Poor Blonde

When Grandmother gouged out Blonde’s eyes, there was a short period when the pain was dreadful and coming in steady, horrible waves, and blood was everywhere. It was then that Blonde thought her world was done and that she was dying. 

Grandmother had taken her out to a field full of blue flowers. A high, bright wind full of flashing sunlight moved the long blades of summer grass, which touched above Blonde’s ankles. Grandmother spread out a blanket, and they knelt down like they had so many times before. Blonde knelt on the right side of the blanket, and Grandmother knelt on the left. Both in white dresses. Both in lavender headscarves. They talked about things, like boys and school, and how the baby lettuce in the backyard at home had been chewed all over by vicious bugs. 

Then Grandmother got foggy, which she sometimes did, and closed her eyes, and Blonde thought her grandmother had never looked so old. Her white hair, hanging long and loose under the headscarf, was brittle. Her eyes were lined all around, and her lips were so faded and shriveled that lipstick was simply drawn on like she’d used a stencil. Grandmother’s teeth, though, poking out as she opened her mouth to sigh, were still white and sharp, sharper-looking than Blonde’s had ever been. The sun glinted off of them as Grandmother turned to Blonde suddenly, raising her arms whip-fast. Grandmother dug her fingers into Blonde’s eyes before Blonde could even comprehend what was happening. 

The screaming and the ringing in her ears was dreadful and everywhere. Blonde felt the scream through every single part of her body. She felt it escaping from her ears like hot steam. She felt it throbbing in her throat. She felt it radiating out from her arms and legs in quick, dangerous waves. The scream rooted her to the ground, still kneeling, and she felt that the scream was pushing her deep into the earth, and that, if she died, they could never rip her from that spot. Blonde felt something wet on her face and a thought, like a glimmer of starlight on a storm-tossed lake, flickered through the scream: my nice white dress will be covered in blood. Her mouth was wide, so wide that she felt as if she could have swallowed the world whole if it were not so full of scream. 

Blonde reached out with her arms, desperately searching, but there was nothing in front of her. Grandmother was gone, long gone, or perhaps just out of reach, watching grimly amongst a thousand silver flowers, a tree bending over her and cooling her with shade from the blistering sun that drenched Blonde in heat. Or was that still the scream leaving her body?

Here’s where I die, Blonde thought, and, out of habit, thought that she should blink away the pain from her eyes, and then when they did not blink, she reached up with hot, hot hands and touched the holes, and everything screamed again in pain. She realized, with a jagged realization, that they were gone. Grandmother had truly taken her eyes.

My eyes! My eyes! Blonde thought and bent to the ground, feeling with her hands for perhaps her eyes, perhaps for Grandmother, perhaps for a knife with which to kill herself to make the pain and the screaming stop. Her fingers scrabbled across the picnic blanket, which stretched itself across Blonde’s mind almost as if it were blinding her, white and blue checked, so bright and so vibrant. Then, the softest crumbles of the blackest dirt, poked all through with the greenest grass, and there a minute flower, there a dried twig, and there a crusting roll spread all over with the yellowest of butters, and there a silky napkin in the deepest shade of the pinkest of pinks, lavish and full and tinged with a bloody red.

The images flashing through Blonde’s mind were familiar and terrible. The picnic. The fearsome edge of an aging tooth. Her own hand dappled in sunshine. Blonde screamed and screamed. She could hear an echo of her scream, again and again. But soon she realized it was the sound of frightened birds shrieking with her like formless ghosts an infinity away.

***

Jordan Hagedon is afraid of bullfrogs and their terrible, violent size. You can find Jordan's most recent work out or upcoming in Grande Dame Literary Journal, Gigantic Sequins, and Lit Mag News. Follow her on Twitter @jeimask.