angel eyes
Two beams of light, as pure and powerful as the sun, and as forgiving and just as the heavens, burst forth from Om’s eyes. His lids fall like great iron gates-- the light is strangled, cut off, killed. In the relative darkness, a sense of dread and hopelessness fills the air, apathy creeping into the mind and killing any sympathetic thoughts that are unfortunate enough to be caught. All relatively speaking, of course. And finally, the two thin slabs of flesh are drawn up by invisible ropes and from the widening gap flows light, bringing love back to the hearts of the people upon whom it is cast.
And so, Om Maysing has blinked.
The sounds of morning in the suburbs kick politely through Om’s crystalline windows, bursting softly into the room and peacefully assaulting anything and everything with a melodious cacophony. Om awakens.
As he rubs the sleep from his eyes, his mother calls him, saying something about breakfast being ready.
“Breakfast is ready, Om. Come on down!” Her voice is ebullient this morning, indicating one clear and simple fact: Mr. Maysing is on a business trip. Om yawns.
He slides out from beneath his covers, a snake slipping out from an old sheet of skin, and pulls on a clean shirt, a hermit crab adorning a new shell. Pushing through the beads that are acting as a substitute door in the absence of his normal door, which is blue, and at the repair shop, he starts on his seven-second journey down the stairs to the front hall.
After the chilled front hall and the twilight dining room, the kitchen’s warm atmosphere embraces him as he enters. The near-sterile linoleum floor would drip were it in any position to, small pools of water lying about-- remnant his mother’s incessant mopping. He takes a moment to look in the fridge before turning to her. She flinches away.
“Darling, please. Wear your sunglasses while in the house, O.K.?”
Om nods silently, retrieving a pair of nearly opaque sunglasses from the little brown table in the dining room next to the table next to the door to the outside world. He draws them to his face, the light filtering through the dark glass and refracting to a much softer and overall more pleasant glow. His eyes now easier to look at, Ms. Maysing lets her gaze slide to his face.
He is and looks sixteen. If you were to see him on the streets it would not be out of place, unusual or unlikely for you to proclaim to yourself or to someone you’re with at the time that he looks to be somewhere between fifteen and seventeen-- probably right in the middle at sixteen, because Jessie’s son is fifteen and he can’t be that young, but Johnny from down the block is seventeen, and that’s far too old. Oh yes, your friend agrees, he must be sixteen. That would not be unusual in the least, in fact, it happens all the time.
Om pushes the food around on his plate, using first his fork, and then his knife. His mother stares at him for a moment before clicking her tongue.
“Now don’t be like that. What’s wrong?” Om gazes at her silently, her question floating silently in the room between them, a hot air balloon adrift above a sunny pasture. Even the cows feel awkward.
In a quick and simple motion, Om pulls down his sunglasses ever so little, allowing shards of the beautiful light to pierce his mother’s consciousness, and, bathed in the purifying intensity of his gaze, she understands exactly what it means not to like wet scrambled eggs.
“Oh, of course. I’m really sorry,” she stutters, picking up the plate and quickly tossing the eggs back on the skillet. In a few short minutes, the eggs sputter and crackle, their edges darkening as the fluids evaporate into the moist kitchen air.
She slides them back onto his plate and he digs in eagerly, clearing the porcelain quickly and efficiently, no moment or movement wasted.
With a curt nod, Om stands and leaves, catching the strap of his small green backpack on his way to the outside world.
By the time the school bell rings, he’s seated on the far left of the second from the last row of the classroom, staring idly through his glasses at where the teacher is, at any moment, going to take the stage, so to speak.
“Alright, class, today we’re going to be in study hall, so take out your books and start reading. We’re still on chapter six, so get to work.”
At that, Om takes his book out and props it up on his desk, letting the pages face him. As soon as it’s stabilized enough to stand on its own, he leans back and, with his head held high, falls asleep—the overall attitude being “screw chapter six”.
In this way, class ends in a flash. One moment, it’s just beginning, with students shifting restlessly in their seats, getting read for a long-haul of studying, and the next, the very same students are hurrying to stuff their books and papers into backpacks of various size, shape, and, of course, ownership. Om slides his book back into his bag and leaves, the rest of the class still wrestling with various piles of unnecessarily notated notes; epic battles indeed.
During lunch, Om sits down with himself in a nearby park at a friendly old picnic table. With a weary eye out for tie toting bears, he unloads a modern-day picnic basket onto the picnic table, laying the various units of his meal out, like chess pieces, upon the table, which, at some point, may have been adorned with a checkered cloth—a chessboard for his pieces.
He takes a bite of his sandwich.
As the game plays out, a rowdy red-haired child from one of the higher grades enters the scene, claiming territorial rights to the now-occupied picnic table, cracking his knuckles and leaking threats, a loose showerhead caked with rust. Om doesn’t pay him any mind, focusing instead on a very complex and perplexing potato chip.
Completely and utterly ignored, the muscles lurking under the senior’s skin stir, his nostrils flaring, indignation and embarrassment burrowing into his brain and working quickly to fuel his rage with whatever is on-hand; all thoughts thrown into the heat of the quickly building anger.
