Spoon Back Eyes

When I was little, I feared the shower head. It looked like a wasp’s nest, hanging there above me, dripping clear juice into the bubble suds between my kid feet. It made a coin-sized crater like you’d imagine the belly button of someone with girth. And the pipes, they might rattle, a shiver of sorts, when a toilet was flushed nearby in another room, or the dishwasher cut off, or the washing machine cycled to spin. This brrr sort of rattle, it rapped in the walls. And I hated it, because that’s how they got you, the noise and commotion brought anger and buzzing and the red and black fighter jets, the wasps, swirled out of the shower head, their nest, in a concerted death spiral, protecting their young from whatever got in the way, whatever sat nearby, aware but unaware while sucking soapy, warm water out of a washcloth. That was me. And bath time was hard. And I don’t remember if that actually happened or not. I did pass out though.

I remember waking up in a bright, doctor’s room—some had white coats, some had blue scrubs. They’d pat my little three-year-old knee, smile, and pat my little three-year-old head, smile at my mom, then leave.

“Spoon back eyes,” I said, with the mumble of lips still learning to enunciate, still learning to wrap themselves around the elegant intricacies of modern language and communication beyond the simple needs for food, water, and love.

Mom had not seen it. Them. Their eyes.

The doctors and attendants, or nurses, whatever, they cycled through rooms and hallways, running their routes like farmed ants. They looked up rarely, never meeting the eyes of one another, but sometimes giving quick glances to those of us beyond their stacks of folders, their trays with their test tubes, some filled with blood, their latex hands filling syringes with needles as long as my finger. Their breath would smell damp and earthen, like vegetables over-boiled. They administered the injection. I looked up to see who could do such a thing. How in the world could you cause pain to a child? Are you a monster, a demon, a thing from dimensions uncharted where smoldering fires boil the body parts of the dearly departed? I exaggerate, of course. But I looked into their faces, wanted to see how their souls grappled. I looked up at brows tensed while they thumbed on a bandage, hardworking brows, with purpose, intent. But the eyes were not there. I looked at two spoon backs, snugged behind both of their lids. Their hard, round eyes were just mirrors. All I saw was the reflection of myself crying.

When I was little, I feared the dark room at the end of the hall. It reminded me of the place where the spoon-eyes worked. Beyond the door, I could hear beeping, like medical gauges or machines. Gusts of air sifted through odd-angled tubes and paper accordions, or so I imagined. I don’t remember if that really happened or not. Inside, with the lights on full blast, there were boxes, just boxes, piled high, stacked askew, some caving in on the others. Our stuff. We rented the house to “get back on our feet” as my mom had said more than a few times, over and over again. And this house was smaller than the other, by far. So, in there, for two reasons, we storage-roomed the overflow and kept the door shut. Reason one was the smell. It was cats once kept there to keep someone company while they died in a bed. All of them left to mess up the floor, their stink, dander, and filth soaking into the long-shagged carpet, a dull red like blood right before it goes dry. Reason two was the death, as one might imagine. Who could sleep there in a room where the cold, brittle hands of the reaper, like winter tree branches, had slowly crept through the cracks in the walls to tickle and tease out the final breath of someone being eaten from the inside out by malicious disease? Whom?

And I missed one of my toys, something multi-colored and shiny with a clown’s head and wheels and a tune that tinkled while pulling it along behind. I missed it and knew of only one place it could be. In there, in the room, within one of the boxes, stored for a later day when we might finally find a home. But now, I needed it, and it was in there, unused, unloved, as no good toy should ever be. So, I marched my little legs to the end of the hall, grabbed a deep breath outside the door, and ventured forth into the red room where dull slats of sunlight cut odd angles across the ceiling and the boxes stood tall in repose, still dim. I could not, at that time, flip the light switch at all. My three-year-old feet went up on tiptoes. The switch was too old, like the whole house around it, nothing moved easily, time-worn and hardened with the gunk and grime of longstanding habitation, shed skin adding layers to the original shine.

Something shifted and scuttled within. Something murmured and breathed, long, phlegmy breaths with the rattle of dying. A purple-veined hand reached out from the boxes. More movement, more shifting, as the weight of the storage re-distributed around this newly manifested existence, a person, formerly, now a what, or a whom? It birthed through the cardboard. My clown toy rode on its neck. The head, scratched raw to the follicles, had mere wisps of white hair cracking outward like live wires. The face turned up. The teeth were all gone. The jaws chewed a fat tongue like tobacco or gum. The eyes had gone glassy with the shine of a mirror. Spoon backs again. I saw the reflection of myself screaming.

My mother pulled me from the room and gave me a spanking. I passed out.

When I was grown up, I feared pretty much everything. Hunger, isolation, sublimation, the slow slope of dying. Heavy feet staggered by on the sidewalk beside me. I covered up with cardboard and torn open grocery sacks. I wore many coats to keep warm in the night. I kept my few things, what mattered most to both sentimentality and functionality, in a shopping cart rusted and time-worn with age. My mother, long passed, we never found our new home. Nonetheless, outside had advantages, no long halls or dark rooms, no bathtubs or shaking pipes, no phantom faces or insects seething out from the in-betweens. I kept my head down and acknowledged very little. The ones with the money and the coins for my cup were seldom the ones with the reflective stare. The ones with the hot coffee and the boxes of food were never the ones with the eyes made from spoons. They still showed up, however, mostly at night. They caught me under streetlamps with that glint in their eyes, like a laser, it sucked me in, drew me to them, just so I could see myself and the reflection of squalor and filth I’d become.

With age and poor health, the clouds finally set in. The juice in my eyes went milky and dense, then blind for a day, or three weeks, or a year. Who can tell anymore? Whom?

And I know now I have them. I have them too. I got the eyes, the spoon back eyes, just like the others, and wow, I was one of them myself all along. Time told. Was there ever anything to fear at all? Anyone? Myself?

No, that would be too easy.

What I know now, and I wish that I didn’t know at all, is that spoons, by their nature, have reflective surfaces on both sides. So, yes, as the unsuspecting and superstitious come and they stare and they see the reflected horrors of themselves and their gasping reactions to nothingness, I, on the other side cannot see them. I grope along, bumbling blindly, mouth agape in anguish while the impressionable three-year-old in the back of my mind projects, film-style, whatever wicked little horrors it can dream up onto my side of the spoons. I see centipedes and dragons and murky blackness walking limply under stone bridges at midnight. I see wood piles corded high, long snakes oozing into and out of the gaps. I see scaly, brown forms wallowing in mud. I see cellophane ghosts hanging upside down in crooked trees under a sharp-edged, new moon in the first of November. I don’t know if it’s really happening or not. I reflect on the times when I had more and took it for granted. I reflect on a childhood that became adulthood way too soon. I remember a mother who gave more than she had, and it still, still, wasn’t good enough. Whose fault was that? Whom?

©2024 J. Brian Reed

Originally published on Crystal Lake Entertainment's Patreon site.