Opaque

Terri Linn Davis

It started with nictitating membranes. After she’d found her grandmother with her eyes open— frozen and cold in bed instead of sleeping and warm, she began collecting animals with pale, third eyelids. Because, at first, mother thought her fascination was educational, she gave her a stuffed alligator for Easter. Eventually, the girl begged for old glass jars and filled them with frogs and turtles to keep on her nightstand and window sill. Her favorite movie was a twenty second clip of a red bird’s head that she’d rewind and play, rewind and play; the shock of its nictitating membrane thrilled her like a thin snapping. The animals in the jars watched her watching them and her mother watched her watching the blinking eyes of the animals and when it all became too much watching, the girl buried the jars outside even though her mother never said the words. Once, during supper, the girl announced that her favorite color was opaque and everyone laughed and said, “aren’t you something else?” and mother agreed but with tight lips. So the girl peeled green grapes in the bathtub in secret and placed the flayed skin over her closed lids. She’d suck the naked grapes and sigh when the thin membranes floated away as she slipped underwater. Lately, the girl couldn’t stop thinking about her Grandmother’s opal jewelry. Those nebulous, milky stones. Mother said wearing them was unlucky unless you were born in October. She felt lucky, though, when she finally snuck into her grandmother’s old room and put on decades’ worth of opal rings and necklaces and bracelets. When she ran out of room on her earlobes, and her neck and her wrists, she put the opals in her mouth and pierced the shirt collar below her throat. In the warped vanity mirror, she saw her grandmother’s fixed, clouded eyes enveloping her. After a while, if she didn’t move, if she went into a kind of brumation, she could feel a sheen, something like a third eye.

Terri Linn Davis is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Icebreakers Lit, a journal featuring collaborative writing and the host of the podcast Too Lit To Quit: The Podcast for Literary Writers. You can find some of her work in Taco Bell Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, and Five South. Terri lives in a 189-year-old haunted farmhouse in Connecticut with her co-habby and their three children. If you're looking, you can find her on Twitter @TerriLinnDavis and on her website www.terrilinndavis.com.