Iridology

It's late. Red rimmed eyes stare back at me, and I cannot deny they are my own. I stare deeply into the mirror, watching as my eyes contract as light from a passing car fills the room and then slowly dilate again when the room returns to dark.

I watch for it, the twisting deep within the pupils, the expansions of the lines in the irises, the bleeding of the veins within the whites. When I blink, I hold my breath. My eyelashes catch against each other, and only when my eyes are open again do I breathe.

Another car drives by, headlights filling the room with a sickly yellow, the beam scattering against the mirror. I blink again, hard, and when I open my eyes, I see... nothing strange.

So I back away from the mirror. Pinch the bridge of my nose and screw up my face, squeezing my eyes shut tight before sitting down on the bed and relaxing. They won't open tonight, I tell myself. It won't come through tonight.

But I have to be vigilant. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and I cannot risk them opening.

--

The next night, the rain turning the headlights a softer shade, I return to the mirror. I sit on the floor and scoot close to the glass and again I watch, staring into myself.

My eyes are a portal, a black void surrounded by the webbings and canyons of color. I see a fleck of brown, a slightly different shade from the rest of the iris, and I can't remember when I first started seeing it there.

I was taught a long time ago that you can look at the lines and colors of your eyes and see the trauma done to your body. A spot indicates a broken bone or an illness of the blood, a new line could mean a tumor or lurking sickness. I lean in, my nose pressing against the cold glass, searching the lines and webs and gradients, searching for the sign of how I broke my ankle the summer I turned twelve. Is it that fleck there? Or is it the color shift around the base of my left pupil? Are those lines from when my appendix had festered and burst and my mother balked at bringing me to the hospital, or is it the curved shape beside them?

I wonder, if someone can look at an iris and see every terrible thing done to my body, what would they see if they looked past the colors? If someone looked into the gaping black hole of my pupils, the windows to my soul- would they see something that squirmed and twisted there? If the iris tells a story, what does the pupil say?

My breath fogs the glass. It dulls the reflection from the kitchen light against my eye, a bright white square curved against its surface.

It was my mother who taught me that- that you can track physical trauma in the iris. My mother taught many things, with all of the crystals and folk remedies that she gave to the other parents on the playground, the friends that she made that thought like her. They would swap cures of vinegar and quartz for my peers' swollen tonsils and childhood rashes, and she stood over it all, proclaiming herself as a true expert. All those parents adored her, trusted her, and always congratulated me on being blessed with such a wonderful and dedicated mother.

My mother believed in her cures so strongly, so violently- was so certain that the doctors were wrong about everything, and that it was her maps of the eyes, her own study of iridology, that was right. She told me about everything that was wrong with me- treated it herself with cleanses and fastings and homemade oils. She knew what was best, because she could see when I was sick, when I was sad, see who I was through the windows to my soul, as easy as seeing the state of a home through the living room windows.

I saw things too, in my mother's eyes. There were no etchings on her irises of the poisonings she'd done to herself as she 'treated' her illnesses, but I saw the rage and embarrassment of all those pains and failures plainly in her pupils, the windows to her soul. It was a deep and thrashing thing, that she managed to hide away when we were with the other parents on the playground.

It started simply, a shadow inside the blackness of her pupils that twisted into a shape that was vicious and vindictive. A young mother had challenged her, called her cures dangerous and her methods of iridology false. She called my mother a fraud, said that she was not better than anyone else for her home remedies, said that all these would leave a black mark on her soul.

My mother seemed to take this challenge in stride, and did not mourn this woman's departure from her group of followers. She told the others that this young mother had fallen prey to lies and falsehoods, and that if she wanted to go receive poisons from men in white coats, then that was her choice. All the parents that stayed were in awe of the way she stood her ground and her truth.

But in that moment, I knew my mother was filled with nothing but a sense of rage and superiority, a burning need to be right. The challenge only made her dig her heels in further, and it became a fixation, a need, a desire to prove that her soul was clean. She was seized with that need, and it consumed her.

