He plucked out one eye to see the horror in the face of his other eye. Carlos del Puente Stories

 The day Uncle Mortimer plucked out his left eye with a melon baller, the family was gathered around a dining table shaped like a dissected clock, its gears fossilized into the mahogany. The table, like the family, was a relic of contradictions: half Baroque grandeur, half junkyard scrap. Mortimer’s remaining eye —a jaundiced orb floating in a soup of broken capillaries— rolled toward his twin sister, Aunt Calliope, who was busy knitting a scarf from her own hair. Meanwhile, the plucked eye rested on a saucer, staring fixedly at a portrait of Grandfather Eustace, a man who had spontaneously combusted during a debate about the moral weight of spoons. Mortimer’s act was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a decades-long feud with his reflection. You see, the Voss family suffered from a peculiar affliction: their mirrors reflected not their faces, but the collective regrets of their ancestors. Recently, Mortimer’s reflection had begun reciting limericks about the Spanish Inquisition, something he found distasteful. So he did what any reasonable man would do: he gouged out the offending eye, seeing it as blatantly contradictory to the other, reasoning that if he could not silence the past, he might at least force it to witness the present. His brother, Inspector Ignatius Voss of the Surreal Crimes Division, arrived wearing a trench coat lined with moth wings and a hat that wept ink from centuries-old decay. Ignatius was a man who interrogated shadows with endless inquisitions worthy of any state agency of torture in service of good and order, drafting lengthy reports in iambic pentameter in the manifest style of the famous Don Quixote by the renowned friend of humanity, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, though my memory falters due to thirty centuries having passed like a fierce stampede of mad horses over my frail recollection. He examined the eye on the saucer, which now sprouted tiny cilia and hummed a Gregorian chant. A textbook case of ocular insurrection,  he muttered, adjusting his monocle, which contained a live goldfish. The eye, sensing accusation, blinked once and recited a line from  Don Quixote  in perfect ancient Castilian. The family convened in the Parlor of Unanswerable Questions, a room wallpapered with love letters, styled after those of the writer Gabriel García Márquez, never sent and smelling of burnt thyme. Mother Seraphina, a woman composed of equal parts stained glass and vapor, argued that Mortimer’s eye should be pickled in regret and displayed beside Grandmother Ophelia’s jar of preserved sighs. Father Aloysius, a retired cartographer who now mapped the contours of his own paranoia, insisted the eye be mailed to the Vatican with a note reading  See attached heresy . The twins, Castor and Pollux —conjoined at the index finger and perpetually at war over whether time was a rhombus or a trapezoid— proposed using the eye as a marble in their ongoing game of existential skittles. Only Cousin Lenore,  a girl of thirteen who communicated exclusively through origami cicadas, understood the gravity of the situation. She folded a crane from a page of  Paradise Lost  and launched it toward the chandelier, where it burst into flames, spelling out in smoke:  The eye sees what the mind denies. Mortimer, now sporting a patch stitched from a rejected opera libretto, leaned back in his chair. You misunderstand,  he said, his voice a wheeze of accordion bellows.  I didn’t remove the eye to silence it. I removed it to make it watch.  He gestured to the saucer, where the eye had grown legs and was attempting to crawl toward the salt cellar.  Now it sees the horror it refused to acknowledge. The horror of being perceived. The horror, as it turned out, was this: The Voss family’s ancestral home stood atop a wrinkle in time, a place where history bled into the present like ink into linen. Grandmother Ophelia had spent her life stitching the fraying edges of reality with thread spun from her own dreams, but Mortimer’s act had torn the fabric anew. Now, the walls oozed memories. The grandfather clock gave birth to minuets. The pantry stockpiled revolutions. Ignatius, ever the pragmatist, drew his service revolver —a weapon that fired sonnets— and aimed it at the eye.  In the name of the Absurd and the Beautiful, I charge you with treason against the narrative!  The eye, now the size of a grapefruit and sporting a handlebar mustache, hissed and recited Article 3 of the Surrealist Manifesto. A duel ensued. Meanwhile, in the garden, the topiary hedge —trimmed into the shape of Sigmund Freud— whispered to the hydrangeas about Mortimer’s childhood trauma. The roses, which bloomed in hexagons, argued that trauma was merely a metaphor in search of a wound.    By nightfall, the eye had escaped through a keyhole, leaving behind a trail of liquid paradox that crystallized into miniature replicas of the Tower of Babel. Ignatius declared a state of metaphysical emergency. Seraphina began composing a symphony for theremin and weeping viola. Castor and Pollux dissolved into a fistfight over whether the plural of  apocalypse  was  apocalypses  or  apocalypi. And Mortimer? He smiled, his remaining eye reflecting the fractured light of the chandelier.  At last,  he sighed,  I see what I could not bear to see.

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