Welcome to Spooky Season!
31 for 31 is often for horror cinema lovers as they use the month of October to work through their favourite or must-see horror films. But I realized I had at least 31 short horror stories that I’ve published over the course of my horror writing career, and now that most are back in the public domain, I’m going to share them with you all here.
Next? Baby Eyes!
This was one of the first horror stories I’ve ever published. Not written–I remember writing my own slasher films taking place at my summer camp when I was in seventh grade–but first published. As in professionally published. Not self, not zines, but accepted by someone else and exchanged for MONEY. It was $10, but I was a broke grad student. I could buy coffee with that money!
To me, this was an utter success.
This was way back in 2013, the year I decided to take myself “seriously” as a writer… which meant actually looking for places and people who would be interested in my dark and twisty thoughts. Enter a now defunct publisher and publication called The Grotesquerie, and their coffee change.
The story for “Baby Eyes” is rather simple, one that plays on very familiar tropes and pain points for most horror audiences. A young girl says something cryptic to her mother about missing her baby eyes (since she has baby teeth, right?) and then the body horror and tension get kicked up. As someone who has always hated teeth, but can be ‘meh’ for eye stuff, this was a fun challenge. How can I make eyes just as scary as teeth?
I think I did a pretty okay job! Check it out yourself and see. 😉
Baby Eyes
By Eve Morton
Natasha’s tooth fell out on Tuesday night.
Every parent prepared for this moment, fighting or embracing a new lie to tell their children. Even in an enlightened age of co-sleeping and macrobiotic diets, I could not muster the strength to tell my daughter the truth about her teeth. I still liked the gaze of wonder that came across her face each time James and I told her stories of Santa Claus and The Easter Bunny. With the amount of time Natasha had her hand in her mouth the past week, tonguing the loose front space between her incisors, I knew it was only a matter of time before she would come running to me with a new milestone.
We had been getting ready for bed, after eating popcorn and watching a movie. I knew the small bits of kernels would get stuck and she’d have to brush extra hard. Sure enough, the thump-thump of tiny feet against hardwood floors sounded in the house’s hallways.
“Mommy, look!”
Her palm held the tooth. The red root was still attached, bloody and gory. I tried to keep my face neutral, but the missing section in the front of her mouth made me a little weary.
“Wash it off, and then we can put it under your pillow.”
She smiled, eyes wide, as the whispers from her school friends suddenly became manifest.
“And?” she asked. “And?”
“And then The Tooth Fairy will come.”
“What does she look like?”
“A fairy.”
“What does she do?”
“Takes your tooth for you, silly.”
“What do I get?”
“Something good. Don’t spoil it. We will put it under your pillow and it will be gone in the morning.”
“And my other teeth?”
“They will fall out too. Eventually,” I corrected, envisioning her taking a hammer to her jaw for more quarters and praise. I leaned down to her level and pointed to my mouth. “Behind your gums, other teeth are hiding. They are waiting to come out.”
She nodded. She touched her face all around her jaw and then up to her eyes. I thought she was about to play peek-a-boo with me, though she had not done that in years.
“When do I lose my baby eyes?”
She flapped her hands over her face as she talked. She asked the question again when I left her in silence.
The parenting books had not prepared me for this one. I was already aware of the strange ways kids sometimes used language. The final way Natasha said ‘goodbye’ or ‘good night’ often sounded as if this really would be the last time I would hear from her again. There was also the fevered pace at which she said ‘I love you’ for that very reason – or worse, shouted ‘I want to die.’ The true connotations and meanings had not sunk in yet. Dying to a small child was still like playing peek-a-boo, object permanence still a new concept. Natasha, and for that matter James and I, were still trying to figure this whole childhood thing out.
But her words still hurt when I heard her say she didn’t want to live, not with the same eyes the rest of her life.
“My baby eyes, baby eyes,” she cried. “I don’t want them anymore.”
She flung her tooth across the room. It bounced off the walls, and then landed at my feet. I had no idea what to put under her pillow now and it was getting much too late for this.
