CW: eye horror

He’s got a pickled eyeball on his bedside table. Says it keeps an eye on things. It’s floating, as any good pickled object is, but there’s a toothpick holding it in place, so that he can turn the eye as needed. If he has guests over, he wears a thick head scarf to cover the empty socket on his forehead that no one can verify is actually there.

Many ask whose eye it is, but his answer is always the same, “It is mine.” 

They ask how he lost it, or who took it from him, or why he kept it, or where it fit on his face—all variants of the same general idea. 

“I didn’t lose it,” he’d say, or “No one took it from me,” or “I do not keep it.” Then he’d look to the eye and it would look to him. “It is still right here,” he’d say, or “It keeps watch over me.”

No one intends to believe him, but he speaks with such conviction that they have little choice but to believe that the undying eye on his bedside table, just next to his half-moon readers and his physicians handbook, is his. That it keeps him aware as to the comings and goings of the night. For while the human mind needs to submerge itself in sleep, this lidless, bodiless eye has no other master. And being freed of the human condition, being freed of fatigue and bathed in the formaldehyde that kept it from reddening or drying out, it served what many saw as the most noble of purposes—the safekeeping of that which it owed its existence. 

There were many times, however, when his bedroom had been otherwise unoccupied and a voyeur let themself into the room. Every time, they had barely seen the eye when the keeper came back casting them back out into the street.

Some thought everyone had the relationship flipped on its head. The man served the eye, and the eye removed itself on its own accord, wishing to rise above the mortal limitations of one body. One day, when the man finally died and lay in the grave, the eye would be passed on to another, blessing him with third vision. 

Of course, the only way to test that theory was to slay the man or wait for him to die of natural causes. Homicidal tendencies were more prevalent than patience, so whispers circulated, people wishing to have the man killed solely to see what would become of the eye—what it would see, if anything. Perhaps it would shrivel like a drying grape and die with the man. Others wished to force the eye to see for them, rather than its current keeper. They grew envious of this exclusive power that only he had. But no one could pull the trigger on the man for fear that they’d be seen.