Prose by Sammy Ismet Merabet

Edited by Velondra Melendez & Eric Nguyen

Cecil’s eyes have already been gouged out by the time Zahra checks in on them. She doesn’t need to call out to them; she can already see that all-too-familiar red flowing under the gap of the fitting room door. She wades through the stream to get close enough to knock. Zahra doesn’t need to say anything. She does anyways.

“Hey, kid,” she says. “You good?” 

Cecil scoffs, and Zahra can hear them stomp in and out of the water, the plips and plops and pitterpitterpitters of frustration. 

“Yeah, figured.” 

They stand on opposing sides of the door for a few minutes. Zahra absentmindedly fiddles with the clothes in her hands—a black blouse and a pair of glasses. She cleans the lenses with the black fabric. The red current continues past Zahra’s feet, its rivers and lakes branching out throughout the rest of the store. Other customers step over it, push their carts through it and drag it in trails as they look through the color-coded sales, further complicating the store’s hydrological map.

 A worker, assuming Zahra is looking for a fitting room, directs her to one. She declines and, after waiting for the worker to walk out of earshot, takes this as her cue to speak up again. 

“Can I come in?”

She hears cloth and fabric shuffling back onto a body. Then, wordlessly, Cecil opens the door for their sister. 

Twin waterfalls stream from the cavernous sockets in Cecil’s skull, where two poorly-made replacements for their eyes have already been shoved into place. They’re blue, misshapen—poorly fitted into the entrances of the caverns they sit in. As always, Cecil thought they’d be able to stop the flow with a new set of eyes; as always, the water chose to just go around them, squeezing through the cracks where the incompatibility of these new eyes were made clear; as always, the pressure had built up especially high in these areas and forced the water to spill so unbearably fast in such an unflattering shape.

They’re wearing the pants Zahra picked out for them. They’re comfortable, high-waisted, and the extra leg length gives a classy, defined look that Cecil—even mid-breakdown—manages to wear well. They’re made of a super comfortable material, too. Plus, they have pockets. Deep pockets. On a good day, the two of them would be raving for hours over how lucky they were to have found such nice pants. 

“They look great on you,” Zahra says. She’s being honest, and Cecil knows that. Honesty doesn’t mean much right now, and Zahra knows that. 

“I thought shopping was supposed to be fun.” As they grumble, Cecil crosses their arms. Zahra can see them dig their nails—untrimmed, jagged–-into the crevices of their elbows.

“I know.” She sits down on the fitting room bench. “I’m sorry.”

“I hate this,” Cecil whispers, voice barely audible. “I hate me.”

Zahra has used the same set of eyes that Cecil’s using. They aren’t her go-to, but they find their way under her lids from time to time. They find their ways under everyone’s lids. Blue eyes, sickly blue, that decide when her eyebrows get too bushy, or her arms too hairy, or her nose too large, or her hair not straight enough. Blue eyes that she would never dare look at someone else with; blue eyes that she’d readily knock out of a head that was staring at somebody else. Blue eyes that are to only look back at her.

Cecil is looking at themself with those eyes now.

A large mirror hangs on the wall in front of them and demands their attention. Zahra rejects it. She keeps her eyes focused on Cecil for as long as she can. When she gets overwhelmed, she looks down at the bench, or the back of her phone case, or the clothes that previous customers left that were now floating in Cecil’s water—she looks at anything but the glass. It’s asking her to gaze at it and in such a convincing way. The mirror, when broken, would make such perfectly jagged edges, spread out so wonderfully across the room. She’d grip onto the parts that hurt the most and get lost in it, or plant it through her wrist and look at it like a watch. But she can’t and she won’t. Not with Cecil like this. 

The entire floor of the siblings’ cramped cage has been stained red. For a moment, Zahra imagines a future where the two of them say nothing else. They’d allow the store to flood with Cecil’s blood and eventually Zahra’s, too. They’d drown in themselves. No more thrift stores. No more family. No more sight and no more air—just blue filling up eye sockets and red filling up lungs.

Zahra hates this next part.

She hates it when she has to do it with friends, and she hates it when she has to do it with strangers in the club bathroom, and she hates it when she has to do it to her girlfriend, and she hates it when she has to do it with herself, and God, she fucking detests having to do it with Cecil.  They need her to do it so often. And she’ll always do it, and she’ll never stop doing it. For anyone. But she resents it. And she resents Cecil, too, sometimes, when this happens. It’s hard to hate a kid crying in a thrift shop changing room. 

