Horses From The Sky Ate Her Sugar Lump Eyes
The girl stands at the window with a slingshot in her hand. She scratches out her eyeballs and shoots them into the clouds, yelling, "Go! Go and see the world!"
Her eyes fly over the snowy roofs of the village, where birds stand aside to give them way. Finally, the eyeballs slam into the side of a sauntering cow in the village border. They sink deep under its skin, into its flesh, and a painful moo tears up the grey clouds on the sky.
"What a prisoner I am in this ugly house!" sighs the blind girl, cowering to the ground, hitting the old boards of the wooden floor with her weak little fists, trying to cry without eyes. "This whole village is just a cage. The world just grows and grows outside, while I’m shrinking here."
Hearing the noise, her stooped, old mother steps into the room. When she glimpses the deep, red pits where her daughters deep blue eyes use to glint, she screams: "Oh, you fool! Your beautiful eyepearls! Come on, stand up, you'll catch pneumonia down there! Lizards will build a nest into your throat, I tell you!"
"Enough, mother! Stop telling me what to do!" mutters the girl, but she's too weak to resist. Soon, her father arrives too and puts her in the bed, blanketing her.
"Stay there, young lady!" groans her dad. "You know you are such a weak little child, if you would go to the kitchen, the spoons would crawl under your skin! If you would step on to the doorsill, maggots would bite into your toenails! Ugly germs lurk in this world, and even dewy air can destroy your beautiful paper-skin!”
"My weakness exists only in your head!" answers the girl, but they cook a soup from the potty, and the hot liquid seals her mouth.
It's afternoon. The family is pouring coffee, boiled from black flies, into small cups. When they throw the sugar cubes into the streaming drink, the father recognizes his daughter’s sweet look in one of the lumps. It gives him an idea. He steps to his daughter's bed, and drops sugar cubes into the girl's empty red eye sockets one into each.
"Now look at that! My daughter is so beauteous!" He cheers, pointing at the girl's new sugar-eyes. She just blinks and blinks, but still, she can only see the moving insides of a cow.
"By choice, I would put her into a show-case, and just gaze her from dawn to fall. Of course, now and then, I would wipe the spider webs off of her, but that's all – the prettiest birds need to be secured in a cage!"
Night falls. Bad luck oozes out from the horseshoes. The father lies in his bed, his long beard floats around his face as he snores. In his forehead, like a tiny ballerina, spins his shrunken, two inch long daughter. Her toes nearly touch the wrinkled, old skin, it's like she's floating between her fathers closed eyes. The sugar cubes are shining in her eyesockets.
"Oh, father, dear father!" moans the girl. "I have begged and begged for that ugly cow to give me back my eyes, or just puke them out and kick them far away, but it's such an evil and witless animal! At daylight, I almost accept my cage, but at night time, father, I would bite your throats, and bath in your blood! Doesn't every animal feel the same about their keepers? All birds hate fowlers."
Her sugar eyes cry sweet honey on to her father’s mouth. She just cries and cries, until the man can't swallow any more and he begins to choke from the golden liquid.
"Father… Oh, father…" cries the girl. The old man squirms in his bed, rumpling the sheets with his kicking legs. Then he dies. A wind arrives, picking up the girl. It carries and puts her down onto her mother’s forehead, and soon the honey fills her mouth too.
Door handles made of dead bees – rotting feathers in the pillow, somewhere in the night a long sausage, like a deadly snake, coils around a steak hammer. The blind girl keeps prodding the walls, and soon, she finds the door – crawling outside into the freezing night, she leaves her footsteps in the snow.
"How sweet is the air, how big is the world!" she yells. Her long, blonde hair reaches up and tickles the clouds’ bellies. The sky laughs up two flying horses, which begin to chase the girl from above.
"Look, what an ugly pale mole crawled out from her hole!" neighs one of them.
"Don't be so rude, Freckles, look, she brought us presents!" They slope downward, and kick the blind girl with their hooves, who falls on to her back.
"Bon à petite!" whinnies Freckles, biting out one of the sugar cubes from the screaming girl's face.
"The lord's supper can't be better!" says the other, the sugar crackles between its teeth.
"Such a sweet girl, I hope she doesn't catch a cold!" laughs Freckles, coughing dark worms into her face.
"A little chill not ever killed someone!" tells the other. Then they spring to the air, and disappear in the sky.
"Oh, father. Oh, mother." stutters the girl, watching the insides of the sleeping cow, trying to read out her fortune. "The ugly germs found me, like you always said they would. My throat… It hurts. And fever set my thoughts on fire. I wish I had just stayed in my room, I wish you were here to take care of me…"
The girl doesn't stand up, she just lies there, as if she were in her comfy little bed. The snow begins to fall. Soon, a cold blanket grows around her body.
When morning arrives, she's just a bulge, a puckering on the white canvas. Her eyes inside of the cow are not glinting anymore, they are motionless marbles. The cowbell rings sadly on the animal's neck, like it wants to call the villagers together for a funeral. But no one comes; everyone stays inside their warm, comfy homes. In the sky, the old boards of Heaven’s wooden floor crack, as a ghost keeps knocking on it with its weak little fists from beneath.
BIO:
My name is Zoltán Komor, I'm 33 years old and from Hungary and I write surreal short stories. I started to translate some of my works to English, and published in Caliban Online, Thrice Fiction, The Phantom Drift, Bizarro Central, etc. I have three short story collections published by Burning Bulb Publishing, Morbid Books and StrangeHouse Books.