Green Eyes

Green Eyes



The wind slammed into me, forcing me sideways off the pathway and onto the cobbled road. It whipped up the drops of rain into icy spirals that raced up the street, like ghostly sentinels seeking out victims to pierce with their cold. I slowly edged my way forward, holding an arm out in front of me in a futile effort to ward away the endless torrent of water being swept off the pavement. Leaning forward to compensate for the buffeting storm, I pulled my pathetic raincoat around my neck and wished that I lived closer to my school.



I was lucky to have a school to go to though. I was lucky I had a home to come back to. Everyday there were less and less places in the city it was safe to go to, and I knew that soon it wouldn’t be safe to walk to school. But some things were always the same no matter where you were. The same itching, impatient hands just waiting for an excuse to pick you up by the neck and shake you, not stopping until whatever it was that made you so different, so offensive is left in a stinking heap on the ground. The sneering mouths, curling in distaste as if at some great affront, some heinous offense that was going unpunished. But it was the eyes that were the worst. It was the eyes that haunted your every hour, conscious or otherwise. The side-ways glances and narrowed brows that follow your every move, waiting for you to do something, anything, wrong, to give them the slightest excuse. Windows to places of such unabashed hate you clutch at your chest as if to make sure your heart is still beating. Under such a gaze it is easy to succumb, to fall at their feet begging for forgiveness, a pardon for your obvious inferiority. How can so many people be wrong?



I had almost reached the street where my father owned a small shop, a rarity now for someone of our family’s ‘persuasion’. He would be angry that I was out so late but I was looking forward to a respite from the rain. It wasn’t my fault that I had to stay behind cleaning the classroom again. Along the way I passed other, grander shops, each with intricately patterned curtains and of course, their brightly coloured hand painted signs. First appearing in the odd window, they were now everywhere – the same message written in a thousand different ways, a thousand different colours.



Hung in windows or scrawled across doors the same message followed me home every night as if I needed more reason to be reminded that I did not belong. I ran my hand along the flat surface of the closest sign, feeling the coarse wood give way to smooth paint and back again. The long brush strokes formed elegant letters, carefully spaced out to be perfectly symmetrical. My fingers reached its edge, pausing over an intricate border. Everything about the sign was careful and articulated. Beautiful even. Not the beauty of a sunset or of a flower but the magnificence of a well-fashioned knife; the majesty of a viper poised to strike. The cool surface suddenly burned my hand and I yanked it backwards, clutching it to my chest.



The sign stared down at me, daring me to disobey, to test its wrath and the wrath of its creators. I raised a hand to rip it down but felt the eyes of a hundred more boring into the back of my neck. Whipping around, my eyes darted to the other shops on the dark street, each with their own similar warning given in the same handsome lettering. They leered at me from all directions, laughing from within pretty borders. How could someone with such a careful hand write such blunt messages? Someone with such an eye for colour and form and composition should be hanging their work on a marble wall, not on the dirty glass of a back street tailor’s front window. I lowered my hand, as I did every night. The sign would just be replaced with another. I turned my back on it and started down the street again, blinking furiously, tasting salt as the rain ran down my face. 



The increasing lateness made me anxious and I increased my pace to a swift walk, punctuated with nervous glances behind me. The driving rain made it hard to see even to the end of the street, blurring colours until the yellow of the street lamps threatened to bleed out into the surrounding black. Faint sounds of shouting drifted down the street, accompanied by louder, more ominous noises such as crashing and low thuds. Approaching through the murkiness I could see a middle-aged woman and her son hurrying through the rain in large, expensive leather coats. I looked down towards my shoes. There it was. The stare. I could feel it upon me without raising my head. It was more then disgust, it was …fear. She was genuinely afraid of me.



She pulled her son closer to her, as if I was going to infect him. As they crossed the road to avoid me I turned and looked towards them. Leveling with me they passed under a streetlight and the woman turned and looked sideways, meeting my gaze. Time appeared to slow, the raindrops sliding through the air like tiny sparkling knives. For the briefest of moments, two individuals each going their own opposite ways along opposite paths looked at each other, not as someone would look at a piece of dirt on their shoe, but as equals. I do not know if it was some facet of maternal impulse surfacing, a stronger force than any society could impose on people, but, for the briefest of moments, she saw me not as a nation had labeled my kind but as someone’s child, someone’s brother, sister. A person. Perhaps I reminded her of someone she knew. I still don’t know. Maybe it does not matter why; that it happened is enough. Bathed in the soft radiance of the street light, I could see her face as clearly as if she was within arms reach, the gently glittering flare reflected in green eyes that were to never leave me. And then the moment was gone, the rain washing it away as the world continued to turn around me.