If she does it quickly enough, Cecil won’t be able to stop her. She goes for a feint—pretends to be moving strands of hair out of Cecil’s eyes—before grabbing the top and bottom lid of their left eyelid, the way she had seen their dad do when they were younger.

Cecil would stay up all night playing on a DS they had hidden beneath their pillow, then whine when their eyes complained, and whine even harder when their dad tried to give them eye drops. He’d have to keep their eyes open, or else Cecil’s eyes would shut tight the second they felt that anything was about to touch them. Zahra hated hearing Cecil cry. The poor thing, Pokémon-ing until their peepers couldn’t handle it anymore. A commonplace tragedy. She felt even worse for their dad. Having to hold your kid down by the eye so that you can give them the drops they asked for, as they sob and scream and kick. Zahra would look at him, keeping his grip firm enough to hold Cecil down but just loving enough to not hurt them, and she would think to herself: There’s no way I could ever have a kid. With her luck, she’d pull the kid’s eye out by accident.

Now, with her left hand exerting her firmest, most loving grip on Cecil’s eye, she takes her right pointer finger and digs it into the socket. Cecil’s screaming that horrible scream now, but Zahra’s learned to tune them out. With one pointer finger in, it’s easier to put the left pointer finger in. Now, it’s just like popping a zit. Reach around the eyeball, all the way into the back of the socket, and push your fingers in together, like they’re trying to kiss. Closer and closer, as Cecil’s screams get louder, until:

Plop.

One of Cecil’s faux eyeballs pops out. It squirms around on the floor, and makes a Pa-loosh as it falls into the liquid on the floor. The eye tries to swim through the red and get back to Cecil, but Zahra squashes it under her heel. Zahra had bought those heels at this specific store, actually. In fact, she had bought her first heels here too, as well as her first dress, and her first skirt, and her first purse. And that’s why she had brought Cecil—to let them make some firsts, too.

She repeats the process with the right eye. This time, Cecil knows what’s happening, and the pretending-to-brush-away-hair loses its meaning. Instead, she gives them pats on the cheek. Pat. Pat. Patpat. Pat.  This calms down Cecil’s screaming, and they resign their face to the ordeal. So, Zahra does it again. 

Plop.

The other eyeball falls out. Pa-loosh. Its blue iris makes it an easy target around the red floor, and Zahra smushes it—like how she had seen their mom squash roaches and gnats and spiders when they were younger. Their mom had always been the one to kill bugs; she’d brag about how even her father and older brothers would call her in to kill whatever insect they had seen scurrying across their bedroom walls. She hated the idea that she should be afraid of bugs. In her eyes, she had been dealt a hand (a killer’s instinct in the face of all insects), and she would play that hand (via an insatiable murder spree against all crawling critters).

Their eye sockets are decidedly empty now. Without the blue blocking the way, the pressure of the red flowing down their face dies down—and, eventually, so does its velocity. Cecil looks at Zahra with their now empty sockets and starts to say something, a few different things, starting and stopping them over and over in a voice tired and quieted from screaming. Zahra places her hand on Cecil’s shoulder, drawing a deep breath. Then, she looks at Cecil, face scowling and serious…and blows a raspberry at them. Cecil laughs. 

“You’re a dork,” they say. She flicks their forehead. 

Someone knocks on the fitting room door, and Cecil realizes just how much time their dysphoria has stolen from them. They cry out— “Sorry, just a few more minutes!” 

Zahra and Cecil begin to grab their things. Cecil decides to buy the pants, and the two finally spend some time finally raving about how it has pockets. As they do, Cecil sees Zahra grab the black blouse she picked out.

“That’s a nice top.”
“Isn’t it?! And cheap, too!” Zahra holds the blouse up to show it off. It’s made of a soft, wavy fabric. It has an ornamental golden collar, and a traditional-feeling floral design. Single digit price tag, too. “I’ve seen Mom wear stuff like this. In old pictures. And better than the rest of the shit I’ve found.”

Zahra sets the blouse down, satisfied with the second opinion that it is a for-sure-buy. As she does, she remembers the glasses she grabbed.

“Oh!” She hands the glasses to Cecil—brown-rimmed, with rectangular faux-lenses. “I thought you’d like these. They reminded me a bit of Dad’s, see?”

Two sets of brown eyes look back at Zahra and Cecil through the mirror.

“Oh shit,” Cecil murmurs. “They’re cute.”