Hi there, I'm
Rhombus Ticks. I wanted to tell you the story of my grandmother that
she told me about what happened to her when she was a little girl,
about the Woman with the Eyeball on her Finger. You must be careful
what you wish for.
The old country in
Louisiana is neither old, nor a country in the cosmic scale of
things; certainly for a Fae or anywhere in the old world. But it is
very old for this country, and the most remote of areas have things
that were brought by the Huguenots fleeing persecution in France.
Pound for Pound, 17th century France had more Fae interaction than
any time or place on Terra except Germany and Ireland. So you can
imagine that there some lingering bits and flotsam that came here.
The night sky was
full of stars and bright was the moon as the young girl wished on the
falling star. She was always so curious and no one would let her
stay for anything. So she wished for an eye on the end of her
finger, so she could see around corners. The sky flashed a brilliant
shade of pink and gold and suddenly she realized it was the northern
lights. She had seen that on Rudolph the Red Nosed reindeer. How was
she to know how impossibly south they were? But there they were just
the same.
There was a sharp
prickling on her finger and this was no enchanted needle putting
sleeping beauty to sleep. The pain was a short gift compared to the
itching. It started out like a bug bite at first but then it kept
lingering and lingering. She couldn't even sleep, and on through the
next day it persisted. There were no lesions, no marks on the skin.
No matter how many times she showed it to her parents asking them to
take her to the doctor, they looked at it and told her she was being
a hypochondriac. She was in a daze at school the first day.
Exhaustion took her to sleep some the second night but she only got a
few hours sleep and was still a zombie the next day. The itching
would not stop. Itch a scritch a scritch a scritchy scratch. She
slowly went a little bit bonkers, losing sleep and getting grouchy to
all her friends. Even her pets started to drive her a little crazy
so she kept them in one room in the house so she could keep an eye on
them. Itch a scritch a scritch a scritchy scratch. She started
rubbing it against the desk to make it feel better. It only helped a
little bit at a time. It started to feel swolen but when anyone
looked at it, they said they saw nothing. Finally, the lack of
sleep made them take her to the doctor, who gave her some sugar pills
and sent her home. It didn't help at all. Itch a scritch a scritch
a scritchy scratch.
She woke up in the
morning and panicked because her vision was blurred but as she
started to flail her hands around in panic she made herself even more
sick. As she slowed down a bit and closed her eyes, she realized she
could still see! She had an eye on the end of her finger! She had an
EYE on the end of her finger! She had an EYE. on the end. of. her.
finger! She laughed hysterically and giggled and cried and
accidentally poked herself in the finger eye as she rolled about in
fits. "Ow!" She was not happy.
Grandma was so happy
that she raced down the stairs and told great grandma who finally
flipped her lid. She grabbed the little girl by the hair, dragged
her around the house clockwise three times and then counterclockwise
three times and then tossed her in the empty bath tub. "Now
stay there until you can stop playing prison warden to all the
animals in the house!"
The little girl lay
there in the bathtub, shivering with delight and horror, determined
to do her mother proud and stop herding the animals into the guest
room. She didn't need to. She could watch them all the time
now...with the eye on her fingeR!
She watched the
animals for days; leaving school sometimes in the middle of the day
much to the alarm of her teachers. She had always been such a good
student with a sharp mind that they could not fathom her rebellion
and they dare not tell her mother for fear of what she or the little
girl's sisters might do to punish. And what started with the animals
extended to the family. Grandma understood that the impulse to
control the animals was a mirror from her sister's impulse to control
the people. Father and Mother humored her, but all the other
children obeyed from fear. Sister wanted all to be in order, and
now, from around corners, hidden in shadowed halls, my grandmother as
a little girl saw it all.
And the world was
never the same.
She began to hear
things, things that let her know her family...my family were not
quite normal. These are memories I had forgotten until now, the
stories my grandmother told me, that were told to her, about the old
country. About Carcosa. But the things she heard were not about
that. I am sure that she heard a lot of things, but all she
remembers hearing was the horrible things they said and thought about
her that she had never known before. She was not well liked by
anyone but her mother and even then, her mother had grown very cross
with her because of the itch.
The world was not a
very nice place. In fact, it was a terrible place, not some place
she wanted to be at all. So she turned from the world and went away
from it as far as she could, which for a 9 year old girl was not very
far at all. So she did what any smart girl would do. She went
farther and farther back into her mind, hiding from all of the evil
things around her, running as far and as fast as she could.
Grandmother hid in her dolls and her talking animals and her
mysteries where the bad guys were always caught and good always
prevailed. And everything was good….for a while.
The eye on her
finger started to show her other worlds than the one she was used to;
the dead, the fae, unreal worlds such as Mana and Gaia and even hints
of Earth. Earth was the worst of all; its terrible banality and the
shocking cruelty of Earthlings one to another was more than she could
bear. It slowly began to drive her mad, more than all of the
whispers of tentacles and flutes and fish scales could ever do. But
she bore it well, and coped by keeping the animals in the guest room
except for a single hour where she let them roll around on the lawn
in the sunlight, which they loved.
She took up
gardening, which she did until she was almost 70. She became quite
good at it, building high walls to keep the cats inside when they
were rolling about, and high enough fences that she could resist the
temptation to poke her finger above the fence and spy at the
neighboors. So many plants; both vegetables you could eat and
flowers that you could smell. It was a wonderful place until she
couldn’t care for it any more and the snakes and weeds and trash
started to clog up the beautiful work that she had done.
I always loved the
gloves she wore all the time. She eventually told me about the eye
on her finger and she never showed it to me until she died. I wasn’t
the one to wash and annoint her body, but during the wake I did go up
to her gloved hand in the casket to see if the eye was really there.
I still don’t know. There were calous marks on her finger with a
tattoo of a closed eye lid. It felt like a finger when I moved my
finger tip over it.
But I will tell you
this. As I moved away, I heard a very faint sound, and as I returned
to my seat I could not help but think that I was being watched. In
truth in fact, that feeling never really went away. Even now, I
wonder if somewhere in some world I cannot see, the eye on the end of
her finger is there, watching me, listening, learning my secrets.
Hello Grandma. I miss you.