Wrapped up in pretty borders and green eyes, I didn’t notice the door to the shop was open, or that most of the front window was missing. It wasn’t until I walked inside and tripped over a broken chair that I realised something was wrong. Through the gloom I could see the dim outlines of broken jars and toppled tables, the floor strewn with containers and sticky from spilt condiments. The rain outside suddenly abated, leaving an eerie stillness in the darkened room. The only sound that punctuated the quiet was rushing of blood in my ears as I held my breath. I slowly backed up towards the doorway, forgetting about the chair that blocked my path. The sound of my back crashing onto the wet floor ripped through the silence, feeling as if it must have woken up everyone on the street. The stillness shattered, I desperately tried to pick myself up from the slippery tomato soup that covered the ground. I burst out of the doorway in a blind panic, a thousand explanations each more futile and desperate than the last running through my head.



It was nearly the end of the street before I forced my legs to stop moving, the colour draining from my face and into my shoes. I had known as soon as I had fallen. I slowly raised my hands towards my face, eyes closed tightly, lip trembling.



My father didn’t sell tomato soup.



The crimson wet that stared back up at me was like a stab through the heart. I stood, paralyzed, a small figure alone on a street corner, hands outstretched like I had been frozen in the act of supplication. The indifferent wind blew my hair across my face, sighing as it continued on its unstoppable flight. The menacing sounds in the distance were louder now, closer, the crashes accompanied by the cries of people. A dull red glow had appeared on the horizon. An acrid smell filled the air, the smell of fires that burn indiscriminately through wood, plastic, and rubber. Perhaps worse things.

I didn’t care. My legs were lead and my head a feather threatening to float away and join the wind on its endless journey, leaving my body to deal on its own.

I turned and ran for home.



I found myself praying as I ran, surprising myself, having given up on it a long time ago. Stupidly and inexplicably I thought of my grandmother and how proud she would be if she knew of my regained, if circumstantial, faith. I didn’t even know who or what exactly I was praying to, just that I wanted my family to be safe, for everyone to be safe. I made up for a lifetime of stubborn skepticism by devoting my entire being and belief into this moment.



My parents were waiting for me in the doorway, smiles on their worried faces as they saw me approaching safely. My father was the first to reach me, arms outstretched in an embrace. Just as we were about to touch he exploded, covering me in tomato soup that blinded my stinging eyes. Flailing, I desperately tried to find my mother who was now someone else, a lady with green eyes laughing at me as I thrashed around in a pool full of blood... I shook myself, the waking nightmare dissipating into a reality that threatened to be no less terrifying. My home was just around the corner now.



‘’Please let me reach them, I have to be with them, I have to be there…’’ Suddenly there were people everywhere, running, yelling, crying. Ten more strides and I would round the final bend, in sight of my home.. seven…six…five…

‘’Please God let me reach my family, I need to go faster, please let this be a mistake, I have to get there, I must...’’

The closer I got to the end of the street the further away it seemed, the ground moving the wrong way beneath my feet, propelling me away from my destination. I could feel the signals traveling from my brain, the agonizingly slow reaction of the muscles in my legs as they sluggishly lifted one foot in front of the other. Three steps… I promised myself a life of helping the unfortunate, of celibacy, of denouncing my heritage if only my family was spared. Two steps… I offered my life, screaming at the heavens to take me over anyone else…



*            *            *



Finally she reached the door to her home, looming impressively over the neighbouring houses. As she entered the doorway, pushing her son in and telling him to go and take a warm bath, she turned and glanced back outside. There was a dull red flickering on the horizon and what sounded like a riot nearby. The light poured out from the open door and across the street, lighting up a small wooden sign hanging on a tailor’s windowpane. Its graceful brush strokes were thrown into sharp relief, its message of hate as bright as the waning moon. A drop of water ran silently down its front, making it sparkle prettily in the glow, coarse wood to smooth paint and back again.



She didn’t notice. Glancing once more at the red sky she turned back to the warmth of her house, the moonlight glinting off emerald eyes. The chill wind picked up again. Maybe she would take that hot bath herself.