He thinks he should be off-kilter more than he actually feels—as if he had a sleeve rolled up and one sleeve loose, or one of his shoes was laced tighter than the other. He’s just not sure why.

He sees an arm in his peripheral vision. The freckled skin it’s wrapped in might have been described as tanned under any other light but, under the wash of ugly green light flooding the room, looks almost as gray as the pitted ceiling above them. A scar shaped like a cluster of branches crinkles as its elbow bends.

The body attached to the arm carries it away. He tries to follow it. His right eye rolls over smoothly. His left eye doesn’t.

Ah, so that’s why.

Behind him, he hears something fall.

“Are you alright?” he asks automatically.

Shuffling footsteps. The arm comes back and its owner crouches, her own eyes landing inches away from his.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re up.”

“Seems that way.”

She reaches towards his face. He weighs whether or not to shy away. The choice is taken from him when her hands make contact before he can decide. She pushes his left eyelid up with the tip of her finger. “How’s that?”

He tries to blink. Only his right eye responds. He brings his own hand up to touch his face and feels his other eyelid drooping and cracked half-open where she’d left it. He applies pressure and something cracks.

She takes his wrist, indelicately, and puts it in his lap. This close, he could have counted every pore in her skin had he not been so distracted by the mass of darkness to her right. It draws his focus the way it would have if his other eye were functional, his vision stretched past its limits to make some sense of what it didn’t know it couldn’t see.

She puts a thumb above and the other below his dead eye. His skin stretches as she rubs back and forth.

She pinches the skin, pulling his upper lip up into a jagged snarl. “How does that feel?”

He glances up at her. “I don’t know, what are you looking for?” His words come out less slurred than he expected, but he still sounds like he’s speaking around cotton.

She snaps her fingers in front of his good eye. He blinks.

“Huh.” She sits back, hand still on his face. He’s starting to feel drool pool behind his teeth. “No matter, it’s an easy fix.”

“Glad to hear it.” A dribble falls down his chin.

She looks down at it. “You drool,” she says, surprised.

“Seems that way.”

“Aren’t you engaging?” She drops her hand and stands up again. He wipes his chin. “What else have you got? Don’t feel like you have to just sit there,” she adds before he has a chance to respond.

“I’m fine for now, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” She vanishes again. This time, he turns his head to follow her.

There’s a table a little ways in front of him, with a chair matching the one he’s sitting in pushed in neatly. He imagines her dragging the chair out haphazardly and dropping him into it (how had he gotten into the room? Had she carried him in over her shoulder somehow—him, shockingly light, or her, deceptively strong? Maybe there’d been a friend who had carried his legs while she’d gripped him under his arms—she didn’t strike him as the type to carry the feet. More vividly still, he imagines her dragging him behind her like a suitcase with a pair of broken wheels, struggling with one hand to pull him in after his foot got stuck on the doorframe and with the other to drag the chair closer to herself—no, she wouldn’t waste a moment to adjust the chair first before going back to pick him up, not when she could do both at once, no matter how labor-intensive).

Or. He spots a furniture dolly propped up in the corner wrapped in tape and mismatched tea towels to cushion the hard edges. 

He kicks one of the table’s legs. A glass bowl of eyes rattles with each kick.

He props a foot up and pushes off, leaning on the back legs of his chair. It squeals more than it creaks as he rocks back and forth. He taps his other foot as he waits.

She smacks the back of his head as she walks around him. She grabs the other chair, swings it in front of her and lands sitting in it backwards, leaning over the backrest, in one fluid motion.

She cranks a handle by his hip. The chair’s backrest falls back with a snap and so does he. His teeth rattle as the back of his head bounces against the wood.

“My bad.” She holds the bowl of eyes over his face, then shakes it when he doesn’t respond right away. The eyes at the bottom of the bowl roll around, glancing over at and then looking away from him. “Want to choose?”

“I don’t mind, just make it match.”

“Listen to yourself.” She digs her fingers into the eyes and they rattle as she fishes around. She plucks a pale blue one up from the bottom and holds it over the dark one stuck in the left side of his face. He hears a clink when they brush against each other.

She clicks her tongue and tosses the eye onto the table. It rolls off and bounces into a corner. She keeps digging.

“Any special bits behind there that I should know about, by the way?” she asks. “These are all pretty standard but I’ve got a few vintage pieces, too, that might be a better color match. I don’t want to damage anything if you’ve got anything extra, though. They might not be compatible,” she adds.

