This is my entry into the short story contest. We had a day
to write a story nine hundred words or fewer that's based on the first
paragraph. (So, they wrote the first paragraph, I wrote the rest.)
Round Eye
Growing up on a fishing boat docked in this small northwest
coastal town brought stares from townspeople and jeers from classmates. She
desperately wanted to escape but, with competitors driving down charter prices,
she knew her dad would never be able to afford a replacement. As she sliced
open the belly of yet another Salmon, her eyes widened and she dropped her
knife...
She unrolled her sleeves and pressed them hard against her
eyes to staunch the blood pouring from her eyelids. The cuffed ends of her white
sleeves melted to red like snow under the urine stream of a kidney-trauma
victim.
It had seemed as if she were out of her body, watching
someone else doing the eyelid-cutting. That hadn’t happened to her since
childhood, when she’d dream she was a hair stylist and wake up with a beautiful
new coiffure, or a cattle rustler and wake up saddle sore with a handful of
feral cows milling about in her walk-in closet.
She hopped into the life raft and rowed herself to the
emergency dock of the closest hospital, some thousand meters downshore, where,
half-conscious, she was taken in.
Voices floated about her.
“…a bloody travesty.”
“…love to find the back-alley quack who left her in this
state.”
“…an indictment of our Orientalphobic culture in general”
“…admittedly, a textbook example of surgical excellence.”
It slowly became clear to Mina Kim, through the painful,
bloody haze, that the doctors and nurses, though intolerant of the surgery
itself, were in awe of its technical precision – the procedure had been
performed to perfection.
As she lay convalescing, her sight as obscured as a cheap
seat at a discussion on the history of Belorussian haiku, her mind wormed its
way around, over, and through the question of “Why?” Why was it this Salmon who
had pushed her over the edge? She hadn’t even gotten to Salome, that harlot who
beheaded John the Baptist. And still to be done were the Samuels – there lay
real terror – Beckett and Johnson and Davis, Jr. and Malone. She’d progressed
through the Salmans without incident, even Rushdie, whom, years earlier, in a
flight of Islamic fancy, she’d sworn to First Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah
Khomeini to kill if she ever saw in person. But, no, it had been Salmon,
desert-vagabond-turned-Palestinian-invader-cum-Israel-founding-father-cum-ancestor
of Jesus, who seems to have refused to comply with God’s strong request that
all conquering Israelis inbreed for at least 30 years by marrying the
Palestinian Rahab the harlot, who catalyzed the self-cutting.
Sure, she was sick of quality-checking the anatomical
authenticity of collectible figurines – who wouldn’t be? – but a lot of people
were sick of their jobs, and surely it was in only a minority that this
manifested itself through autoblepharoplasty.
She also hoped, with the hope of a small-town beauty who
wanted more than to marry the high school football hero, that this would set
her apart. In sharp (or, perhaps, smooth and curved) opposition to her peers,
she now possessed the indulgent, luxurious almond-eyed beauty of the foreigner.
Ming-Ji Gal over in Mats Mats may be able to catch a baton
in her teeth, thought Mina, but she has nothing that can compete with these
ovoid orbs precariously placed on delicate cheekbones that balanced on her
inverted sewing needle of a nose.
Yuki Fukimura up in Mukilteo might have the adorable,
circular face of a child-drawn cartoon character, like pie you want to kiss,
but her eyes were ever two knife-slits in the crust, sleek and intelligent and
beautiful, but just so same-same.
Mina had long thought her only way out was by winning the
Miss Raindrop Qualifiers. Surely the regional competition that lay after that
would be filled with talent scouts. Her piccolo skills were the best they’d
ever been, what with her solo in the senior recital nigh. She’d always been a
charmer when it came to public speaking – people couldn’t resist the hint of a
bawdy edge to her humor, especially when seasoned by the conspiratorial curve
of her upper lip.
When her lids had fully healed, just a week before the MRQ,
her friends, even her family, all agreed that she looked, at worst, different,
and, at best, much more eye-popping than she had.
The night of the event, her fingers flew over the holes of
the piccolo like indecisive bumblebees on amphetamines careening recklessly
from one flower to another in a serendipitously stumbled-upon conservatory
garden. The recuperation from the surgery had taken away her appetite, so her
buttocks were dangerously slender. And her question was, “Can you be sexy and
moral?”
She looked the judge in the eyes and asked, “What are you
hoping I’ll say?”
She heard murmurs of approval and laughter from the
audience. As she opened her eyes wide to expand upon her response, the stage
lights assaulted her newly defenseless retinas like the Japanese Pearl Harbor.
By the time her eyelids had covered the newly yawning chasm, her equilibrium
had been irretrievably lost. She felt something hard hit, in quick succession,
her elbow, shoulder, and head.
Right before she lost consciousness, she spied through
barely parted lids the face of Yuku Fukimura, smiling like a Pillsbury Dough
Girl. But the trauma was too much – as her new lids closed, she felt her chance
for glory in at the Tri-state Regionals in Portland slipping away like the last
bit of stage light.
