Gina with the Colorless Eyes

Gina with the Colorless Eyes


In addition to Gina’s colorless, transparent eyes, she had shoulder-length, green fluorescent hair that she kept pulled back in a ponytail. When she slid off the bar stool to go to the bathroom, I gazed after her, mesmerized by the way her green ponytail flopped up and down, momentarily distorting the dim nightclub air like a trick-or-treater's twirling glow stick.

But it was Gina’s icy eyes that simultaneously amazed and frightened me. If you leaned in close and stared past the thin clear film that filled her orbits, you could see her thoughts: grainy images curling about like swirls of drifting smoke, changing as quickly as the blue sparks that branched off the soft tissue of her brain.

When she got back from the bathroom, Gina smiled and snatched my packet of Salems off the counter. She shook one out. I struck a match on the bar and lit the Salem for her. After she blew out a lungful of smoke, she set the cigarette with its red, lipstick-stained filter in the ashtray in front of her. She turned to me and smiled. “Now what did you want to know?” she asked.

I cleared my throat, leaned in close and stared into her eyes, past the transparent film. “What was it like being a kid?”

Blue sparks fired off behind the clear film. I watched the pulsing veins that mapped her brain redden and fatten like leaches. Then, appearing in the smoke-like haze came a black-and-white image of smirking schoolgirls. A palm with ring-laden fingers grew to fill the screen in Gina’s mind. The scenery shifted instantaneously, a playground, high shrubs, a narrow opening into a wooded area. Suddenly all was replaced by a pair of black-buckled shoes, rising and dropping and rising over a cracked sidewalk; a right shoe, a left, a right. For a second the shoes disappeared in a rising, hissing steam. They reappeared again, damp now, and the sidewalk became a dirt path. Dust rose, powdering the shoes as the shoes pounded the path. You could hear moist breaths, sucked in quickly. The foliage alongside the path grew thick, and the path narrowed. The tip of the right foot snagged a vine and the ground rose up. I watched a small girl’s hand reach for thorny branch.

I blinked, drew back from her colorless eyes. Gina’s eyelids slid shut and she took her cigarette out the ashtray, sucked the filter again. When her eyelids raised again, beyond the icy film were pleasant vivid images: A rusted steel guardrail, curving above a forest of pine trees, the tips stirring, the branches heavy with white snow. Beyond the downward sloping pines sat a lake, which appeared and disappeared beyond the ever-winding rusted rail.

Her eyelids slid over the clear orbits again. This time Gina did not reopen them, at least not so I could see inside her head. She kept her face down and crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. Without looking up, Gina softly said, “Take me home.” Her arm shot through the air between us, and her palm fell onto my thigh. “I don’t want to think of the past anymore,” she said. “I want to start creating fresh memories -- happier ones.”