Eye of the Beholder

Hello again and thank you to all who have been reading my blog. I've been sending out query letters for some of my short stories and am still waiting to hear back from the last query I sent out to an agent. Hopefully, something will come from all of this. I appreciate all of you who have taken time to by my book from Kindle and I hope I will be able to point you to a place to buy a hard copy in the near future. Until then, I thought I'd share a short story I've written entitled Eye of the Beholder. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that you will comment below and share the link with your friends on Facebook and anywhere else you feel is appropriate.

And now, without further ado, here is the story.

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER BY: SAM REESE

You’ve never looked so beautiful. I know I’ve said those words before, and I meant them. Every time. Like when, after being friends for years, we went on our first date. I still remember how you looked when I asked you out: nervous, unsure, awkward even. You never were completely comfortable in your own skin, but you were always so striking, the way your ebony hair seemed to both clash and mesh with those cerulean eyes. God, you could never see how flawless you were.

But that night…that night your beauty was beyond belief. Remember how you tried canceling on me when I came to pick you up? Your mother said you’d had an accident and I immediately thought the worst. There I was, all of 17, and my entire world was gone thinking you’d been maimed-killed even-in some horrendous accident. Then, when she told me what really happened, how your brother had thrown one of his toy cars and hit you in the eye…well, I laughed. I couldn’t help it, the image was so ridiculous. And let’s be honest, your brother has always been a brat.

I remember I went up to your room and knocked on the door, told you that it was me, and you told me to go away. “I’m hideous,” you said. I told you that was impossible; black eye or not, you were still the most beautiful girl in the world. And I was right. When you finally opened the door, you’d never looked so beautiful.

Remember when you were pregnant with Katie? I remember the glow on your face in the beginning, your smile beaming from your face and lighting the world around you. I on the other hand was terrified. I knew I was going to be a lousy father but you never doubted me at all. You were always there, telling me things about myself that I didn’t believe at first, but the more you said them the more I wanted to believe them. You were, in so many ways, my rock and my anchor. Thank you for that.

When you got into your last trimester, you had gotten huge. Your ankles were swollen and so was the rest of you. Remember that day you tried getting up from the couch, grunting and straining and then collapsing in frustration? Tears began pouring from your eyes and you screamed, a heart-rending scream if ever there were one. I came running into the room on two wheels, terrified that you’d hurt yourself and the baby.

“What’s wrong honey?” I asked you, pulling you to me and caressing your hair.

“I’m so fat, and ugly, and I smell. I can’t bathe properly, I eat like a pig, horse, and cow combined. My feet are swollen, my hair’s a wreck, our house looks like a bomb went off in it, I can’t work…” Then you burst into a sobbing fit, unable to hold the sorrow back any longer. I took you to the bathroom, stripped you of all your clothes, and bathed you from head to toe. Remember that? Then I put you in bed, kissed your eyes and whispered into your ears, “Sweetheart, you’ve never looked so beautiful.”

The worst news in my life came when we learned you had breast cancer. My world crumbled around me, thinking that if we didn’t beat this thing we’d never get to grow old together. I think the worst news in your life came when they said you had to have a mastectomy. I remember you just sat at the kitchen table that day, staring at absolutely nothing, looking like a man who had just been a participant at Tet. I didn’t know what to say to you because to me your breasts, while certainly enjoyable, were not you. And I loved you. But I suppose in your mind they were an integral part of your being, as if you were no longer you without both of them.

After the surgery when you were allowed to come home, remember how you wouldn’t let me see you undress? You told me to go away, to turn off the lights, to wait until you were done in the bathroom before coming in. you cried constantly; never was there a moment when your eyes were dry it seemed. After two weeks I couldn’t take it anymore, and I determined that this thing would not beat us. Remember how angry you were when I burst in on you in the shower? You screamed at me, cursed my name, made accusations about the legitimacy of my birth. It was the first time I had seen you naked since the mastectomy, and I couldn’t stop staring.

“Stop staring at it! For God’s sake, don’t look at me like I’m some circus freak on display for your amusement!” You snatched your towel down, pulling the rack with it. You stumbled out of the shower and as I caught you I saw the hatred and pain in your eyes.

