i had two eyes once

I had two eyes once. They were blue, I think, or green or gray or hazel or possibly all four, a patchwork of sorts of mixed blood and blurred family lines. Mestiza. My skin was brown the way coffee mixes with milk, the way someone adds just a dollop more than expected of cream into bitter cocoa, how sometimes I, either too far gone into a daydream or too busy arranging pots and dishes onto a silver platter, would let the cornbread bake just moment too long in the oven. I had two eyes once -- in the days where my greatest concern was ensuring that the master of the house had his coffee and breakfast every morning, when I would watch almost wistfully the corn and cotton harvesters toss their gatherings into baskets taller than I, surely more profitable than I, most definitely holding greater freedom than I could ever achieve in their long journeys to the processing plants in the next plantation over. I was fifteen when I was bought and brought into the house. Had never worked a day in the fields outside in my life; I was too pretty for that, no, too fair-skinned, too light-eyed, so steeped in the in-between of the similarities and differences that separated my master and his other slaves that it was almost odd, it seemed, watching me run errands around the pristine, columned house as if I were a common servant. I supposed I looked a little like a piece of antique furniture by the way he stared at me, what with my blue-green-gray-hazel eyes and strange, not quite completely dark or light complexion. A trophy.

I had a child once, too. This particular adventurer, even beneath her thickly rimmed spectacles and layers of worn robes and scarves, looks a little like I thought she would be: short, stubborn-looking, with corkscrew curls and freckled, sun-kissed skin. My thousand eyes lazily regard her as she trembles amidst the bodies of her fellow peers.

I’m still picking my teeth with a particularly sharpened thigh bone when I ask: “And what is it that has brought something as young as you here, my child? I must admit that I do not receive many visitors such as yourself very often -- not live ones, anyway.” Her expression catches between something like confusion and fear behind the blood-splattered spectacles; I laugh, forcing her knee-deep in the carnage again. “You’ve survived the arrival at the gates of the world and this guardian has decided to spare you, young one. Isn’t that lucky? Now, before I lose my patience --” My maw snaps shut, grinning, an inch from her face “ -- SPEAK.”

She manages to catch something -- a small journal, how quaint -- out of a particularly large pocket as she presses herself into the red, wide-eyed “O-of course, of course!” She adjusts her glasses on the bridge of her nose, fumbling with the dampened pages. “I’ve spent a good portion of my higher schooling researching the gates and their beasts -- angel, I mean to say, the proper term is an archetype of such -- and I do know the proper terms of seeking questions and answers heavenly beings such as yourself, ma’am. Give and take, it always is, it always is. And I believe I’ve written quite a few notes about you, so if you’ll just let me find it ...”

Noisy. Irksome. Now completely engrossed in acquiring a greater amount of knowledge to expel from her incessant, rambling mouth. Somehow I can’t bring myself to devour this strange, cheery human -- not with her bouncing mass of blood-matted curls, not with the delicate dappling of freckles just over her cheekbones. Especially not with dimples I could remember as clear as the light of day, of the thousands upon thousands of inscriptions keeping me trapped within the crumbling walls of the sanctuary, of each and every nook and cranny I'd gotten used to accommodating with my colossal, feathered frame over the past two or three hundred years that must have passed since the death of my daughter. I'd lost track of time after that point. The noisy human pauses at a particularly dog-eared page, genuinely smiling now like Clementine, like Clementine, like Clementine, and I see my baby girl for a moment, bright, warm, crying and calling out my name as I traded my humanity for her mortality in that split moment between myself and my baby and the cotton gin and that winged humanoid thing, gently cradling the edge of my chin as he offered to --

The rambling human is rambling again, announcing questions and pieces of history as if she hadn't just watched the rest of her noisome expedition group fall to story-tall jaws before her eyes. Hadn't traveled thousands of miles to the middle of a mountainous nowhere and survived a near-death experience not to receive one or two more notes for her research journals, I suppose.

I decide to listen.