Smoothie

We are born without eyesight / We are born without sin / And our mama protects us / From the cold and the rain

-Talking Heads, Making Flippy Floppy

I’m just like everyone else, really. I brush my teeth twice a day. I ride my hovercar to work five days a week. And every year on my birthday, a new eye emerges somewhere along my body.

Tomorrow I turn forty. Forty years, forty fuckin’ eyes.

You’d think I’d be ready, having already experienced this thirty-nine times before. You’d think I could feign surprise at this surprise party my spouse has not-so-surreptitiously planned, spend a few hours having people with my exact eye count make fun of how near to death I am, and carry on with my life.

But no. I am filled with dread. I cannot sleep. Because I know that at 2:38 a.m., for the full minute - my birth minute - I will writhe in agony as I birth a new eye somewhere along my body.

There is a plethora of documentation of similarly-eyed people meeting their unexpected ends due to being startled awake during their birth minutes. I’ve studied a perhaps unreasonable quantity of these records. So I won’t chance it. Not this time. Not again. I’ll be tired for my party. What’s the worst that could happen? That I forget it’s a surprise party? And it embarrasses my spouse and they shout in front of everyone, I wish you were dead!?

Nah.

---

The first five times aren’t as tormenting. It’s still excruciating, don’t get me wrong. But at least you know where they’re going to be.

Your first two eyes grow on the face, above the cheeks and below the brow, symmetrically on either side of the nose, forming a line with the nose’s bridge. If you were somehow able to locate a history textbook from the 20th- to mid-21st centuries, you might see a forty-year old equipped solely with these two eyes. Beauty has traditionally been associated with having only these two eyes, which may explain why a disproportionate number of photos we take as a society anymore are of two-year olds.

The third eye grows above the first two, at the center of the forehead. Mystics once used the idea of the third eye figuratively, as a symbol of enlightenment. Turns out all this enlightenment really amounted to was the foresight, so to speak, that one day three-year-olds would start growing eyeballs out of their foreheads.

You grow the fourth and fifth eyes in the back of your head, level with eyes one and two. We call this hindsight. These eyes are invulnerable, completely impervious to damage. You will forever have perfect vision with the eyes in the back of your head. Hindsight is always 20/20.

From there it’s anyone’s guess as to from whence your remaining lifetime of eyeballs will emerge. A whole-body MRI will reveal the locations and remaining number of eyes biding their time beneath your skin, but which of those terrorizes you next is a crapshoot.

Some say you can also glean your expiration date from those scans - meaning that, if nothing else in this hellscape of an existence gets to you first, once you run out of birthday eyeballs, you run out of time as well. I have never known this to happen. I have never known anyone unlucky enough to live that long.

I am hesitant to believe this about the MRIs because it doesn’t seem to apply to voluntary eye removal. Those with the means and the vanity to commonly opt for elective eye exteneration. Some wish for that classical beauty and extract every other eyeball from their body such that they will look like two-year olds forever. Others approach it more pragmatically, weighing the costs and benefits of each potential eye, solely going under the knife to rid their anatomy of those eyes which will only cause constant suffering - the bottoms of the feet, for instance, or anything along the parabola that separates the upper thighs. I know plenty of people who have had these procedures, some when they were so young the decision was surely made for them. And despite having (albeit artificially) run out of b-day e-bs, they’re still alive and kicking. Most of them, anyway.

As for me, I never bothered with any of that stuff. What difference would it make, really? The god of airborne disease made me this way, and I accept that. It’s entirely possible I’ll never grow an eye out of the arch of my foot, won’t ever have what our society colloquially calls hemeyerrhoids. Or maybe in two hours and forty-seven minutes, I will.

---

I’m officially forty now. The clock has rolled over to the a.m. But the main event still awaits me.

In terrorbration, I sojourned to the kitchen for a midnight snack and have successfully returned to my office, snack intact, without waking the spouse or child. Here we have one (1) peanut butter and jelly sandwich, quartered into (4) triangles, and one (1) snifter, filled with three (3) fingers of bourbon, neat. It just sounded good. Wouldn’t make for a bad last meal, if it came to that.

You’re probably wondering where all my other eyes are located. Well I already told you where they aren’t. Isn’t that enough? Just use your eyemagination. Better yet, just name a body part. There’s a good chance one’s there.

You may also be wondering, Is this snifter you mentioned a refill? To which I might reply, And pray tell what business is that of yours??

No, what I think I’d like to talk about, briefly, is the absence of eyes.

