Black Eyes

During college, I took a world history class. It was required, and I had put it off for long enough. The course covered significant events from the mid-20th century to the current day. The class was mundane, and the professor was exactly what you would expect. A white dude in his mid-sixties with a fascination for a subject that he never realized no one else cared about. His name was Mr. Morris. I remember one day, he came to class unusually somber. His face sagged with sorrow, and his red-rimmed eyes were wet with pain. In old leather shoes, he stood there. For maybe thirty seconds, he did nothing but take deep breaths, and then he began. “The university requires me to teach you about the Black Eye.” 

There was silence. Not one born of fear or respect for an authority figure. Not a comfortable silence found in easy moments of boredom or contentment. It was the silence one wishes to avoid at all cost. The quiet that gestates in awkwardness and unease then slithers out of its egg, covered in the slime of anxiety. Put plainly, we were uncomfortable. Not by the subject. The Black Eye was common knowledge. Any child old enough to recognize the wrongness but still feel the temptation to lie, steal, and curse could rattle off a few rudimentary facts about the Eye. That unbearable stillness was generated from the way our professor looked and talked. His voice had an edge, causing it to shake with emotion and vulnerability. He had clearly been crying before and appeared on the verge of tears again. The image of an adult man having an emotional breakdown makes everyone wish they were elsewhere.

I’ll admit that his display offended something base in me. It was an understood yet unspoken rule that men should get harder as they age. Unfair as it was, they were meant to be like bedrock and settle. Be harder to break and to reach. 

To his credit, Mr. Morris persevered. With liver-spotted and shaking hands, he displayed a picture of a raven on the projector. It was a detailed image. It was clear that the photographer who had taken it was very talented. You could spot each feather on its body. The picture was so clear that you could see the sun reflecting off the glassy black marble that was the bird’s eye. It stared into the lens vacantly as most birds do. 

Mr. Morris coughed twice and looked at us with these sad, dead eyes. “Did you know that I was born there? Hopkinsville, Kentucky. I lived there for most of my childhood and some of my adult life. It’s been twenty years since I’ve been there. You know, the worst part about memory is that it all fades into whisps… eventually. It happens faster when you don’t have something from the moment. When you can’t see the place where it happened anymore.” His mouth split open, revealing his numerous bad, yellowing teeth. His cheekbones rose as high as they could, tugging at the flabby jowls on his face. It made me think of two children desperately trying to hold up an oversized blanket falling around them. 

“If there is one thing you learn from me, let it be to take pictures of everything. The camera is the greatest invention ever to come about.” It was the fakest smile I’d ever seen. “I ramble too much, but you already know that. I’ll continue. Twenty years ago, an unexpected phenomenon transpired in my hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. A new species of raven had appeared and took to the skies with a vengeance. These ravens reproduced at a rate beyond logic or reason. Soon, there were millions of the fucking things all concentrated in one small town! Worst of all, they have no fear. Most animals develop a healthy fear of people. How could they not? How godly we must seem with our endless food? Walking tall as we move around with these machines that let us stride the land where we may and spit death with abandon.” 

That false smile grew more real as he spoke. His voice evened out, too. I thought of all the times I chased squirrels up trees as a kid. I reveled in those moments of panic when the rodents noticed my much larger frame barreling towards them. They were desperate to get away, certain that I was their death. The fun always ended when one squirrel chose to stand its ground and stare at me with those big, wet eyes. It saw me, and suddenly, I felt judged. Like it knew that my stubby legs could only carry my soft, chubby body so far before I was winded. One time, a squirrel charged me. It was the first time I was afraid to die. 

Mr. Morris’s smile ended. It all dropped, and that disdainful weakness returned. Suddenly, we all missed that forced grin. “But not these birds. They attacked and consumed both beast and man on sight!” Those deep breaths that he took before started getting shorter and shallower. 

Ornithologists named them Edentes Superbiam. They’re restless beasts, constantly on the hunt. They gather in the sky and fly in a giant circle. If you’ve seen a video of it from above, you’ll know it looks like a tropical storm. It’s better if I show it to you. There’s a live feed of it online. 

