All she could do was inject the aqueous fluid from her eye into the tiny glass snow globe she had drained and refilled with saline. She felt the loss like a gulf opening between them. She thought the process would be more painful, the planet more difficult to extract from the universe of her body, but it just slipped out of her like a tear, all that salt whispering away before she could think to say wait. She slid the needle in so easily it frightened her. The blood! The carnage! Just a little pinch. Imagine the injuries my ancestors must have had and healed from imagine their wonder in looking up into the mouth of a saber tooth tiger. Did you know the human eye heals faster than almost any other part of the human body? An anatomical marvel produced by millions of years of evolution. While taping open her eyelids, she soothed the crystals with simple chatter. She could do much the same with only a hypodermic needle and the eye patch from last Halloween’s costume, which would help speed recovery. According to the internet, ophthalmologists routinely poked holes under patient eyelids to drain the eye of excess fluid and, thus, relieve the pressure that caused glaucoma. No, she would have to extract the planet on her own. She could not allow scientists to poke and prod and strike a tuning fork to determine the exact frequency necessary to shatter the crystals from within and eliminate the enemy. That in the absence of predators to keep it in line humanity viewed all other intelligence as an existential threat to its self-image. Through her, they had seen too many movies about encounters with extraterrestrial life they knew that their sentience would be a death sentence. No petri dishes, no tuning forks, no experiments. She didn’t know any ophthalmologists, nor any crystallographers, and when she thought of looking for one, the crystal bodies vibrated with panic, broken prisms in a microscopic lattice. It was painfully obvious in the way their bodies hummed at night, that sullen way they poked at the crumbling pillars in the great halls, the way kids kick at pine cones, knowing how much potential for life they once held.Īfter so many years, she knew what they were thinking: More light. No one would say it out loud, but she knew. Her crystals were outgrowing their castles. All the little pieces lodging in the planet’s crust. Go outside, the crystals would shout when she stared at the screen too long, and once outside she would have to stay there an hour, maybe two, to feed them. Only when starving would they eat the light from her phone, that pale ethereal glow providing no nutrients, no sustenance-just a desperate act of survival. Sunlight was best, then moonshine, then fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen. They fed on light through her pupil, synthesizing crystalline energies. If she closed her eyes and listened, she could hear them communicate with each other. The crystals absorbed it all and played her life back to her to say: We’re here. Her haphazard attempts to mirror her mother’s Spanish. Only the sound was part of her, she realized-the first beat in a rhythm she had been unknowingly teaching these crystals as they coalesced in the spaces between words and breaths. A pure, high note so sudden it woke her from her slumber and conjured the image of a miniature flautist performing deep in the canal of her ear. Late at night, while her parents slept, she often lay awake and listened to the dense water solidify itself, the salts forming crystals, the crystals becoming pillars in a great, cavernous hall populated at first by no one, and then: music. Only the gentle sway of an ocean pushing and pulling against the aqueous humors of her left eye. This story is part of our special telepathy issue, Diabolical Thoughts.Ĭlick here for the entire Diabolical Thoughts transmission.įor the first thirteen years of her life, the planet was silent.
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