eight ball fracture(d)

By

Bex Peyton

After leaving the hospital, I wore an eyepatch for two weeks and kept confusing leaves in my house for crickets. They share the same dark color, cast the same angular shadows, fill out the same sized spot in the corner of my blurred peripheral. My glasses didn’t fit over the patch so they were indistinguishable to my eye; the good one. The other was filled with blood because you hit the back of my head with a baseball bat. It’s hard to see through blood. It makes the eye sensitive to light—sensitive to everything—so now I still can’t tell the difference between leaves and crickets.

It was a rainy autumn when you did that. One week in the hospital, two weeks with the eyepatch and the broken finger and the bruised ribs and the missing tooth. The eyepatch was what stayed for two weeks. The other stuff was there for longer. I didn’t leave the house much then, only to grab my food deliveries on the porch because I couldn’t drive.Still, I’d fantasize about driving to Domino’s and crashing the car on the way to hide in the damage. That way I wouldn’t have to lie to my mom and sister and boss about the tooth and the ribs and the finger and the eyepatch.

I was supposed to feel safe being away from you, sitting in the dark in my room in the basement, but even with my bedroom door and the basement door and the front door and the walls and stairs and roads and states I couldn’t put enough between us. Maybe one more level in my house would have done it. There were enough crickets around. I was already sleeping in the dirt. I stayed awake most of the night, then dreamt about your taste.

I chose to focus on something else. If I couldn’t tell the difference between crickets and leaves then— I decided— I should find out how the leaves were getting in. The crickets I couldn’t do much about. I set up cameras around the house, kept myself busy with that for a day or two. I had a whole monitor set-up in the kitchen: a view of every room. It wasn’t about you, I promise, it was about the leaves. It was about never mistaking them for anything else.

After monitoring the house for a couple of days, I saw the truth. I was tracking them in on the bottom of my shoes, of course. It really was a rainy autumn, and the trees always shed onto the porch. Everytime I’d get my deliveries, the soaking leaves would stick to my shoes, dry out, and crumble everywhere I walked, leaving small, dark, cricket-shaped pieces on the floor. I made sure to start wiping my feet before I came back into the house. After that I took off the eyepatch. When I went to take down the monitors, I noticed a screen in the corner that was previously covered by the eyepatch’s darkness. The camera was positioned in my room, and playing back the footage, I saw through the remnants of blurry vision that the crickets fucked my mouth while I slept.

BIO:

Bex Peyton is a writer, visual artist, and cyborg prostitute. Their work has appeared in Expat Press, SELFFUCK, SCAB, FERAL DOVE, DON’T SUBMIT!, Agon Journal, and others.