“Honey, honey, these eyes are all you have. These are all you need.”
“Why do you have glasses then? Have you lost your eyes?”
“No. My eyes are damaged, honey. It’s like a cavity.”
Her face twisted at the memory of her first needle to the mouth last year.
“A sweet tooth,” she said, remembering what the dentist had told her. Little girls and little boys who like too much candy get holes in their sweet teeth. This was why we brushed every night, even if it did knock out some in the process. Natasha seemed calmed by the information. She was even moving towards the bed now. The tooth in her hand again, she placed it under the pillow.
Aren’t you just a sight for sore eyes, I thought. I pulled the blankets up to her neck.
“Go to sleep, sweetheart. I will talk to The Tooth Fairy soon and we will see if we can work out a deal.”
*
“What does a tooth go for around here now?” James asked.
“I think more than a few dimes.”
“Can we write her a check? Can she save for college instead?”
James and I were in the kitchen. He made me tea, but avoided the herbal kind I usually use to help me sleep at night. One of us had to play fairy, so we needed to remain alert.
I waited a while, stirring in some sugar, before I told him what Natasha had told me.
“It’s the strangest thing. Probably nothing. The parenting books would tell me it’s nothing. She just wanted to know about her ‘baby eyes.’ As if they were training wheels for her bike or the last toes on her feet.”
“Run, run, little piggy! All the way home,” James sang. He took a large drink from his blue mug, and then rested his hand on his chin. “Kind of a neat concept, though. Maybe baby eyes have something to do with déjà vu or nostalgia. Maybe that’s why things are familiar to us though we never remember seeing them.”
“Because we’re about to lose our eyes or we already have?”
“Both, maybe. Nostalgia is pretty tinged with loss. Maybe when we’re so tired our eyes hurt, it’s like our eyes are loose? Like a tooth?”
I fidgeted with my glasses. I knew that feeling of tiredness. It had permeated Natasha’s first three years of life.
“I’m not so sure about this. It still makes me uncomfortable.”
“Well, you know kids. Their imagination and all.”
“We still have imaginations as adults, you know. It’s not something that generally goes away.”
James was a writer, mostly of sci-fi shorts and comics for the local paper. He also took on a lot of ‘fill in the blank’ work, as he called it. This mostly consisted of general ‘calls for submissions’ from various magazines and what his agent had wrangled up for him. James could stretch his imagination to write about a lot of things, technical or otherwise. He and I were both creative people, though. It was why we married and why we had decorated our daughter’s room with something other than pink balloons. We had written our own vows. When we first met at twenty-four, we had also promised one another then that we would never grow up to be boring or dull. We were always going to look at the world with fresh, new eyes.
I shuddered at the kitchen counter.
“I know that we’re creative and all that, Nicki, but you can’t deny it. Kids are different. They are just experiencing the world and that is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Obviously.”
Sometimes James’s metaphors weren’t always so great. I had to hide my smile as I sipped more tea.
“But you know. There are other things. Kids see ghosts – at least, they are more receptive to the idea. They have imaginary friends, secret languages, and worlds all to themselves. They experience things differently than us. Maybe when we get older, we do lose our baby eyes.”
Even James shuddered now as he talked. In the silence that followed, we glanced at the clock which read ten pm. Natasha had gone to bed at eight.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I allowed. “So. Am I The Tooth Fairy this time around or are you?”
James reached into his wallet, pulling out paper bills before he found coins. A few dollars rolled around on the counter and he slapped each one down into place. The loud sound his wedding ring made against our granite counter echoed through the house. We paused. Listened. There was still no shuffling from Natasha’s room.
“I’ll go,” I told him. “You just keep my tea warm.”
When I got there, she was curled into a ball and off her pillow. She had tried to stay awake, I noticed. Her toys and one game were scattered on the floor, though I always made her put everything away before bed. I lifted the pillow off and found the tiny tooth underneath. Next to it, Natasha had left a card with a drawing of a fairy in pink wings next to a bucket of teeth. The writing inside was too messy and spelled wrong, but each sentence lined up in couplets as if it was a poem. In the dark, I used the light of my phone to read what I could, before I realized the verse ended with another request for new eyes.
