When the bandages came off, I saw everything.
The world was bright and trembling. I cried the first time sunlight hit my face. After being blind for over twenty years, I'd forgotten what light felt like—not the warmth, but the weight of it. The way it outlines everything, sharp and full of meaning.
The first thing I saw was my mother's face. She cried when I whispered, "You're beautiful." I didn't remember her looking like that—wrinkles, soft eyes, silver hair—but it didn't matter. I was seeing. Finally.
I spent days just... looking. Walls. Woodgrain. The way light moved through water. My own reflection—I didn't recognize myself. I studied my face like it belonged to a stranger, fascinated and grateful.
At night, I'd lie awake, afraid to close my eyes. I didn't want to lose it again.
But I should have.
I should've stayed blind.
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It started small.
A hole, the size of a pencil tip, appeared on my arm. At first I thought it was a bruise, or a freckle. But when I looked closer, it wasn't just dark—it was deep. A void. A perfect circle punched into my skin with no blood, no pain. Just black.
"Mom," I said, showing her. "Do you see that?"
She frowned. "See what, honey?"
"The hole. Right here."
She touched my skin gently. "There's nothing there."
But I could see it. And once I saw one, more followed.
They spread along my legs. My ribs. The back of my neck. Always perfectly round. Always clean and bloodless. Like little mouths waiting to open.
No one else could see them.
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I stopped sleeping.
I started seeing things move beneath the holes—twitching shapes, small and slick. I leaned in once, holding a flashlight to one on my thigh, and saw a tiny eyeball blink up at me.
It blinked again.
I screamed until I vomited.
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Then came the teeth.
They started appearing in places they shouldn't. On the bathroom floor. Under my pillow. In my cereal. Not mine. Not anyone's. Just random, human teeth—molars, canines, incisors—all smeared with red at the roots, as if freshly pulled.
One morning, I opened the fridge and found a jawbone nestled between the milk and eggs. It grinned at me with a cracked front tooth that looked exactly like my mother's.
When I showed her, it was gone. Replaced by butter.
"Hannah," she said, gently but firmly, "I think you should talk to someone."
But I couldn't talk. I couldn't make her understand.
I could see the world peeling away like wallpaper. And no one else even noticed.
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Then came the figures.
At first, they were shadows. Lurking at the corners of rooms. Tall and still, too long, too thin, heads tilted as if listening to something only they could hear.
Then they began to move.
They crawled from the holes in the walls. From my skin. They unfolded, limb by limb, slick and black and wrong. Their arms dragged along the ground. Their heads would twitch when they looked at me. And when they opened their mouths—
They didn't scream.
They grinned.
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I tried to blind myself with a fork.
I couldn't go through with it.
I remember standing in front of the mirror, shaking, gagging, whispering, "Just do it, just do it," over and over. But I couldn't.
The next night, I found a message carved into the wall in what looked like burned fingernails:
YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO SEE.
I clawed at it. My nails bled. My hands bled.
The shadows watched.
By now, the house was alive.
The walls breathed. The ceiling oozed. Sometimes the floor would ripple like water when I walked. I'd see fingers slide out from under the floorboards and retreat when I screamed.
My reflection no longer mirrored me.
She moved differently. Smiled when I cried. Watched me with wide, bulging eyes.
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One night, I blacked out.
When I woke, I was sitting on the floor of the hallway. My feet were bloody. My mouth was full of something hard. I reached in and pulled out three teeth.
I don't know whose they were.
I started to believe I was in Hell. Maybe the surgery hadn't worked. Maybe I'd died on the table and this was some layer of torment reserved for people like me—those foolish enough to try to see what they weren't meant to.
The figures stopped hiding.
They whispered to me now. Not in words, but in images—flickering visions behind my eyes. People I loved rotting from the inside. My mother standing over me, peeling her own skin away, revealing another face underneath—my face.
One whispered directly into my ear one night:
"They gave you our eyes."
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That was the last straw.
I snapped.
I took a steak knife from the kitchen and locked myself in the bathroom. I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I just sat in front of the mirror, whispering, "It's not real, it's not real, it's not real," while my reflection tilted her head the opposite way I did.
I told myself: if I take them out, it'll stop. I'll go back. I'll be safe in the dark.
I drove the knife into the first eye. It popped like a grape. I howled, the pain searing and electric—but also... relieving.
I stabbed the second without hesitation.
The darkness rushed in. Beautiful. Pure.
I collapsed, trembling and grinning, bathed in blood.
No more shadows.
No more holes.
No more teeth.
No more sight.
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They found me the next morning.
Dead from shock and blood loss. The paramedics said it looked like I did it myself—no signs of forced entry.
My mother told them I had been "getting worse." That I'd been "seeing things." They chalked it up to mental illness, trauma, post-operative psychosis.
No one will ever believe what I saw.
But I know this:
The eyes they gave me weren't mine.
They weren't human.
They were windows.
And something on the other side was waiting.
Still is.
Watching.
Just waiting for the next pair.