---

It wasn’t long ago that my child, sleeping now with several eyes to their name, was a smoothie. Smoothies are what we call children in their first year of life, when their faces are bereft of the lumpiness of the eye.

Prior to their birth, I read the supposed gold standard of first-year parenting manuals, Smoothie Operator, cover to cover. There is considerable discussion about crawling in there - when to expect it to begin, how to smoothie-proof your home so that your no-eyed child can safely and freely creep about. They even include some discount codes for safety gear made exclusively by the publishing company’s affiliates. I read that thing soup to nuts, from tip to goddamn toe. Nowhere does it mention even the prospect of crawling being preceded by a period of sustained, tornadic rolling.

At seven months, my child, eyeless as the day they were born, started rolling around the house with the precision of a professionally-rolled bowling ball. The spouse and I took this as a sign to smoothie-proof the place as the manual had instructed, because surely crawling would not be far behind. This did not prove entirely accurate. The kiddo was content to tumble about for a good two months there before adding crawling to the mix. The smoothie-proofing guidelines were adequate for this interval, with one critical, for lack of a better term, oversight.

One day - one fine day - the child was rolling about the living room, as they did, moving between various scattered toys they recognized by feel, sound, smell, and taste. One moment they were slobbering all over the blue stacking ring, and the next they were headed, I thought, for their beloved stuffed moose, Morty. But, you know how pro bowlers put that spin on the ball such that it goes from leaning over the gutter to perfectly hitting the 1-2 pocket in the blink of the eyes? That’s what happened here. Except Morty was in the gutter, and our sofa was the 1-2 pocket.

Now, I read Smoothie Operator from stem to stern. It contains no reference to the underside of a sofa, or even its more archaic nomenclature, ‘couch’. I have since filled out the form on the Contact Us page of the publishing company’s website to alert them to this, as well as to the rolling erasure. I actually filled it out thrice since I hit the character limit on the first two go-rounds. Perhaps my suggestions will be considered for subsequent editions and save future by-the-book families some trauma.

Before I could react to what was happening, the child had rolled to the back of the sofa, which nuzzled against the wall. The wailing started up instantly. I laid on my stomach to assess the situation, careful not to put too much pressure on my ab or chest eye. I could feel them wincing involuntarily nonetheless. I crammed my right shoulder as far under the sofa as it would go and stretched out my arm, but the child was just out of reach. I bent my hand so that the eye on its back side was inches from their smooth little face. Hang tight, kiddo! I shouted over the wails. I’ll have you out in a GIF! I scooted out and scanned the room.

What is happening? the spouse called from a different room.

Nothing! I reassured them. I located a large emptied box that a postal drone had recently delivered to our home. Aha! I yelped, so the kid could follow along. They gave a knowing wail.

Using only my hands, I expertly broke the box down and started sliding the flattened cardboard beneath the sofa. With hindsight, I watched my spouse, unsurprisingly, enter the living room while I tried to delicately position myself on the floor as I had been moments earlier. Shhhh, I said to the both of them.

I feel like this qualifies as something, the spouse said. Maybe they had a point.

I tried to slide the cardboard underneath the child, but it was too thick or the angle made it impossible or something. It instead pushed into their right side and the cardboard bent to resemble its previous form. This merited a more forceful wail. Roll over! I commanded. Roll this way! Help me out here, kiddo! It’s quite possible I was shrieking at this point. Anyway my guidance proved unconvincing.

Anything I can do? the spouse asked, irrationally calm about this, in my opinion.

Yeah, get the broom! I yelled from beneath the sofa. My visible eyes must have looked positively manic.

The- they paused. Broom. Sure, yeah, okay, that seems reasonable. They headed toward the utility room. For the interim I continued trying to nestle the cardboard beneath the wailing child, to no avail.

When the broom arrived, I moved to the end of the sofa nearest the child’s legs. I pushed the broom’s head along the wall until it had snugged in there between the wall and the child’s torso. I’m so sorry, I whispered, feeling tears welling all over my body. I’m so sorry. And then I swept my child onto the cardboard.

I moved hastily back to the front of the sofa, poking my chest eye as I went, which did not help with the welling. I pulled the cardboard back out from under the sofa and, with it, my wailing child. The spouse picked them up off the floor, bounced them and shushed them, and said, You’re alright, you’re alright, we’ve got you. They did this all with a calmness that made me wonder whether a similar episode had previously occurred while I was at work. I never did ask, though.