“Yeah, I understand.” There’s a swamp green eye at the very bottom of the bowl with a crack splitting it down the middle. She shakes the bowl and the glass catches the sunlight, illuminating the eye from the inside out.

“So?”

He shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Seriously?” She picks up another eye and holds it over his face again. She tilts her head. “Not bad. So, what’s your deal? What do you do, what are you for?”

“I forgot. Shouldn’t you know?”

“Yeah, and I’m just asking for fun, right?” She puts the bowl back on the table.

“Where’d you get me from? They should know.”

She looks back at him. Leans over him, propping her elbows on the sides of the chair. “Maybe I’ll tell you later if you’re not bugged.”

He feels her breath ghost over the tip of his nose, his upper lip, a bit of his cheek, and absolutely nowhere at all on the other half of his face. If he had a pen, he could have drawn a straight line down the middle to show where the feeling broke off. He smells fish on her breath, and tells her as such.

“Salmon,” she tells him. “In a soup, with potatoes, sour cream and dill. I almost choked on a bone, you know? That’s interesting though—gotta be internal if it’s more than just one bum eye. Here, hold still.” She fishes a scalpel out of her tool belt.

His regret for his honesty is immediate. “It’s really not so bad—”

“Don’t.” She plants a hand over his face, blocking what little sight he’d had left. “You’re worse than a kid at the doctor’s.”

“You treat kids like this?” he says, muffled, into her palm.

“Only when they don’t listen. Now hold still, seriously. I’m right by your ear.”

He hears a smooth crunch and feels a brush of something cold swipe down to his chin. The tip of the blade scrapes something beneath the surface of his skin and his vision flares white.

“You alright?”

His nerves are on fire but he’s as still as a statue. “What’s the word, doc?”

He feels more than hears rubber peeling back from metal. Layers of glue split, the crunch of it echoing inside his skull as she forces her fingers between his skin and the sterile surface below.

She lifts and, in that moment, he sees the shape of his eye drifting up and away from himself, a boat-shaped cutout in a black hood being pulled over his head.

The rest of the mask is yanked over his good eye and everything goes dark. And then, just as quickly, the mask is gone and he’s staring back up at her. His bare face tingles, nerve endings lighting up at every brush of her breath and blast of air from the ceiling fan overhead.

“Listen,” she says as she begins unscrewing the plates around his eye, “can I mess with your cheeks a bit?”

He doesn’t have eyebrows left to raise and the edge of the blunted knife she’s using as a screwdriver is a little too close to the curve of his brow for comfort. “What?”

“Your cheeks,” she repeats. “Or just your cheekbones. I wanna shave them down.”

“Why?” He can’t visualize his own face well enough to know how offended he should be.

His eye comes free with a pop and any imbalance he thought he should have felt before is, all of a sudden, real. The right side of his face is as heavy as if he’d just caught a bag of bricks with it and, were he not already lying flat, he’s certain he would have gone tumbling straight to the ground in a mess of flailing limbs.

“They’re not really proportionate.”

“Objectively?”

“Of course not.” She tosses his old eye up and catches it in mid-air with her other hand. She tucks it in her breast pocket and leans back over him. There’s a divot on the underside of her chin that’s not visible from head-on. He wants to stick his thumbnail into it and see if it fits. “Your face doesn’t really match your build, you know? It’s like, up here, all … all stern—” she puts a hand in front of her own face, “—and then not.” She brings her hand down in a grand sweep.

Of all the words that have ever been strung together, this was not a combination he’s ever heard before. He stares at her blankly, trying to come up with a response. He settles on, “I don’t think that’s a cheekbone problem.”

“Not really, but it’s a start.” And, without any warning, she puts the new eye over his empty socket and strikes it with the heel of her hand.

He twitches, staggered, for a moment, by the sudden rush of information on his left.

She waves his hand in front of his face. He sees her wrist through his right eye, her fingers through his left. She snaps her fingers and his eyes dart over to catch the tail end of the movement.

“There we go!” She grins and sits back, planting her hands triumphantly on her thighs. “Well?”

He glances above him, craning his neck slightly. There’s a cabinet behind him and he sees the blurry form of her reflection, silhouetted in front of the window, and the shape she’s leaning over.

“Well?” she repeats.

“Well, what?”

“Can I?” She’s already reaching for her belt.

He thinks about how to respond.

She leans over him again. The branches sway.