Kenny, You Fucked Me Up.

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Elio woke up feeling like he’d been beaten to a pulp. His left leg was numb from being pinned under the heavy blanket all night, while his lower back throbbed as if he’d been tossed around in a hamster wheel for hours. Sunlight barely seeped through the newspaper-covered window. He tried to open his eyes, but his right eye was a mess—his vision blurred by a thick, sticky liquid, his lower eyelid swollen and pulsing with an unnatural ache.

Instinctively, he reached up to rub it but recoiled when his fingers brushed against something soft and bulging near his eye socket. The skin felt stretched, hot, and inflamed, with dried pus cracking at the edges. A surge of nausea hit him as he scrambled out of bed, ignoring the icy air that bit into his skin. He rushed to the bathroom, tripping over scattered debris on the floor, and fumbled for the light switch. The bulb flickered uncertainly before finally casting its sickly yellow glow over the grimy tiles.

Elio gripped the edges of the sink and looked up. His reflection stared back—gaunt, unkempt, but still holding onto that sharp beauty: high cheekbones, a straight nose, and... a grotesquely swollen right eye. He leaned in closer. His upper and lower eyelids jutted out unnaturally, pushing against his thick eyelashes like they were about to burst. It looked as if a bee had stung him—or worse, French-kissed his eye and left it a pulpy mess.

Panicked, he pried his eyelids apart, ignoring the sharp sting. A glimpse of something fleshy nestled beneath the inflamed skin made his stomach turn. It was pink, ridged, and covered in a fine, moss-like redness. It almost looked like—

“A tongue, right?”

A garbled, childish voice rasped from his right eye.

Elio froze. His breath hitched. His fingers trembled, still holding his swollen eyelids apart.

“Jesus Christ.”

He blinked, but his eye blinked back—independently. The lids opened and closed like lips, smacking wetly.

“How’s it going, Elio?” the voice murmured from within his eye.

He jerked away from the mirror, hands still hovering uselessly in front of his face. His mind had short-circuited. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.

“What the fuck—”

Frantically, he scooped up cold water from the cracked blue bucket beside him and splashed it onto his face. The shock made him shudder.

“Goddamn it, stop! You’re freezing me to death!” The voice whined.

Elio gripped the sink again, his knuckles white. His entire body was humming with terror. “Who... what the hell are you?”

“Well,” the voice mused playfully, “Mom and Dad never got around to naming me, considering you swallowed me whole before I even had a chance to be born. All I had left was my mouth.”

Elio’s breath came in short, ragged gasps. “No. No, no, no. This is Kenny’s fault. This is the goddamn drugs.” He turned on his heel and stumbled out of the bathroom, barely registering the way his eye chuckled.

“Kenny, you son of a bitch.”

Just outside his shack, a tent wrapped in black plastic rustled in the wind. Elio stormed toward it and yanked the flap open. Inside, Kenny—a bearded, wild-eyed man—was in the middle of tying a rubber tube around his arm, a syringe poised in his other hand. He groaned in frustration.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Elio! Can you give me one goddamn minute? Respect my fucking privacy, man.”

Elio’s voice was hoarse with panic. “What the hell did you give me last night?”

Kenny rolled his eyes, barely glancing up. “Dude, I gave you two hits of LSD. That’s it. Now get the fuck out of my face.”

Elio shook his head violently. “Bullshit. My eye—my fucking eye—”

Kenny finally looked at him properly and flinched. “Christ, man, you look like you lost a bar fight with a beehive.”

Elio jabbed a shaking finger toward his own face. “It’s talking to me, Kenny.”

Kenny snorted. “You’re high as fuck.”

Elio opened his mouth to argue, but his right eye—his grotesque, swollen, sentient eye—spoke first.

“You’re a real piece of shit, Kenny.”

Kenny’s syringe clattered to the floor. His body went rigid as he stared, unblinking, at the puckering lips of Elio’s mutated eye.

“Holy mother of—”

His breath hitched, and for the first time in his miserable, drug-fueled life, Kenny truly considered going sober.

 

by Lamu Xiangqiu 11.09.2020