My Evil Eye

One night my eyeball exploded.

Not in a “Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star” kind of explosion but in a “WTF! What's wrong with you?” kind of way. My wife first noticed it in the morning when she brought me some coffee.

There was no sensation of any kind. So I rushed to a mirror and saw that my eye had turned red. It was gruesome to look at, but at least it was painless. After the initial shock and some internet research it turns out I was suffering from a subconjunctival hemorrhage. I wasn't entirely sure of the reason for it but I vaguely remember sneezing in my sleep.

Since it wasn't irritating in any way nor did it impair my vision, I quickly got used to it. It happened on a Sunday which is a day off for me, so I kind of forgot about it until I got around other people.

At work the next day, after finding out that I wasn't dying or more importantly that I wasn't going to infect them with a dread disease, my co-workers would try to ignore it but you could see that they had a hard time looking away from my hideous deformity. As my customers would look upon me I could see the thinly veiled shock on their faces as they tried to play it cool and place their orders without throwing up or running out of the store prematurely.

At first it bothered me a little being a freak of nature with my abnormal eye, but then it started to be fun. I felt the power of having an evil eye and I would flash it at strangers and watch them get nervous under my gaze, certain that I could look through them to their very soul. They thought me a monster disguised as a human. An evil wizard out of nightmares walking the aisles of their stores waiting to whisk away unattended children to be eaten during a Black Mass, but only after I cursed them with plague!
 

But the fun only lasts so long. Only a certain amount of people are frightened of the unknown. There are in fact, other people who are well meaning and not superstitious that would ask if I knew that my eye was deformed and if I, perhaps, needed medical attention. One such exchange happened while I was eating a hamburger at a well known clown funded operation. An old man kept staring at me from another table and I kept wondering why (having forgot about my ailment because my mind was on eating lunch) until he walked over and made sure I wasn't having a stroke.

Gradually over the next few weeks my eyeball returned to normal and I was grateful as I had grown tired of the experience. Now, I'm scared to sneeze.