Jack Tucker loosened his collar. It had been tough work but he had single handedly saved every job in his department. It had cost him nights and nights and weekend upon weekend but he finally managed the budget in such a way to keep the vultures in human resources off for at least another year.

The office had thrown a pizza party in his honor and he had stuffed himself unabashedly. He’d earned it. The party was fun but what he really wanted was to get back to his wife. She had been more than patient with him these last couple of weeks. She understood the situation. She’d been laid off for four months herself.

Jack sprang out of the elevator and made his way out the door. The bus stop was about a hundred yards away and if he hurried, he could make the four-thirty stop. If not, he was stuck for another forty-five minutes. 

As he reached the park, separating his office from the bus stop, he could see the large, yellow and white, city bus en route to the stop.  Jack took to a dead run and with a smirk, reminded himself that he was doing it for the planet.

Today had been an Ozone Alert day. When the pollution level gets high, the city issues the alert in hopes that people will stay out of their cars and use public transportation. Though he seemed to be the only one to take part, Jack did it gladly. When the final flood, nuclear winter or earthquake happened, at least he’d be able to say he had done his part to prevent it.

Jack hit the bus stop a second before the bus did. The three other passengers boarded first but when Jack lifted his leg to the step, the driver suddenly slammed the door shut. Jack almost fell back. He looked through the dirty, Plexiglas door and could make out the face of the driver, who was staring back with a grim sneer.

The bus pulled away and Jack felt a cold shiver run down his spine. Before he could figure out what to do for the next forty-five minutes, to occupy his time until another bus came, something fell from the sky and hit him in the forehead. A stream of white rolled over his eye.

He looked up and saw an enormous flock of birds circling overhead. He wiped the white bird feces from his face and sat down on a bench. When he looked up, he saw a woman and her daughter heading his way. The woman made eye contact and suddenly all the color went out of her face. She hurriedly turned around and just about ran off, dragging the daughter behind.

Jack turned around but he couldn’t see what had frightened the woman so much. He shrugged and decided to look up and watch the birds.

As his head cocked, he saw thirty of forty birds heading directly towards him. He screamed and held his briefcase up over his face. Then from both sides, birds, black ravens, flew up from under the leather case and began nipping at his face. They were going straight for the eyes.

Jack tried to swing the case but a force, like unseen hands, pried it from his grasp and it was lost in the flurry of feathers. One by one, the birds began pecking their beaks into the soft white of his eyes. He couldn’t pull them away fast enough. He could feel their mouths, like tiny jackhammers, pounding into his face.

“Oh God!” Jack screamed, he felt two pops and the birds, as quickly as they’d flown in, flew off, taking his eyes with them.

Jack rolled off of the bench and onto the rough sidewalk below. He was holding his hands inches from the bloody, hollowed slots in his head, careful not to touch the painful wounds. “Oh God! Somebody help me!”

Nobody was coming. Jack kept screaming and flailing on the ground. What the hell had just happened? Why had birds pecked out his eyes? Screams like never before tore through his vocal chords.

“Please somebody help me!” He twitched and bled to an empty audience. Was anyone even around? What could he have possibly done to deserve something like this? Jack wasn’t sure he believed in the God but he definitely believed in something. Now that something had just deemed fit to tear his eyes out.

“Calm down Jack.”

A voice he didn’t recognize entered his ear. Immediately Jack was calm.  “Please help me.”

“I have not come to help you.”

“Please, birds….birds came and….and they pecked out my eyes.” Jack said, in horror at the realization. If he had eyes they would have been crying.

“I know that Jack. Do you know who I am?”

“No but please call 911.”

“I am Ryan Priest.”

“Do I know you?”

“I’m your author.” I said looking down at him. He wasn’t twitching anymore, merely lying there, as if dead on the ground, with a red trickle still issuing forth from the wounds. The grass all around was bright green and uniform, like you see only on television commercials, the concrete roads were all clean, looking swept and polished.

“My author?”

“Yes. You are a character in a story I am writing. Birds have just pecked out your eyes. I created you, your life and even the birds.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You do now.”

“I believe you. Why have you done this to me?”

“It was your role.”

“Please give me back my eyes.”

“I don’t have them but here.”

Jack’s pain suddenly stopped. He sat up on the park bench helped by my hand.

“Now we can talk.” I smirked.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to write a tragedy.”

“Well you’ve done it. Can I have my eyes back now?”

“No, that would be breaking the rules. It’s not in this story that you get your eyes back. The story is about them being pecked out.”

Jack didn’t like that answer. He began sobbing tearlessly and even started praying to Jesus to give him his sight back.

“Jesus isn’t writing this story, I am.” I said to him and swatted him on his head. I got blood on my hand but I rewrote it so that I didn’t. Have to keep clean.

“Why would you do something like this?”

“Because it’s art.”

“This doesn’t feel like art. It feels plenty real to me.”

