At Optimize Optical, Dr. Gray points her flashlight into my pupils. I roll my eyes upward, sideways, down. “Everything looks normal,” she says.
I roll my head toward Sheila. “See?”
“Normal? She’s bleeding from her eyeballs,” Sheila says.
“Hm,” Dr. Gray says. “Was there an inciting incident for your bleeding?”
I pretend to think. “Not that I can think of,” I say.
“There was something,” Sheila says. “Something with the bartender. She kept staring at this bartender.”
“Maybe it’s better if you wait outside,” Dr. Gray tells Sheila. Sheila grabs her bag from under the chair and exits the office.
Dr. Gray taps her lips. I wonder if she had the surgery, if I’m as beautiful to her as she is to me. Maybe she doesn’t believe Sheila because she looks too perfect. It’s hard to believe bad news that comes wrapped in a nice package. Bad news should be delivered by the ugly. That only seems fair.
Behind Dr. Gray, the white walls are peppered with motivational posters. One features a giraffe and says If you think lovely thoughts, you will always look lovely.
“Let’s do a test,” Dr. Gray says. From her desk, she pulls a stack of photographs, flips the first toward me.
“Fox,” I say.
Flip.
“Petunia.”
Flip.
“Swan.”
Flip.
“Boy.”
“Alive or dead?”
“Sorry?”
“Is the boy alive or dead?”
In the photograph, a schoolboy’s smile pins his cherry-tinted cheeks. “Alive.”
Dr. Gray’s expression is inaccessible as she places the photograph down. She wears the same calm smile she had after the lens implantation.
“And this?”
She holds a photograph of an overturned bus, the metal of its sides glinting in the sunlight. Crawling out are four smiling people. A part of me senses that I’ve seen this photograph before.
Dr. Gray taps the photograph. “What do you see?” she asks.
“People exiting a bus.”
“How do they look?”
I squint at the photograph until my vision pulses. I can see a flame flickering toward a girl’s outstretched arm—but then it’s gone, replaced by a line of orange sunflowers.
“How are they supposed to look?”
“Tell me what you see.”
“They’re smiling.”
Dr. Gray nods, tosses the photographs onto the desk. “I’m going to need you to come back for more tests.”
After Sheila drops me off at home, I pour a glass of wine and stare at myself in the mirror. I peer into my gorgeous eyeballs. I peel off my clothes, watch the wave of my hips break when I move, watch the rolling constellations of freckles on my shoulders. Drink another glass. Wonder if this was how my husband saw me. Wonder how he knew to love me. Wonder how it was so simple for him.
Sheila texts me, asking me to call her. I set my phone to silent, dig through my closet. All black, even before the mourning, except for one pink dress that squeezes my middle and washes out my skin. But when I put it on this time, I’m a vision. I walk through the mist to the bar I said I’d never return to, smiling at myself in the reflection of each oily puddle.
Everything is beautiful, but it feels like there’s a dead fish rotting in my chest. I can almost smell it if I stand too still.