F. Lowson lifts his son anyway and pushes his eyes to the small sliding window at the top of the door.
The man lays dead. He lays curled as tight as a human skeleton would allow, pressed to the back wall. Tiny. Non-intrusive. He is a spider, dead with the reflex to reduce itself to as little a burden as possible.
Then, F. Lowson takes his gun from its holster. He slams the butt hard against the door. The sound brings alive the man inside. Tiny William always knew his father to have a magic trigger.
“He doesn’t move much anymore,” the father says. “Probably close to dead, this guy. The last thing he’ll see is one of those walls.”
The prison is a home of blind reality. And this truth only gains strength as they drip further down the hallway. F. Lowson pours into his son a little more fear with every doorway.
“Behind that door is the guy who invented lotion.”
“The man in there, they call him Shampoo,” he says.
Item by item F. Lowson disposes of what Tiny William had for so long cherished as a tribute to his father.
“That guy in there doesn’t like toothpicks. Says they get dirty and starting wrapping them up like you like,” he says. “Bad idea. Made the germs grow faster, actually. Like a greenhouse.”
Miles and years tend to nurture apathy. Big William waits in a motel room for his pregnant wife, back home, to pop, tossing a shampoo bottle between greasy hands. He wants to call her, to tell her where he is, but even he isn’t sure, really, where he is. She might still be sleeping, might be cradling his vacant bed sheet outline, might be eyes closed and still able to dream.
He wonders if she will tell their child the same thing he heard once from his mother: “Your father’s not terrible like genocide terrible. He’s terrible like kill just one guy terrible.”
Copyright belongs to the author on the publication date unless otherwise noted.