“Of course it does. You’re a part who can’t see the whole.” I said absently. The park and bus stop were nice settings, they served my purpose at the time but now I wanted something different. So, Jack and I were sitting in a coffee shop and I was drinking coffee. The patrons and employees both shrieked and ran when two men appeared out of nowhere, one with bloody holes for eyes. I smirked at them and just for shits gave one of them the flu.

“What is artful about this?”

“The fact that it’s so sad or funny or both, I don’t know. Several things are often both. The way you scream, the look on your face, things I didn’t write but nevertheless will be present in the minds of the readers. You’re different every time a new set of eyes hits the page, pardon the pun.” I said, as I sipped my cup of coffee, but since this is an umpteenth draft, I change it to hot chocolate.

“Why write something like this, why not write stories about happy things, and good things happening to good people? Good happy people.” And I suppose he had a point.

“This is what I do. I create people, try to flush them out as realistically as possible and then do things to them. Like a child playing with toys.”

“Toys don’t feel pain.”

“Not to you but then again you don’t feel pain in my world. People may read about you but you’re just fiction to them. You’re not real and so neither is your pain. By the way I took your pain away at the bus stop. Physically you are in none, just mental anguish. Will your wife still love you? Will you lose your job? All of the questions a man must ask himself when he gets his eyes ripped out by rabid birds.”

“If you’re not going to give me my eyes then erase me. Delete me. Do whatever you have to do. It’s not fair. I can’t live this way, your pain puppet.”

“Pain puppet…I kind of like that. I might keep it.” I smirked.

“What kind of existence is this? To be brought back time and time again simply to be maimed?”

“Do you remember this happening before?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then what makes you think you’ll remember it this time?”  I asked but he didn’t have a snappy rejoinder. “And let me ask you. Is it you? Was it you? Will it be you next time?”

“What on Earth are you talking about!?”

“Well the next time someone reads this story, will it be the same you? With every reader, you’ll look completely different, the events will unfold completely differently. This story is only 2,225 words. But every one of your readers will add so much more for themselves. So, my question is, will it be You or do You only exist when I read the story?”

“…” He says, because this one, my dear reader, is for you to fill in.

“I will say, it all depends on how we define ourselves. If we’re some conglomeration of other people’s thoughts and ideals about us, independent of our own direct input, then yes.” I said taking a drink of my hot chocolate. It was very chocalatey, like you never really get at those places, and it didn’t leave a grainy feeling on my tongue. The whip cream didn’t dissolve into tiny curds and the perfect portion slipped into my mouth with each sip.

I continued, “But what a horrible world that would be if we were only what others thought of us as. I mean, it seems absurd when we put it in these terms yet we still choose to label others, to try and define them for ourselves rather than experiencing them for what they are, unique sparks of individuality in a universe where every single molecule conforms.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Jack was really just worried about his eyes.

“That’s okay, someday some reader is going to come along who does and you’re going to be instantly endeared to them.” I said.

“You’ve got some ego on you!” One of the coffee shop waitresses interjected. They’d been listening in from across the room.

“So what? If it bothers you so much, go write your own story where I don’t.” I turned back to Jack,

“My eyes!” Always the eyes with this guy. 

“They’re gone. You won’t be erased. It’s not part of the story. Face it Jack, bad things happen to people, bad things in life, bad things in art. It really makes no difference they’re both the same. They feed off one another…How does all of that sound? Good? Literary?”

Then Jack started pining for his eyes again completely unable to accept his fate as I dictated it.

“Just tell me why it had to be me.”

“In passing, I once told a buddy that if he ever read one of my stories where someone got their eyes gauged out then that the character would have to be an asshole.”

“I’m an asshole?”

“Oh no Jack, you’re the salt of the Earth. I created you that way. No, you see, the second I had said it I, of course, thought of a way to write a story where a nice man gets his eyes pecked out and well, here we are.” I admitted.

“How can you be so detached about all of this? Please it means nothing to you, put me back together.”

“Look Jack, I can’t give your eyes back. It doesn’t work that way. The only thing I can do is suffer with you. We all suffer for our creations.”

Before Jack could answer birds broke through every window and attacked my eyes with a fiercer frenzy than they’d done his. They tore the eyes clean out and one bird even took a chunk of my nose for good measure.

So there we were each rolling on the floor of the coffee shop clutching for eyes we’d never have again. The artist and his slave, the character and his slave, both in blind agony.

The employees called the ambulance and Jack finally got the “help” he wanted. We shared the ambulance on the way to the hospital but once the ambulance stopped, the hospital was gone. I didn’t feel like writing it. The world around us began to fall away too and soon it was just Jack and me, surrounded by nothingness. Here his eyes didn’t matter.

“You know what’s about to happen right Jack?”

“Yes.”

“You’re okay with it?”

“Yes.”

“Here it goes.”

“Mr. Priest…”

“Call me Ryan.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

# # #

Ryan Priest is a mad, former screenwriter and current roustabout. He promises to be your friend if you’ll be his friend. Unless you’re weird, then he’ll be your friend either way. www.ryanpriest.net

Photo: James Pond