“What? Shocked at how ugly your wife is?”

“You’ve never looked so beautiful,” I said, and then I kissed you full on the lips. That night we made love, and I swear it was the greatest of our lives.

Now here we are. We had a few good years of no cancer, but when it came back, this time in your brain, it was horrendous. Every night, I prayed to God for mercy, for grace, for healing. I guess I got the first and third, because you didn’t suffer long and you’re not suffering from the disease anymore. I stand here, looking at you for the last time, this box cradling you in its arms as you wait to be lowered into the earth from whence we all came, and all I can think is…

…you’ve never looked so beautiful.

THE END

In Memoriam

The other day was my uncle’s birthday. He would have been 54. My uncle committed suicide a few years ago, and it was the first time suicide had been close enough to breathe its rancid breath in my face. I remember a few years before my uncle’s death, my best friend’s father committed suicide as well, but having not known his father all that well-I probably saw him a total of 15 times in my entire life-it struck me but it did not hurt me. I even began writing a novel entitled Silence which would have been very loosely based on that particular suicide. I reasoned in my mind that I could ask my best friend for permission or-barring that-I could just pretend it had nothing to do with it and that “any correlation to actual events is purely coincidental”. But when my uncle died, the evil demon threw me to the ground, pounced on my stomach, and spat its bile in my face. Never had I felt so helpless, so out of sorts. I could not write a novel about suicide, because it felt like I would be capitalizing on my uncle’s death.

You see, my uncle was not the “typical” suicide, if such a thing exists. He was a happy man, proud of his family. Yes, he’d had setbacks as we all do and while I’m sure the thoughts to “just end it all” were there-as they are, I suspect, for all of us in times of desperation-but my uncle was a strong man and a kind man, willing to give anyone the shirt off his back with a smile and a pat and a “let me know if you need anything else”. And he would mean it, every time. I remember a man came to the viewing, that most morbid of ceremonies which precedes burial, and said that he had been involved in a car accident with my uncle not too long before and that my uncle had made such an impression on him that when he saw his name in the paper he felt he had to come pay his respects to “the kindest man I ever had the pleasure of meeting”. I think over 300 people attended the viewing, and I couldn’t tell you how many were at the funeral. I remember thinking, “If he could only see all these people wailing and gnashing their teeth at the unfairness of a life lost at the hands of this wicked being Suicide he would never have given in. He would have fought and kicked and screamed and done everything in his power to live.” And I guess that still holds true to me, for it gives me comfort.

There is an old tradition that if a loved one has gone off to war or sea or just away, you light a candle and place it in the window as a sign that you are waiting for them, and that they are always welcome back into your home. I’d have bought every candle in existence and lit it for my uncle if I had known he was at war with Suicide. But I didn’t; no one really did, for Suicide is a cunning enemy. It wears down slowly, assaulting the mind and causing it to become diseased. It begins in various ways, but it always ends the same if fought alone. No man is an island so the saying goes, and nowhere is it more evident than in the aftermath of a suicide.

I miss my uncle terribly with each passing day. I think of his infectious laugh, his smile that never seemed to stop. I think of the advice he gave me throughout life. I think of the time my cousin and I shook his beer until I thought it would explode, placed it back on the table, and then laughed as it did explode all over his face. And I think of how instead of becoming angry, he simply laughed and went to clean himself off. Was my uncle a bad man? He had his flaws, of that I am sure. And I am also sure that in my memories he has been romanticized, for memory is an untrustworthy thing when recollecting those we love. But to say he was bad would be to say that the Grand Canyon is small. My uncle was a good man and he tried to treat everyone with fairness and respect. Some would say that he is in Hell, being tormented for committing an unpardonable sin. But I say he is in Heaven, looking down on his sons with pride and smiling at his family, every last one of us. Because I can’t imagine the God Who sent His Son to die for humanity’s sins sending a man who loved Him so much to Hell simply because he lost the battle with one of Lucifer’s most seductive minions. And if I am wrong, and that is how god is, well, I choose my uncle over him any day.

I think I’ll start working on Silence again…