The New Flesh

It’s been raining eyes for six months now. Human eyes. They’re everywhere, black eyes, blue eyes, red eyes, yellow eyes, pink, brown, green and purple eyes; albino eyes even. Sort of like hail but softer.

At first it was a major inconvenience, having to avoid them - if stomped they become this gooey pulp which is harder to get off shoes than schoolgirl-chewed gum.

Then a new company, ‘Demonpharm’ (am I the only one who finds their name less than confidence inspiring?), made a twofold discovery: first, a painless eye-transplant procedure, and second, that it worked on the falling eyes.

What happened next? Yeah you guessed right. With eyes raining all over the world (except over Beijing for some reason), everyone rushed for the new procedure, ditching their original eyes for new. It’s ongoing too - most people I know change eyes at least once a week.

[This last is encouraged by the government. The worst thing the government’s done so far in my opinion is introduce the weekly ‘eyepop’ events; you know where people dispose of their ‘old’ eyes into huge mobile bonfire furnaces. The ‘eyepop’ monicker came about because it sounds like they’re making ‘eye popcorn’ when they burst.

The government says eyepopping was introduced to stimulate the ‘eyeconomy’ i.e. huge eye turnover equals huge eye taxes on Demonpharm.

The government’s dumb as a carrot, But what can you expect from a Rabbit parliament? The president’s a Bug, the prime minister a Bunny. I know that sounds like a scene from a children’s cartoon but it’s not even half as funny.]

There’ve been three eye-trends so far. First, it was having eyes of different colors, then it was ‘eyeball’ eyes (you know the kind the undead slasher has in scary movies - all white without iris or pupils), and now, its eye-shades, where the left and right eyes are the same color, only one is a lighter shade than the other, so you get a disoriented ‘traveling’ feeling of motion when you look at whoever’s face.

Now I’m not an eyelier-than-thou religious hypocrite; I’m not immune to fads myself.

While I avoided the first two, eye-shades has sort of won me over. They look cool, if you avoid the more girly colors and get with the ‘gangster’ look. I’m currently on my sixth set of ‘shades’ now - my left one is black, the right a water-transparent middle tone of grey. Gives me great vibe when I’ve to deal with recalcitrant customers.

Yesterday Demonpharm announced eye-shadow, a new eye-drop which alters the color of the eyes you’ve already got, without you taking them out first. They say it’s their response to customer requests for saving measures, though with eyes as plentiful as sand everywhere, and replacement costs as low as underground fares, who’re they fooling?

More relevant and interesting (if you’ve a high pain threshold) they recently patented the eyejection, an eyeball hypodermic which enables you color your eye’s orb different from its iris . . . and from each other.

My girlfriend Briss is really into this, with her freaky Asian dominatrix thing. Her right eye is currently blue and yellow and her left one red and black. (Yes, she is a sight for sore eyes . . . ha ha . . . sorry couldn’t resist the urge.)

[Her name’s actually Bliss, but . . . well let’s say I never put much stock into Chinese ‘r’ and ‘l’ vocal switchover stereotyping until we started dating]

And still eyes keep raining. Everywhere in the world that isn’t Beijing rain clouds fill the sky like they’re going to pour water on people and pour out eyes instead.

* * *

So on Earth now we’ve eyes to spare. Which should be good, shouldn’t it?

But I’ve got a sneaky feeling about all this; A BAD feeling. I’m certain we’re all going to wake up one morning and find that these new eyes cause cancer or they’ll turn into water in our faces, and . . . and . . . something much, much worse . . .

[And if you think them turning into water sounds far-fetched, remember I just said they fall out of rain clouds?]

*   *   *

Just after the Demonpharm eye-rush began, I asked Briss: “Briss honey, why eyes never fall over Beijing?” (She’d just come over, her English wasn’t too good.)

“Chinese see flar ahead,” she replied while buckling on her thigh-length orange leather boots, and over them her dried-cobra belt. “Rong civirization, rong histoly of lead and pran future. We not need flesh eyes.”

“But you’re using them.”

“Because I lesident in decadent capitarist countly,” she retorted, putting in her cockroach-strung nose rings. She waited till she’d hung on her (life-sized but hollow) tuna earrings before adding angrily - “You know I cultular-exchange student; if I exchange eye as wer I leplesenting Chinese intlests.”

I saw she was angry with me, tried to kiss her. She pushed me off, glared freshly transplanted red orbs at me. “Keep decadent capitarist mouth away flom rovery sociarist body.”

And to make her point she draped her live-toad cloak over the ‘rovery sociarist body’ in question. She glared some more at me, her cloak-toads rolled their eyes and wagged disapproving tongues at me.

Watching her/them walk off, I realized I love her because she makes me look much less mundane and boring.

But her comments stuck with me. And lomance . . . sorry I mean romance, aside, she sounds more and more like a spy everyday.

So unlike everyone else I know, I was smart enough not to get taken in by all the ‘eye popcorn’ nonsense.

Unknown even to my darling Briss, I’ve kept my original eyes in a pickle jar in the fridge so I’ll know exactly where they are when the rain stops, our new eyes all dissolve, running liquid from their sockets, and the Chinese invasion begins.

"Can't See for the Rain"

Copyright: © 2010 Wol-vriey

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Wol-vriey is Nigerian, and quite tall.  He believes that there actually are things that go bump in the night.