“Baby eyes, my baby eyes,” her voice repeated in my head.
I laid a few dollars for her on the nightstand, her tooth in my pocket, and walked out the room.
*
“What do we do with this now?” I asked James when I returned. I held up the tiny piece of what used to be Natasha. He stared at it too.
“Throw it out? I don’t know where or why we’d keep it…”
“I guess we’re not up for lockets filled with teeth, eh?”
I opened the counter underneath to find the kitchen garbage. James had already emptied everything around the house and taken it all outside for the morning. I tossed the tooth inside the clean bag, a hollow echo in its wake.
“You coming to bed?”
“Soon,” I told James. He kissed me on the cheek and then left me alone in the kitchen. I put on another kettle for tea.
While I waited, I looked at the old photos of myself in my wallet. What do you even get when you lose your baby eyes? I thought. Another round of golf at a country club, another bill from the bank, more license photos. I used to keep my old licenses, student cards, and everything else with my photo on it because I thought it was funny to watch the evolution of my hair in the 1980s and the shoulder pads slump. I had thrown away all of the outfits in each photo and exchanged each hairstyle for something more demure. But the eyes always remained the same. It was the one part of the human body that did not shrink or grow.
I went back to the garbage and retrieved Natasha’s tooth.
*
The next night, I dreamt that all my teeth had fallen out. Like a white picket fence, they fell onto the front lawn of our newly purchased house and collected in a pile. No matter how hard I tried, I could not put them back into my mouth. No other teeth came to replace them.
*
Two days after the visit from the tooth fairy, I walked into Natasha’s room and found all the eyes from her dolls removed. Some stared back at me hollowly with nothing inside their skulls, while the foreheads of larger dolls bore marks of pens and crayons attacking them in a desperate plea for replacement. Dolls now held third all-seeing eyes in the middle of their foreheads, while others had pairs above and below the empty holes, in an attempt to replace the missing ones. The largest doll with the deepest holes had paper replacements. Natasha drew new eyes on construction paper, folded it up like a flower, and then shoved it deep inside the doll’s plastic skull. She gave most eyes new colours than before. A fierce red and then a calming, green-blue, along with a few kaleidoscopes of rainbow colours and opal-like gem patterns.
Natasha turned around and covered her face when she saw me in the room. Her dark hair fell over her forehead, her cheeks red as she tried to hold back tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Voice small, almost muffled. “I thought they would grow back.”
I cleared my throat and tried to look away. “We already had that discussion about hair, Natasha. You know.”
She nodded. She had ruined a bunch of Barbies a year ago giving mohawks and dying them with markers. But she had tried again with eyes since the trip from The Tooth Fairy had been so successful. I marvelled at the childish logic of second chances.
She mistook my silence for disapproval and lowered her head more.
I knelt down to meet her so we were face to face. I brushed her hair out of her eyes and wiped away a tear. I stared longer than I needed to at her eyes, wanting to make sure she had not turned the craft on herself. They were still blue, still there. The void in her front teeth remained, but I had grown used to that in a few days.
“I’m sorry, mommy,” she apologized again.
“It’s okay. Maybe The Tooth Fairy can bring you dolls next time instead of dollars, since she sort of mislead you with this one.”
“That bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“She must be rich.”
“Yeah, the kids tooth business is quite lucrative.”
I lingered in the doorway a few minutes more, making sure she was okay. She turned her back on me, picking up one of the dolls with six eyes, and began to play again. She hummed a song I could not recognize.
For a moment as I walked down the hall, I wondered if we lost our baby ears as we got older, too.
*
A week later, another Tuesday, I awoke in the middle of the night. Darkness. I reached for James next to me, but I could not feel him there. Only Natasha. Her hands were clammy and wet as she gripped my shoulder and leaned into me. It had been a long time since we had tried co-sleeping. I did not know what she was doing in my room.
“I have found my big girl eyes,” she whispered into my ear. “They were right next to yours.”
END
Eve Morton 