At first, you didn’t know what you were looking at. There was something glaring back at
you from the small darkness between your feet, something you didn’t recognize, something you
assumed to be insignificant. After all, who would pry up a shower drain just because they saw
something shiny? Not you. Not at first. It took five days and four showers before you went so
far.
Even once the drain was exposed, you didn’t know what you were looking at. Something
black. Something white. Something pink. You would soon discover what the optic nerve looked
like. It was still attached. You screamed, of course. I would have, too. No one heard you. Why
would they?
You had only a vague memory of calling them, but you know you must have. Your
subconscious filled in the missing details. A false memory of an unforgettable event. They didn’t
help very much. They removed the eye, whisked it away in a flurry of questions, accusations,
and biohazard containment devices. They didn’t seem to like the idea that you weren’t
responsible for putting it there in the first place.
You stayed at a hotel that night, naturally. Your formerly inconsequential home was now
a crime scene. That was fine, it was a short walk. All about you, the city stirred, breathing,
living, pulsing. Despite the light pollution, the stars still stared down upon you. Holes in your
firmament. You didn’t meet their gaze. Nor did you shower before bed. You knew you needed
one, but no one could blame you for putting it off.
That night, you dreamed a memory. It was first grade, maybe third. A group of
classmates, maybe friends, were gathered around the sink. Your classroom had a sink. They
claimed there was an eyeball in the drain. Even before you looked for yourself, you knew they
were wrong. You remembered what you would see. The drain had a small circle at its center,

allowing you to see drops of water forming from the top down. It looked a bit like an iris, enough
like one to convince an impressionable child. You had to look anyway, despite the adult
knowledge coursing through your assumedly adult brain.
You saw two eyes. One: the artifact of a child's mind. The other: the product of a recent
trauma. One had an iris of reflected incandescent lighting, an animated flicker of stale light. The
other: an iris of brown so deep, it could hardly be distinguished from the pupil. You could make
the distinction. You always could.
It was an eye you knew, though you couldn’t say how. You didn’t know whose it used to
be, whose it still was. Everyone you knew with eyes that dark still had both of theirs. You
checked.
The moon shone during the day, half, waxing. While it bore a passing resemblance to an
eye, it was decidedly not one. That was a comfort. Besides, it wasn’t looking at you.
The brief time you were alone with the eye was a hazy blur you’ll never forget. You
couldn’t let the thing out of your sight, nor it you. You dropped it as soon as you knew what you
were holding. But even from its place on the bathroom floor, once again at your feet, you could
see every detail. The pupil was incredibly dilated, more than you thought possible. The sclera
looked polished, soapy, fake. There was a hair traversing the lens, presumably your own.
Definitely your own.
Modesty was the least of your concerns in that moment. It was still on the list, but so far
down that it took the interruption of a knock at the door to remind you that you were a human
being who should probably be wearing a towel when letting people into your soon-to-be crime
scene. You put one on.

It took all of your remaining willpower to rend your attention from the eye on your floor
and leave the bathroom. You knew it was foolish, but somewhere in the back of your mind, you
believed it would be gone as soon as you returned. It wasn’t. They saw it and took it away as if it
belonged to them. You could hardly fault them. It didn’t belong to you either.
What had it seen? Logically, you knew it couldn’t have seen anything. It was dead. It had
to be. It couldn’t have possibly seen you in all your pale vulnerability. It couldn’t have. Could
not have. But it didn’t find its place in the dregs of your life on its own. Yet there it had been,
feasting on what you assumed to be unwanted, unwantable.
The time you decided to finally kneel and discover the nature of the glistening thing
beneath you was also the first time you had ever put any real amount of thought into your shower
drain. Until that moment, it lived in the far background of your unknown mind amongst the other
mechanisms of daily life your brain deemed irrelevant. Its presence was known to you. Its
specifics were not. It, as you soon discovered, did not simply lift away. A ring of once-white
caulk bound it to your floor. Time and mold had transformed it into something you didn’t want
to touch. You touched it anyway, pulling it apart in weak, fraying elastic strips.
You couldn’t say why exactly you had to pull the drain cover up yourself. Maybe part of
your brain already knew what you were looking at even if the rest of you wasn’t ready to accept
it. A memory yet to happen. Seeing something reflective in your shower drain shouldn’t have
been enough to make you tear it apart. But it was.
Three days passed before the crime scene was cleared and you were allowed to return.
You weren’t sure if you had the mental fortitude to go back. But you somehow managed. I
missed you.

You didn’t shower that first night back. That would come two nights later out of simple
necessity. Your desire to be clean would soon overpower your slowly dissipating fear, but not
yet. Those first few days, you were scared to use the bathroom, to even open the bathroom door.
Once again, you managed. People are resilient like that.
When you did build up the courage to clean yourself, you almost refused to look down.
Two forces warred in your mind: the fear of seeing the drain, and the fear of not. The latter won
out.
They didn’t replace the drain cover. Why would they? All that was there was a short
funnel into an unknown narrow darkness, only a centimeter wide. A distant piece of your brain
was preparing a trip to the hardware store to buy a new cover. Most of you focused on what you
saw in the darkness. Nothing. You saw nothing. You looked away. You washed your hair. The
bubbles disappeared into the depths, just as they always had.
With a deep breath, you turned off the water. That wasn’t bad. You could do this. As you
always have, you would carry on. You looked at the drain again. It wasn’t an afterthought, but it
felt like one. All you saw was an incandescent reflection. A slow drip. A drop forming from the
top down. A glowing iris falling forever down a hole far too small and deep to fit into memory.
You ran outside, heedless of both modesty and morality. Thoughts of past eyes and
futures dripping into the deepest fathoms of your mind corroded the feelings of safety that your
home had once brought. The heavens continued to stare down upon you. They hadn’t stopped.
They never do.
Our eyes met. It lasted only a moment. Under any other circumstances, it would have
been overlooked, unthought. It was never supposed to happen. But in that moment, in that