Page 59 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

much like a child it freaks her out. “They told me not to wear it.” She braces herself for a brutal takedown by her brother, because if the roles were reversed, she wouldn’t be able to help herself.
Instead, he takes a long drag of the blunt. The tiny bushes shake with the breeze and suddenly Via sees her brother as an adult. A drug dealer, a miserable law student, but a grown man regardless. Huh.
“Via,” he starts, kicking some tiny rock with his foot. “Was it your eye? Did they say something about it?” She reaches for the weed. Isra obliges but jerks his hand back at the last second. “Are you crying?”
Via’s crying but not like, crying crying. There’s just a little well under her eyes. Just a tiny tear. “Can you pass it please? Jesus. Yeah. It came up.”
Suddenly, Via’s in fifty different places at once. She’s sitting on her shitty med school futon texting Isra about how she can’t get on dating apps because she has no pictures of herself. She’s in her undergradu- ate library, at one of those desks that has a built-in cubicle, facing the wood. Isra’s in the driver’s seat of the family Prius in a stupid poncho as Via sobs in the passenger seat, in the parking lot outside of the convention center where her high school had their senior prom.
Someone spit something in her eye. A cute girl said something off-color. A teacher tried to make a joke out of it, once, back in middle school. Walking into school for the first time after her eye became That Eye.
“It always does.”
“It always does.” Via echoes, sniffing. “Look at me.”
“No. Stupid.”
“Fucking do it.”
Isra stares her straight in the eyes, petulant. Both eyes. Like normal. Like he always has. “Everyone’s go- ing to be scared of you, okay? Because they’re scared of weird things. Fucking... scared of thunder. Scared of airplanes and fireworks and little baby spiders and those sharks with the eyes that are so far apart –”
“– hammerheads –”
“Yeah, hammerheads.”
“I don’t like those fuckers.”
“Me either.”
“You shouldn’t be scared of you, too.”
An awful-sounding sniff reverberates through Via’s sinuses. “Shut up.”
~
Thursday’s pre-dinner activity at Foy Retirement Cen- ter is Arts and Crafts, which Via enjoys because she’s allowed to scribble on her own sheet of paper. She’s kind of decent at drawing, she’s found out recently. Not enough to show anyone, but enough that she looks forward to Thursdays.
“Via,” says Dr. James Patel in a singsongy tone. He was a professor once, before he retired. Dementia rot-
ted out his brain, but the classics have stuck around somehow. “By way of!” That’s his greeting for her, each and every afternoon. Via smiles and takes the seat between him and Bridget, who has a thick accent that even months after starting this position, she still cannot place.
It’s technically her break, but she likes to spend her time here anyways. She doesn’t want the residents to only know her as the girl who gives them the shots that make them wish they were dead. Bridget hums a happy sound as Via scoots her chair in.
Bridget shifts the paper she has to reveal another paper, completed, under it. She slides the drawing over to Via wordlessly.
It’s an eye, massive, in the center of the page. Creamy, with a discomfiting black pupil in the center. Crimson veins, like lightning, shooting out from the center. Drooping corners, dark eyelashes, all framed perfectly by a monocle, with a little brass chain rolling over the side.
After all this time, Via still forgets that she’s wearing it.
Yannotta is a graduate of Chapel Hill, NC. She has work published or forthcoming in Revue Post, Yes Poetry, and Fiction International among others, and was an inaugural winner of the Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship. Additionally, she was a selected playwright for the Process Series in 2022. She is an active contributor to The INDY as a music writer, and founder of a local writers’ workshop.
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