Om looks up just in time to see five crooked fingers, bunched together, squeezed tight and braced for impact, rocketing at him. The punch lands flawlessly, and Om is thrown off the bench and to the dirty dirt ground. Lying on his back, with his glasses beside him, he squints up at the clouds and looks for shapes that are familiar to him.
After a few moments, and after discovering a tree, a basketball/onion/vinyl disc, and nine cotton balls, he sits up, slowly. With his eyes closed he stretches, and listens to the red-haired ruffian as he sorts through Om’s things, searching for valuables. With a click of the tongue, he catches the attention of the brute, metal drawn to the magnet, and, without a moment’s hesitation, he opens his eyes.
The red haired teen experiences it as a wave of tears, love exploding forth from his heart, squeezing through his veins and erupting from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Sorrow and regret flood him, everything he knows thrown to the sea, where a vicious storm tears apart the reflections caught on the surface of the water. A whirlpool pulls him down, and at the bottom of that contemplative ocean, he finds himself left with nothing but his anger and his greed. Compared to the vast thoughts engulfing him, he feels petty indeed, and, just as swiftly as it began, it ends, the world returning to him.
Om pulls his glasses back on, noting the cracks in one frame. The bully, dazed as he is, remains still, his eyes still adjusting to the light of the real world. After shaking his head in attempts to regain clarity, he looks down at his hands, the rough skin stained with his imperfections. He almost doesn’t notice Om gathering everything back into his backpack. Almost.
“Hey . . . pal . . .” the kid begins, resting a gentle and heavy hand on Om’s shoulder, “I’m really sorry, like, really sorry. Is there any way I can make it up to you?”
Om looks at him through his fractured shades, and thinks about cotton balls floating in the sky.
“Oh, woah, I must have cracked your glasses,” the teen says suddenly, inspecting the thick channels running along the edge of the left frame. Om stares passively into his assailant’s eyes and sees there the regret of a saint done wrong. The saint sighs.
“Here, have these,” he says, pulling a pair of sporty sunglasses from a pocket in his nearly empty but trendy backpack. Wondering as to the utility of such a large container for such a small load, Om accepts the glasses quietly, switching his own with the new pair.
“Yeah, for sure, they look much better on you than they did on me. Is your eye alright? It looks a bit swollen . . . I really must have hit you hard, huh?”
Om picks up his bag and walks off, leaving the bully to himself.
Having exhausted his energy, Om finds the walk home is a lot harder than he would like. Making people care is hard work. His sneakers drag slightly as he rounds the final corner towards his house.
Sleep… I need to sleep.
Om opens the door and falls to his knees at the foot of the stairs. His mother walks by and closes the door, patting him on his head as she passes.
“Did it again, did you? Looks like it was a hard case this time.” Energetic as ever.
He slowly climbs the stairs, mostly on all fours and, and, with a final push, enters his room and falls upon his bed. The thick blanket of sleep falls over him immediately.
A few hours later, he awakes, some of his energy returned. He gets up and checks the clock.
4:07 PM
Having missed fourth, fifth, and sixth periods, Om kicks back for the night, setting up his laptop and laying in bed. He pulls open the news feed for the world on the world wide web. Scanning the articles, he feels nothing. Genocides, war, murder, rape, none of it reaches him on anything but an intellectual level.
When he gazes upon people with his light, sometimes they resist, and sometimes they accept it. When they accept he simply lets them know how he feels. When they resist, however, he often must exert a great deal of effort to overcome their attempts to remain ignorant. Nearly always this leaves him drained, and more so these recent years.
A slight seed of fear plants itself, however, in his mind. As the images of world suffering flicker past his even gaze, it sprouts, and ever so slowly it grows. His consciousness is drawn to address it.
Every time I do that, every day passes, and I’m forced to do that, I feel it slipping away. I feel my energy leaving me. When I force my empathy upon people, I get so little back the next day, will I be unable to feel permanently? I just don’t know . . . I’ve never been this tired before. As a mute, how will I communicate with people if I lose this power?
He turns away from his computer and holds his head between his hands. In his world of numbness, void of all care, he still fears what is to come.
The morning arrives at the same time as always, and, as always, he finds himself awake long before required.
Maybe I shouldn’t go to sleep at five in the afternoon . . .
Pulling some pants on, he opens his door and walks downstairs, rubbing his eyes. Something’s different today, but he can’t put his finger on it. His mother is cooking when he enters the kitchen, and after a quick peek in the fridge, he goes to the bathroom. Washing his hands, he glances at himself in the mirror. Everything stops.
Light blue irises with a heavy dark pupil in the middle. Perfectly normal. He falls over backwards, hitting the wall hard. His mother rushes in, oven mitts still on hand.
“Om! Om, are you alright? What happened?” She braces for a flash.
With his head down, Om steadies his breath.
“M-mom?”
And in that moment, tears of happiness and unspeakable sorrow well up in eyes that will never again hold the light of heaven.