Poet Eyes
by Autumn Bettinger
I once curated an art show at a community college. All entries had to be nature themed. Bonus points if they were made from sustainable materials. I had made dry and wet leaf mosaics, an amateur’s approximation of the Mona Lisa and Starry Night in torn maple leaves and fern fronds. I know there were other displays like mine: heavy-handed and on the nose.
There was one kid who came and stole the show. I say ‘kid’, but he was at least nineteen. I was only twenty, but he seemed so young. He was small and pale, had poet’s eyes—that’s what my friend called them—dark and sunken, but attractive I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.
When I brought him to his table, I watched him pull half a dozen taxidermized pieces of roadkill from a scuffed, leather suitcase. They were misshapen, the stitching lumpy and raw. Some were missing eyes, some still had blood in their fur, some looked like they were screaming. I recoiled, but I was the outlier. The rest of the girls moved forward as one, touching broken tails and trying to capture poet eyes. The guys were congratulating themselves on knowing it was a metaphor for the brevity of human life.
I walked back to my table and said nothing. When the show ended, a few straggling artists helped me throw away half-full plastic cups and wipe down counters covered in crumbs and crumpled napkins. The kid lingered, putting his roadkill away with a tender, unsettling exactitude that I would later attribute to serial killers. I half-listened as my friend told me how she had always wanted to sleep with a moody artist. I looked over at the kid fondling a flattened squirrel and shook my head. Poet eyes clearly go further than I realized. When he showed up ten minutes later with a paper towel and started helping, I moved to the back of the room to pull trash bags from bins and let my friend shoot her shot. An hour later and I was the only person in the room.
Weighed down with packed up leaves and the remaining trash bags, I struggled down the stairs and into the alley where the dumpsters lived. It was cold, my breath puffing up to whiten and then slip away. The dumpster lid was already open, which was a small mercy. I’m short and easily winded, and those lids weigh more than you think. I threw a trash bag in and heard a muffled curse. I froze but wasn’t all that surprised when the kid crawled out of the dumpster; a half-dead mouse in one hand. I gagged but otherwise remained composed. I had been his boss after all, for at least two hours, the least I could do was not throw up on the kid’s shoes. Poets eyes were pinned to me, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I didn’t see any emotion, just flat pools. Two unbothered black marbles. When he closed the gap in two quick steps and grabbed me by the hair, kissing me, I was so surprised I kissed him back, like a reflex. I didn’t pull away, even when I felt the barely warm mouse brush my neck as he pressed me against the bricks.
Autumn is a full-time mother of two in Portland, Oregon. When not folding laundry or slinging snacks, she can be found writing once the kids are asleep. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Compressed Literary Arts, The Good Life Review, and others. She has been a finalist for The Prose Online International Flash Prize. All of Autumn’s published works can be found at autumnbettinger.com.