There was a short bit of typing, and the image of the raven was gone. It was replaced by a video of what appeared to be a frayed, angry black circle lazily rotating in place over the countryside. Mr. Morris was correct in his storm analogy. The town we all knew must exist underneath wasn’t even visible—only a shadowy ring making its eternal spin. While we were all studying the ravens in their strange pattern, Mr. Morris continued. “Yeah, it’s like a hurricane. Eye and everything. No wind or rain. All it makes is feathers, white shit, and corpses.” 

Besides Morris, I knew only one person who had experienced the Eye, although I never discussed it with her. My freshman roommate’s older sister was five when it happened. I remember meeting her for the first time and boldly gawking at her missing left eye and half-eaten right ear. The two deformities made an interesting yet ugly symmetry to her face. I spent the rest of the semester trying to sleep with her. The closest I ever got was when she called me a “Downright nasty little perv.” She said it with a smile and wink, which might have meant she was flirting, but she said it in front of my friends, so I took it as an insult. To prove how unoffended I was by the remark, I spent the entire next semester making fun of her disfigurement to anyone who would listen. She socked me in the eye for that one. She and I had something in common for about the next two weeks. 

For a long while, Morris just stared at the video with us. “They’re screaming, you know.” I don’t know why, but that surprised me. I wasn’t the only one. There was a collective intake of air around the room. It shouldn’t have been shocking. They were still birds, after all. Regardless of their numbers or aggression, birds caw and scream. “That’s all they do. They scream, eat, shit, then scream some more. It's a horrible, awful noise!” The image of my freshman roommate’s older sister covered in blood and bird shit made me fidget in my seat.

We were all young—only newborns or infants when the Black Eye first occurred. For us, it had only existed as we saw it then, a video of this impossible thing in the fictional state of Kentucky. Mr. Morris had just then introduced us to its actual reality. In that pitch-black circle of hell was a single bird being eaten alive as it shrieked in agony or rage. As it shit itself perpetually until its death. As it mated with the bird next to it, which experienced the exact same thing. That was the truth of the Black Eye—a million billion individual birds in this grotesque spin without end. Suddenly, the slime-covered silence from before turned into the cold and sharp silence of fear. 

After he said that, Mr. Morris just put his head in his hands and refused to speak. I remember jumping as the door slammed behind this kid who had grabbed his stuff and chose that moment to get the hell out. I would have done the same, but the revulsion of Mr. Morris trapped me. Or was it the birds? I don’t know. At that moment, the whole damn world made me sick. It was all too much for poor Mr. Morris, and he broke out into an open sob. The rest of us were too scared to move, so we sat there in our fear and disgust of the Eye and the man before us, respectively. We watched our professor cry in front of us. In between sobs, he would just repeat the same thing over and over again. “It’s a black eye! It’s a goddamn black eye!” 

At the time, I remember thinking he was referring to the cyclone. How could he not? This legion of blackbirds spiraled in the air, mating and cannibalizing one another. I realized what he meant only after I graduated and learned and saw many things. 

There are many Black Eyes on this planet. They come in a myriad of forms, but they are all Edentes Superbiam. They all eat our pride. You can find them in places where we have been forced out. Banished from the places where we created homes and forged lives. Wittenoom, Beichuan, Gilman, and Tomioka to name a few. I’ve visited them all. Each a mark of shame. Hopkinsville was saved for last. 

I saw the storm of birds and their havoc for myself. Those ravens were a black eye to us as people. A black eye to civilization itself. Despite all our advancement and achievements, we had been forced out by simple birds. Hopkinsville was gone, and we couldn’t go back. Being defeated by such primitive creatures was humiliating. Their flight was just an ebony wreath crowned atop another failure. 

The moment I laid eyes on the storm, I knew why they screeched their haunting song. I recognized it for what it was because I had heard it before. I heard it in the ever-burning hellfire of Centralia. In the ceaseless volcanic ash of Plymouth. And in the irradiated walls of Chernobyl. Each was just as loud as those screaming birds and shouted the same words at me. It was a victory cry—a reminder. “You lost. We won.” 

In secret, I define myself with three characteristics. The first two: I hate birds and old people. Both remind me of death and loss. Lastly, I take pictures of everything.