Okay, I know the burning question (at least one of them…) for those you that have been reading The Blind Eye: What’s the deal with eyes? Hindsight eats’em. The Blind Eye dusts’em. Guttersnipe shoots’em. And Amanda draws the hell out of’em! Eyes ARE at the heart of our story; it’s true. To avoid giving away major story elements that I want you to experience organically as our gruesome little tale unfolds, I have to be pretty limited in what I discuss about the role of eyes. However, let me get into the subject to the extent that eyes have impacted the plot thus far.
Hindsight Loves Eyes!
Rest assured that Hindsight does not simply take and consume the eyes of his victims as random organs, nor were eyes chosen as the target of so many by your humble writer just to make you cringe. For the vast majority of us, eyesight is how we primarily experience our world. I venture to guess that, put to a forced choice, almost every one of us would forfeit EACH of our other senses if allowed to just keep our vision. Now that’s value.
Headliner Loses an Eye!
Vision gives us our most poignant memories – good, bad and in-between. It’s these lingering internal images that begin on our retinas and then travel with us throughout the rest of our lives. The blurry lights and reflected surfaces of Christmas morning. That perfect girl on the lunch wave that no doubt looked a lot prettier than she acted. