The Ears Have Eyes, Too

by Vanessa Nina

The first night the power went out, the forest swallowed us, and our home was clad in darkness. Like sharp-toothed shadows, the trees surrounded the houses, making us wonder just when they would push into us, crushing our bodies underneath the rubble. It was only the second week of November, but the cold had already swept away the people from the streets and forced them to shelter inside their houses.

They have been happening more frequently. The power-shortages, lasting, at first for many hours, usually once the sun had already set. Mum had started to stock up on cheap candles that smelled like crayons and had re-purposed our chimney that stood unignited for more than a year now. They were strange, really, evenings like these, for the members of our household were all equally drawn to each other during those times of dim.

Our mother called for board game nights or puzzles, while our father used those hours of absent TV entertainment to join us, though only in presence, as he claimed the sofa to read up on the local newspaper. That day, it spoke of some disturbance on the main power line, easily fixable in the city downhill, but more difficult for a village hidden inside the depths of dark woods.

My sister, Esther, on the other hand, frequented the threshold of my room, now more than ever, peaking her head in just slightly with her dark hair that, at first, seemed more like scattered curtains in the scarcity of the light from my reading lamp. Sometimes she’d just be standing there without saying anything, waiting for me to notice her, so quiet on her feet. I’d always know of her presence because my room would instantly fill with the scent of smoke, yet it didn’t mean that it wasn’t terrifying all the same.

My grandmother, before she died last summer, used to tell me that the ears have eyes, too, only that they’re half-blinded. It gave me comfort, back then. For it explained why I always thought someone was watching me when I was engulfed in the uncomfortable silence of a near-empty house, or why my mother’s snoring from the next room sounded more like the creaking of floorboards on which someone was walking.

It would also explain that knocking I always heard once the power went out. That rhythmic thud-thud-thud coming from my ceiling every other minute. It was gentle, always, as if someone was asking for entry, waiting for me to allow them to get in because they felt just as drawn to human presence in times of darkness. Often, I caught myself mid-parting my lips. For, yes, the words would already be lying on my tongue: Come in. My throat already vibrated slightly when I remembered the power box in the attic, that seemed to ask me to check for it because, indeed, something was not working well. 

One dark night at the end of that first week of powerlessness, in which our living room smelled like cinnamon and candle wax, I heard my mother scream from the adjacent kitchen before the piercing ping of metal met the ceramic tiles in a shrill thud, followed by the rustling of fabric. My chest scorched, because from what I heard, someone must’ve come and stabbed her. She had only cut off part of her fingertip with the knife as she cut away on a pile of walnut, but I couldn’t let go of that mortifying and bone-shuddering feeling in my torso. I was certain of the heavy feet slithering across the kitchen floor back then, and that squelching tone, as if someone was cutting through flesh and bone.

I imagined a dark-clad figure, though I couldn’t see a face because, perhaps it just didn’t have one to begin with, coming through the window Mum liked to keep open when she cooked. No, the stabber had already been hiding in the house from the beginning, maybe in the attic after all, or perhaps the cupboard that was used more to get rid of the image of unwanted clutter than actual storage. It would’ve explained the rustling I heard minutes before the incident; a cacophony of clacking and creaking, ripping, and tearing.

When I told my sister later about what I thought, smiling at the fringes of a nervous cackle, she looked at me, funnily, baffled that I thought Mum was getting murdered and didn’t do anything? To which I, admittedly, scratched the back of my head awkwardly.

I didn’t think it was actually like that, I said, trying to save my irresponsibility with a lie.

What if it were? How would you know?

We sat in that silence for a while, because, honestly, I didn’t have an answer. How strange, I thought, to think that a murder sounded so similar to a mother preparing a meal.

Before my sister left to check up on our mother and her finger, she turned to me and said:

You better clean your ears, Steph.

And I did, then, later that evening, because, indeed, I felt something cloying there. It had been an easily overlooked sensation, before. But through Esther’s suggestion, it became undoubtedly present. Like the knowledge that the tightness in my skull, that emerging headache, might not actually be an incoming migraine, but perhaps a tumor, nestling somewhere between my lobes. It confronted me with the realisation that, indeed, I had misheard something. That what I was seeing, or rather thought that I would see, was not what was happening.

When I went to poke at it, then, with a Q-tip, and the wool came out slightly wet and pink-ish, I knew that it must’ve been some pimple. Indeed, I had felt the slight burn of it, too; the light pain of skin ripping open with an invitation to heal. It had been a heavy, stuffed feeling that I had tuned out successfully for the past few days. The power had been out for more than three days by then, and townhall made sure to provide everyone with free blankets, two dozen candles, and kettles.

Lucky enough, thanks to Dad’s long-passed interest in hiking, we were well equipped with some additional heating pads and generators. Although they were mostly used to fuel up Esther’s laptop so she could catch up on some of her TV shows. Sometimes I would join her, feeling lonely and unrested from the ongoing knocking coming from my ceiling, and every time she’d open up her screen, Esther would say:

Let me turn on the subtitles, I can’t hear without them.

I don’t know why her words came to mind when I started cleaning my ears again and again, to make sure nothing was infected, not at first. But it made me think, again, of grandma’s words about the ears and the eyes, and I wondered if eyes had ears, too.

I wondered if, thinking back to Mum’s incident, I had recognized a murder as such only if I had seen it – with my eyes, not my ears. I couldn’t remember if, back then, she had screamed for herself or for anyone to help her, too. After all, once I saw her, her finger was all bandaged up already, with some red seeping through the white cloth.

Two days later, the power had still been out, and we had become more and more uneasy. I felt it again, this lump inside my ear, dulling my surroundings, though only slightly. This time, I felt it squeezing somewhere by my eardrum, threatening to burst. Dad suggested I might’ve come up with something.

 It’s winter, it’s normal.

But I’ve never gotten otitis, not even when I was eleven and started my career as a prepubescent mermaid, practically glued to both our bathtub and the public pool just outside the village. And when it started to hurt, really hurt, from the pressure that slid up my skull, I decided to have a proper look. Perhaps I had overlooked something, perhaps there was still some residue in there.

There was an orb hiding in my ear, poking out, bloated and seemingly solid at first glance. It was white and a little shiny, almost like a pearl but bigger. Way bigger, and there was a blue-ish hue right in the middle of it. I felt the bile rise in my throat, for I expected a pimple, a wart, perhaps some insect hiding in there, looking for a warm shelter, but not an eyeball, nestling between my flesh and cartilage.

It was one, I was sure of it, because what else could it be? 

It was streaked with reddened hues that mimicked veins, and it looked oddly similar to the eyes that were nestled on my face: white and glossed-over, the iris with its blue, and a black pupil that seemingly feasted on the colour threatened to overtake it.

Yet, the more I looked and poked, I noticed that it wasn’t as solid as I thought at first but squishy when pressed into. Bending underneath the pressure. Yet no matter how firm I poked, I couldn’t feel a thing. As if it was a different organism, detached from my own skin and nerves. I tried to remove it, pulling at it first with my fingers, then with a pair of tweezers because it was, indeed, quite sloppy. But, to my frustration, it wouldn’t move; it wouldn’t allow itself to be removed.

My stomach turned and bile began to burn my throat. I dreaded the sensation of throwing up, felt how my jaw squeezed with its muscles and nerves running through, but I was distracted from the heat rising to my head, my temple. At first, I thought I imagined that thing nestling in my ear. For I had only been using my phone’s flashlight to see, and when I first touched that thing, it didn’t make any peculiar sound, although, honestly, I didn’t know  what it would sound like to properly squeeze at an eyeball. I didn’t wear contacts like Esther, and something about the image of my finger touching my own eye disturbed me. I couldn’t even watch some of those weird splatter films Esther enjoyed from time to time, where putting things into, onto, or through body parts was part of an artistic imagination.

Yet, looking at it, my ear hosting that blue-centered eye, I couldn’t fathom that it was of any value apart from that wretched sensation of fear ripping through my chest. I couldn’t scream, except for Esther, who was in the room next door.  I barely heard her approach, until I saw her body entering the bathroom next to where I stood in front of the sink.

Esther shrieked as I turned, all red-faced and open-mouthed, revealing my ear, and I felt my body tremble, knowing that I had, in fact, not imagined what I saw.

What is this?

What does it look like? There’s an eyeball growing inside me.

You’re messing with me, Steph-

I’m not kidding, I don’t know what’s happening-

Esther closed the distance, and I felt her hands, always gentle yet trembling with something, grasp my shoulder and the side of my jaw, turning my head upward just slightly. In the half-hidden darkness, she had to squeeze her eyes to get a better look.

Shit, my sister huffed. There definitely is something.

How is that even possible? I mean-

Breathe. Have you tried to poke it?

Esther-

Let me get a needle.

A second later, a dreadful moment of trembling, my sister returned with a small silvered sewing needle she got from somewhere in her room. I had not dared moving, fearing that, if I were to crank my head just any other way, that thing would fall out – worse, would disappear somewhere inside my depths.

I’ll be careful, promise, Esther said as she grabbed my shoulder again, trapping me between the sink and herself.

I felt her breath on me, on my cheek and earlobe, and again it reeked of smoke. As if there was something burning inside of her, falling into ashes. It made me curl my nose, just slightly, for I had never enjoyed how it always felt like I had to hold my breath when I was near her. Nausea rippled through me: first to my stomach, then throat, up to my head where I felt my mind cloud for just a moment.

 I heard my sister mutter something, but it was drowned out by my heartbeat. I could neither see nor feel what Esther was doing, but I trusted her, blindly, that she would free me from that thing.

That thing, that eye. Would it be that we both just misinterpreted things in the darkness?

It’s pretty sturdy, she said, and I swallowed a wail. The needle is not going through.

This cannot be happening, I whispered, glad that Esther was there to hold me.

I’m pretty sure it’s just a cyst, Steph. That happens sometimes.

No, I wanted to scream at her. It didn’t look like one. Although I really wasn’t sure what cysts looked nor felt like, but I was sure that they weren’t white and eyeball-shaped.

Might be fungus, though, Esther then concluded, still doing who-knows-what to my ear. I was numbed, at that point, by my nervous system kicking into a frenzy. 

A day later, Esther would show me some article on her phone, talking about something called aspergilloma, balls of fungus capable of taking root inside the human body.

We’re deep in the forest, she would say. It’s not impossible that something grows in uncommon places.

I thought about it, often, too, the possibility that something would transpire. After all, the village had been put upon the earth that nestled with past generations and their ghosts, and grandma, when she was still alive, had always warned us about stepping too far into it.  I always thought it funny because, after all, we had already been surrounded by nothing but wood, and the knowledge that there would be something in the distance. It wouldn’t make a difference.

I knew that there was no evil lurking there. After all, everything bad came from the heart, and it was us that lay there, nestled deep in the forest’s chest, bringing it to life.

After Esther’s failed attempt to free me, I grew an almost obsessive sensitivity to the eye growing inside me. It didn’t grow bigger, thankfully, but I still felt the stretch become more and more bothersome. I started sleeping on my other side, then, because the pressure was too much to bear, and, somehow, the world became a little quieter that way. It was almost like an ear plug, drowning out that knocking, which still went on somehow, and isolating the tap-tap-tapping footsteps of someone, probably Esther, stealing across the hallway, only to come to a short halt by my room door, perhaps checking on me, before continuing to her own room.

At least, I expected it, for I never heard the satisfying click of her room door shut, but, Esther rarely liked it closed. She didn’t like any door shut, in fact, which is why she so often came to mine, mingling in the doorway for no reason.

I asked both Mum and Dad to have a look at me, and they all suspected what Esther had already told me. An infection of some sort, some lump, something that would pass. They had always been morbidly easy-going when it came to illness; it’s why grandma passed so quickly after having that cough for a few weeks, and why Esther’s little toe was bent just a little bit differently than the others after having stubbed it while leaving the living room once. The nearest hospital was at the foot of the mountain, too, and neither of them liked driving through the steep woodland anyway. The snow would’ve made it even more difficult on the roads.

But despite their negations that I really actually didn’t need a doctor, because people have survived worse, I was now cursed with knowing that there was something that shouldn’t be.

It itched, not where the ear was, but where my chest lay. This unnerving pressure, the tingling of my muscles. I had developed a restless leg. For every time I wanted to ask them to bring me to somebody to check it out, I was again reminded of the fact that all three of them had not seen what I had seen. Not really.

But I had known that it was there, I could feel it.

Every time, I went to check in the mirror, which happened about two or three times a day, it remained, unmoving, ungrowing. But it was there. Still.

Which, somehow, was worse. For, it meant that there was no progress, no further transpiration of whatever this thing was or meant.

It meant, essentially, that it would be a permanent condition. That I was now carrying an eye inside of my ear.