You’re alright, we’ve got you, they repeated. I knew those words weren’t for me, that I had been their catalyst. But I found comfort in them all the same. I stood and lay my head on my spouse’s shoulder, opposite the one our child occupied. And I allowed the welling to turn into sobs, causing splotches to form on every article of my clothing.

At the sound, the child lifted their head from my spouse’s shoulder and faced me. They stayed that way, silent and motionless, for a good fifteen seconds. I stopped my sobbing and sat up and faced them as well. They were looking deeper inside me than eyes would ever allow. They gave one of their patented giggle-smiles, and I laughed back, feeling the lingering tears dribble off what must have been a couple dozen eyelids.

What I remember most about this is staring into that kid’s smooth face and realizing, amidst all that wailing, that they had shed no tears - that they did not yet have the infrastructure to properly cry. And I wondered what sorrow that builds in us, to not be born with that release. I wonder that still.

---

What am I doing? What in the hell am I doing? Why’d I have to get all sentimental? Here I could be telling you about how strange of a sensation it is to involuntarily close thirty-nine eyes when I sneeze, or working through the understood meanings of every permutation of winking. But I chose, what? A sob story? Really? It’s true that I have to change clothes after a good cry, which is a not infrequent occurrence. But did you really need to know all that? What are you going to do with that information? And how could I fail to mention that in the final seconds of this family embrace, while still giggling - perhaps the very reason for said giggling - the child made one of the smelliest, yellowest stools that I have ever encountered?

And for all that, it didn’t even kill that much time. We’ve still got fifty-two minutes to go.

Oh, look at that! Fifty-one now.

My snifter has been empty for some time now. Perhaps I’ll take this opportunity to abscond once more to the kitchen. Yes, I think there be time enough for a couple more fingers of brown. As they say.

Can I get you anything?

---

So, by my count, you know where eight of my eyes are. Pretty good! More than twenty percent, for the next forty minutes, anyhow.

Wow, when’s the last time I stayed up past 2 a.m.? Oh, right. This exact time last year, I suppose.

Seeing as how we’re in the home stretch here, and since the subject came up naturally, I’ll tell you a bit about eye 39. (For those playing along at home, I’ve called eyes 1 through 5, eye 9, eye 17, eye 33, and, now, eye 39.)

My thirty-ninth eye emerged 364 days, 23 hours, and 23 minutes ago from the roof of my mouth. It’s mostly useless, but every now and again I’ll tilt my head back and open my mouth wide and pretend to bite the things that cross my line of mouth vision. I’ve trained it to stay shut while I’m eating, for example, sandwich triangles, or drinking the aforementioned brown. I’ll occasionally take a peek at my toothbrush while it works away at my lower incisors, just for funsies.

I didn’t quite make it to my birth minute last year. I was in here, in my well-cushioned sitting chair, imbibing a similar helping of brown. I must have been doing something fascinating. Knitting, maybe? Next thing I know, I’m waking to my own screams. It felt as if someone was drilling a hole into my soft palate, making their way from the top of my head. The pain caused me to pitch forward, and I caromed off my desk before crumpling onto the floor.

About thirty seconds in, I could see my uvula vibrating. I screamed, What the fuck is that?! Then, at the sight of the back sides of my teeth forming words, I screamed, What the fuck is that?? And then I said, Oh, I see, and zonked out right there on the floor til morning.

We’d soundproofed this room a few eyes back because I had woken everyone up with my screaming the minute I turned thirty-six. So I wasn’t surprised to have not disturbed the spouse or child’s slumber. Nor did they seem alarmed to find me sleeping in here on the floor.

Wake up, parent! It’s your birthday! the child said from atop my chest.

At this point I realized that several eyes had blackened from the fall. Is that so? I grunted. My palate was still tender, and I examined it with my tongue. Eye 39 had spent the last few hours adjusting to life among the boozy humidity of my partially closed mouth. Now I gave it a nice good morning probe. Oh, right, I said.

The spouse had been searching me over, more than likely trying to locate exactly where the event had occurred. From the floor and beneath the child, I opened my mouth wide, said ahh, as it were, and pointed inside. Whoa! That’s so cool! the child said as I attempted to blink out the saliva.

You probably don’t want me putting my tongue in there anymore, the spouse said.

We’ll figure it out, I said.

And we did. We certainly did.

---

So yeah, try as I might, I never have stayed awake until showtime. I always seem to lose consciousness just before it hap—.