At night she would sit and stare into the bathroom mirror for hours, holding the curtains that were her eyelids open, prying them apart until they were red and dry and her vision went fuzzy and unfocused. She'd sit there, waiting for it, calling to it. She would lean in so closely to the mirror that her breath would fog her reflection, and grip her eyelids so tightly they would bruise. It stretched the iris and pushed at the cornea, swinging it outward like a portal. At first, it was just the fingers, tiny and shining, with spindly joints and sharply jutting knuckles probing forwards. The nails scratched as the fingers twisted, leaving new dark furrows on her irises. They pulled at her cornea, scraping to gain a footing, leaving thin white lines like a scratch on glass. She'd keep her eyes pried wide open, for the long minutes and hours it would take for the fingers to start to show.

Slowly, the fingers pushed through further, and hands slid out from the black portals. They pushed the cornea outwards, until it split and broke, the fingers scrabbling at her waterline, her eyelashes, tiny furrows made in her eyelids. Arms as spindly and jutting as the hands snaked out from the blackness, distorting its roundness. The palms slapped against the whites of her eyes, and the veins bled.

She took to wearing sunglasses when we were with the other parents, hiding her cracked eyes and twisted, mangled pupils.

As I grew older and she fell down more and more rabbit holes, we both watched as she let her soul crawl out of her. It clung to her eyebrows, squirming through, twisting as she whimpered and sobbed. Its body was smooth, yet haggard, emaciated from her long years. She held her eyes open for hours in front of the mirror, all the while telling herself and I that this was for her own health.

--

The night after the appendectomy, as I lay in the hospital room and listened to my mother scream at the nurses for letting the men in white coats take out my festering appendix, I kept my eyes shut tight. She swore at them, furious at them for insinuating that her detoxes and cleanses hadn't helped me, that she had only hurt me when she denied the doctors. She used the same arguments she had against that first mother to challenge her, her voice shrill, but the nurses stood their ground for me. There was silence for a long while after they did.

And then the door to my room burst inwards, and my eyes snapped open as my mother rushed in, crossing the room in an instant. She grabbed my shoulders and shook me, my hospital gown and my stitches ripping open. Her sunglasses slipped off her face, her eyes were wide and manic, and I saw the mangled shreds of her irises, the waving and grasping hands of her soul prying her pupils open wide. Its head pushed through, followed by thin shoulders and a torso made of razor-sharp ribs and a bulging spine. She winced as a flailing hand caught her tear duct and tore the flesh open, tears mingling with blood, mingling with a clear jelly that oozed down her face.

She gripped my cheeks, pulling my face close to hers, as her soul fought to crawl further out. Its hips slipped through, and her irises split entirely, the already mangled flesh sliding down the sclera until it pooled at the bottom of her eyes and the shattered portal in the center was wide and open, and her soul no longer had any trouble fitting through.

It crawled forward, fingers gripping her face for traction, long and spindly legs sliding out from her pupils, until it hung from her forehead. Her eyes were dull and empty. She clung to me tightly, fingers digging into my skin, her breath hot on my face. The jelly from her eyes landed on my arms, my hands, coating me.

The blackened soul turned its head, and its bones crunched like broken glass. It looked at me with my mother's eyes, large and bright, boring into my own. Its face contorted into her smile, baring her teeth. It reached towards me, hands slippery with blood and vitreous, reaching to touch my eyes with those sharp and spindly fingers.

"This is the cleanse." It whispered in my mother's voice. "This is supposed to happen. This is all of the bad things leaving. This is cleansing the windows of my soul."

I slammed my eyes shut and screamed, screamed until the nurses came and pulled her off of me. She was limp in their arms, her soul already gone, the windows shattered.

--

At the funeral, everyone was so, so sorry for my loss. All the parents from the playground patted my shoulders and embraced me, telling me they would miss her so much. One of her best friends patted my cheek and held me for a long time, despite my apprehensions, whispering in my ear.

She told me she'd miss my mother, miss how strong and smart she was, and how she had always taken such good care of me.

She told me she saw my mother in me.

She said I had my mother's eyes.

--

It's late, and it's been years since the funeral. I stare at my red rimmed eyes in the mirror, waiting, needing to know when it happens to me. I can still feel the slick vitreous on my skin, hear the scrape of her soul against the softness of her eyes, as she let it squirm out of her in the name of a cleanse. I am... consumed by it- the fixation, the need, the desire.

The eyes are the windows to the soul, and I watched my mother's awful soul crawl and scrape its way through them, the windows that are the pupils, the black voids that revealed everything about her.

I am not my mother.

But I have my mother's eyes.