“… like you once did your omniscient son. Give us divine sight to look upon your holy face.”
The boy listens to the priest’s chanting in silence, mute as he has learned to be, all eyes shut because he dares not look. His mother taught him to glance with his first and second eye when alone, but never open the third, the fourth, and all the rest.
A reek of incense. The cage that isolates the boy’s head constricts his face, sealed with a padlock on the shoulder, the lower rim chafing his collarbones. Iron bars press against the bulgy flesh of his cheeks, and his bloated hands cannot squeeze through to shut the ears and muffle the chanting of the priest. The words hurt, burning like embers in his belly. He won’t stop unless the boy opens his eyes before him.
But it’s all right, the boy resists because he’s strong—as Gods must learn to be.
Alone in his vast cell, the boy stretches his serpentine tongue beyond the barred windows, scenting starlight. He is afraid to look, alone though he is, for what if someone moves in stealthily, footsteps muffled by the constant screams of tortured prisoners?
He has felt the room with his tongue: cold floor, flaming sconces, dead mice. He cannot tell how long it’s been since the priest last came. Dreams and reality are just as obscure, and they become harder to separate.
Approaching footsteps spur him to untangle his tongue from rusty bars, swallowing it into his maw. Through gelatinous eyelids, the sconce-cast shadows shudder as the door creaks.
A little girl’s voice: “Are you all right?”
The boy remains silent. A trick? It has to be, why would humans genuinely care how the boy feels?
“I’m sorry my father is cruel to you. He is cruel with us all. I brought some food. Boiled rice with lemon, salt and oil. I didn’t know what your kind eats, so I separated them for you to sprinkle what you like.”
What a soft voice. He hears the clink of cutleries as the girl lays things in front of him, then shuffles back.
It smells nice, but he won’t reveal an abyssal tongue to a human. His mother had said the more of his anatomy he shows, the more he exposes what these bipedal creatures may exploit.
The girl is quiet, and as time passes, they are engulfed in the sound of torture: lash of whips, followed by screams, and in some horrific moments the cut-flower sound of a guillotine. He wonders if the girl left and he failed to hear it. She must have, the creaking door occluded by one of the prisoners’ wails. Humans are never quiet for so long.
The boy opens the maw, his face flesh squeezing against the bars as the tongue slips out to trace the floor until it finds something warm and soft and fragmented like grains of cosmic dust. He wraps his tongue around the food and reels it in. So warm, so filling, warm comfort crosses down his throat and settles pleasantly in his vacant stomach.
“You like it?”
His tongue rolls, his lips puckered and ashamed. She’s still there. What a fool, he exposed his secret-holding tongue to human eyes. His insides should have remained within, always within, because what if she could read his thoughts on it? Or glimpse a fragment of existence that would break a human’s mind?
The boy wants to hurt no one. Not even them.
“I really like it with oil and lemon,” the girl continues.
She shares so much, so freely. This girl is pure, untouched by greed. Maybe he can share two words with her: “Thank you.” The boy’s throat aches from disuse.
“Ah, I’m so happy you spoke to me.”
He extends the tongue again, feeling safe in this girl’s presence, and devours the remaining rice.
“Father should never have summoned you with wicked magic, only to trap you here.” She gathers the leftovers and walks away. By the doorstep, she hesitates. “I know you won’t talk. But if you do, don’t tell him I was here.”
The boy is left with a warm feeling in his stomach. He hopes he’ll get to hear the girl speak again.
When the priest returns, his gait differs—larger strides betraying excitement.
The boy has learned to tell footsteps apart, craving another visit from the girl. She has come three times, and last time she mixed the rice with oil, lemon, and salt, and it was the best thing he ever tasted. Better even than starlight dappled by willow leaves.
“I know one of my daughters fed you, omniscient son.”
Dread sinks in the boy’s belly. The priest sticks a sharp, flesh-wounding tool through the cage, its metal clanking against the bars. He sticks it between the boy’s eyelids, struggling to pry them open.
“Open your eyes, godchild, like you did for my heathen daughter.”
The boy will not. He never did, why does the priest assume otherwise?
“A woman should not witness godhood before her father. Now she’ll witness nothing at all.”
The boy cannot allow tears to spill. His eyelids must not open, not even a smidge to let a trickle out.
“Good thing I have many daughters to replace her. There was beauty in witnessing her terror. To witness things so grotesque they become gorgeous. Just give in and open your eyes, too.”
The man’s voice drips with lust. Whatever he did to his daughter—and what he does to his prisoners—it’s not piety, but pleasure and morbid curiosity.
“Grant him eyes, my mother,” the boy says. “No more pity for the fool.”
The boy opens two eyes and looks at the priest through bulgy flesh and iron bars. His tongue lashes out to taste the bitter lies clinging to the air. The wrinkled bald man retreats, unable to look away.
Two eyes are not enough, the boy slowly opens another, and the fool chokes and gags.
Through the third eye, he sees through a tunnel with a tongue at the end—the fool’s own throat. The optic nerve becomes esophagus. Vitreous humor becomes saliva.
In the end, the boy sees his own self, as the fool’s mouth blinks open: his lips are eyelids to the boy’s third eye that keeps the jaw erect and locked. His wish finally granted.
The girl. Maybe he didn’t really kill her, and she lies in a torture chamber, beaten and suffering—or maybe her soul is gone to another realm. If only he opens the right eye—in one of the many cells, or one of the many worlds—he’ll find her.
Fear and pity discarded, the boy now opens every eye in every realm.
And with a mad smile, he sees it all.
