Something glistens in the lumpy mess of seaweed at the tideline. A bright spot, small and round, it catches the eye of an osprey. She lifts off from her nest in the field, flies toward the water and glides down for a closer look.
An eyeball, on a washed up dead body, somehow missed by the fish who’d nibbled the other one away. A white and watery blue eyeball, open, staring straight up at the looming talons of the approaching bird.
The osprey rips it out easily. It’s bigger and not as round as it looked when it was still on the face, more like a jellyfish. Not as heavy as a flounder, easy to grip in one claw. She flies with it high above the ripples and out over the deep blue, willing to drop it if she spots a juicy school of scup.
The dead body on the beach has been decomposing for days, shrinking into wet clothes, unnamed, unmissed, unmourned. A gangster, an assassin who met one nastier. His brief life of hiding in dark dead-end alleyways, creeping up back staircases, slumping down in his car with hat brim low, is now over. He never saw beyond his quarry. Never noticed above or beyond. Never felt another’s pain. Crows gather to investigate as he rolls in and out with the tide, pale and sodden, empty.
While his eyeball, wrapped in a big hooked toe, is flying high above, facing front, air rushing past. A vast and surprising panorama as far as it can see, far beyond the mountains, stunningly far considering it’s dead and shouldn’t be able to see anything at all. Colors sharpen as the bird tilts toward the sun, dim as it dips away. Image after image piles up, nowhere to send them. A stack of still shots with no meaning or thought. Water and sand below in blurry green and brown lines, lighter, darker, moving, mingling. Black tops of trees. Leaves, and as the bird swoops lower, rocks on the beach. A powerful wing beat pulls the eyeball up, farther and farther from earth. Yellow, white and blue. Crystal clear and smooth, like a new painting not quite dry. A ride out of time.
The osprey flies inland, circling the field, heading home with a snack, a treat, a test for her chicks. Which one is weakest? Which will be pushed out? Which one will get the eyeball?
No sign of her mate. Gone on his long, lazy daily cruise up the coast, practicing his hypersonic dives, hunting for the perfect meal. She stops in mid-air, hovers and drops the eyeball into her nest where it rolls into a dark prickly corner. Scratchy twigs, feathers and fish bones. A red string.
Immediately the eyeball is poked and jabbed, three ruthless little beaks trying to grab it. Every stab tears away a bit of vision with the flesh. They knock it around the nest, little baby barbs on the pads of their feet, then all at once the eyeball is falling, poked right over the side of the nest, spinning half blindly in a kaleidoscope of dark and light. It hits the ground with a weak bounce and rolls down off the field onto rocky sand, trailing the red string like a trickle of blood.
Little waves at ocean’s edge slide over and off the eyeball, salt water streaming in the gashes, sand filling the beak bites. Until suddenly the sharp claw of a crab grabs it from behind, drags it in and under backwards, the pebbly beach, the field, the sky retreating then gone. Down the beach, crows feast on the rest of him.
Wendy is an ex-social worker who lives on an island. Her work has appeared in Rosebud, New Millenium, Nimrod, Confluence, Sixfold, Spillwords, Fourth Genre and various anthologies.
Published 8/7/26