I could hear now. Could hear not better, but differently. I noticed it after the fourth day, and the power was still out, mostly. Mum had now switched to battery fuelled candles, and our generators had started to run low. Didn’t stop Esther from watching her shows though, and neither did it keep me from using up my phone’s battery for the flashlight in the bathroom.

It was strange, for somehow I started to pick up on the little things I hadn’t noticed before. Like, the way Mum ended her sentences with that little huff of air that transformed all of everything that she said in a declaration of frustration, or how Dad’s hip creaked whenever he got up from where he was sitting. It not only creaked, but I could hear the way the bones met each other in a rattling exchange; rubbed their surfaces against each other all unnaturally, or perhaps, just as they were meant to be, could hear how the nerves practically screamed to burst. Just two weeks later Dad had to be put on bedrest because he had slipped his disc, before, a year later, it had to be replaced gradually.

I could hear it all more clearly. How their bones rattled, their lungs inflated and deflated, could actually see it, too. For the sounds had become so poignant and clear that there was no way for me to escape the image of their hearts pulsing, beating rhythmically, perhaps with a few delays on my father’s part.

It squelched. Somewhere something was rising with a shrill plop. At times, it sounded like a hand squeezing a tomato, pressing the fingers so hard into the red flesh ‘til it burst and its insides would be splattered across skin and cloth. It squeezed my throat shut with a sickening turn of my stomach, thinking, or rather seeing, it.

Esther, so close to me at all times, was the worst. I heard it rattling inside her chest whenever she talked, whenever she breathed. It was worst when she laughed. Because something in there tried to get out, knocking from her organs. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was halfway glued to the insides of her lungs, trying to get out, but failing because her body was not made yet for such an ejection. It echoed dull, hitting her inner walls, dark and gooey, more gently than I expected. Almost like a stress ball filled with sand hitting the surface of a wooden table.

Sometimes I tried to tune it out, but how can you ignore such a sight if the image of a squelching mass inside one’s body is the only thing you can see?

I was becoming even more sensitive, more aware, and I decided to not say anything just yet. The power cut had made all of us rather annoyed of each other. After all, we did not have the distracting noise of electronic screens to make each other’s company more bearable, and we were now forced to see each other, really see each other.

I saw all of them, everything of them, now. Even when I wasn’t facing them. Because I could hear it. All of it.

Every small rummage inside their bodies, the precise ways in which they moved, reached for something, walked across the rooms in their own different ways. I never paid much thought to the ways my family was walking before, but now I could not escape how Mum practically slithered across the halls without much of moving her feet, her bones and tissue and muscle were weighing her down. Nor could I oversee how Dad’s knees mismanaged his own weight, making him sway just a little with every step.

Esther moved, always, like a person trying to escape something without being caught; fast-footed, but light in touch. She annoyed me the most. Because she was always lurking somewhere, and I noticed her presence when I could, again, hear that rumbling in her lungs.

I had slowly accepted that the eye in my ear had become part of me now. For, after a week of actually nothing happening, I acknowledged that it might, indeed, had evolved to an ocular lump of cells. Of course, I examined it regularly, in fact, I couldn’t pass a mirror without looking at it through the dimmed light of an electric candle or my phone’s illuminated surface. But that estranged feeling that I felt in the first few days of this new acquaintance had, strangely, lifted from my body. Weirdly, while the world around me had begun to grow louder and brighter, despite the darkness that had befallen us since the lights went out, my insides became quieter, muted.

Somehow, it felt nice. My eyes, all three of them, had now been occupied with the shrill grind of my father’s jaw when he chewed on Mum’s casserole, or with the scraping sound of scalp tearing open whenever Mum itched her skull.

The scraping against our windows, which was not because someone battered a blade against the glass to come for a body, like I assumed most of the time, but the wicked twigs of the pines asking for entry, or rather the space we had deprived them from by building our house on this soil.

It felt nice, because, for once, it was all what it was. What it sounded like. And thus, it was all that I could see.  

Hearing it through the eyes, I figured, made a big difference in seeing the world. So when, a week later when our last generator ran low, I heard a loud pang from my room’s ceiling, and started to hear the crinkling rhythm of brooting fire, I knew that the flames were coming to get us; both of my parent’s bodies that were slowly falling apart from the inside, and Esther’s too, even before the cancer would swallow her.