A man lives inside my mind. Every morning, he shoves his fingers out of my eye sockets, one at a time, and wedges open my lids. He sticks his head out in front of my pupils. Left eye then right eye then left again. He likes to pace back and forth. Stomping in circles around the back of my skull on occasion, to prove he can. I see him whenever I see myself, but I see the man more clearly when I’m with others, as I laugh with my friends at lunch or give them rides home after school. Always acting under the twitch of his glance.
Today, the man didn’t wake me up. I woke up first.
I opened my own eyes, startled at a world fully seen. The texture of my ceiling. A tiny spider scurrying up the wall. The corner of my mirror. Without the barrier of the man’s eyes and head and body, I gasped. It was so colorful. So bright. But then he woke up.
The next day, I didn’t wake up before the man.
But I managed it again after he had gone to sleep.
I lay in bed, eyes closed to keep him trapped in complete darkness. I lay in bed with no one watching.
I didn’t pose. I didn’t blink demurely at the ceiling, seducing only myself. And the skin I revealed, I wanted to reveal. The skin I touched, I touched alone.
I fell asleep satisfied.
I dreamt of Medusa and all her hissing tendrils. I wondered if she minded the snakes watching her, unable to look away, unable to detach from her skull. Did they whisper in her ear? Did they notice when a man was looking at their host, the moment before he turned to stone?
I woke up early in the morning.
The man was there. Pulling and pushing and twisting my eyelids until they opened. Sore and crusted. He paced more than usual, running muddy shoes over the folds of my grey matter, once clean and pink. Like the poster in the biology classroom. I had forgotten about pink, dismissed it as a girl when so much pink was offered to me. I hadn’t seen clearly even then. That night, I fell asleep to the rhythm of the man still pacing. We had just learned about how more men than women are colorblind. Faulty cones and recessive genes dulling half the world. Yet they still do most of the looking.
I almost did it again, but I was too tempted to open my eyes and view the plain, pebbled ceiling painted with the sunrise. Something clean and recognizable. But the man was jealous of even a peek. He took up my entire sightline that day, hanging half his body out of my eye or running between them to try to block every moment alone, every moment trying to see myself.
I asked my mother the next day—the man’s profile in my left eye, his foot stretched back to cover my right—what do I do about him.
“What man?” she asked.
I saw my father reflected in her right eye. He winked. I saw her boss wave behind her left. I saw other men crowded behind them, shoving each other for a glance. Despite their jostling, my mother did not blink. She kept her eyes wide for them.
I don’t know if she did it on purpose, but I tried not to look at the man inside my head. Be willfully ignorant of his shifting resemblance to the senior boys, my math teacher, men on the street. My friends never speak of their men, eyes downcast even when it’s just us. Hiding. All I know is that my man never stops looking at me. And he enjoys it when I pretend he isn’t there.
I can’t remember when he appeared.
That night, I dreamt of Medusa and her snakes again. They probably watch her back, I decided, hissed warnings. They occupied her head on the outside rather than the inside. Not so intrusive.
In the morning, I set a snake—a young garden snake—on the man inside my head.
He was afraid. Spent most of the day in my left eye, the right taken up by the snake. She wiggled and swam and swirled in my eye’s vitreous gel, but she did not block the light. Her underbelly was still pink with youth.
But the next morning, she was gone. It took a long time to spot her corpse in my periphery. The man held open my eyes all day long, not letting me see without his fingers in the way.
While the man slept that night, I stayed awake—eyes closed—and thought of him. Though differently than he assumed I did, differently than the stories I heard about boys’ expectations. How I might please them. Be timid and grateful that he would want to look at me at all.
Instead, I got angry. And it wasn’t until I had gotten so furious that the thought of him couldn’t stay fixed in my reeling mind that I could imagine the snakes. Larger than garden variety. Vivid green from the jungle. Light brown from the desert. Inky black from muddy water. Sharp fangs. Poison dripping. Muscles squeezing. Snakes enough to cover my bed, my house. Snakes enough to swallow the Earth and birth a million new worlds. I opened my eyes and let them in.
In the morning, there was nothing left of the man. My eyes were still closed, but I knew. My actions were my own. I was giddy and unmoored by the possibilities. But my anger was quelled. For now.
My snakes had excused themselves, slithered out from between my eyelashes and down, leaving hisses on my tongue as they went. Without shadows cast from inside, I could see pink light shining through my eyelids. Clear, warm color. I opened up to the sunrise and bathed in it alone.
Emma Brousseau earned her MA in English/Creative Writing at Texas Tech University, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Necessary Fiction, Hobart, and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. She previously studied experimental psychology, which informs the scientific and speculative aspects of her work. You can find her on Twitter @Emma_Brousseau or on her website.
Photo by mmarftrejo on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA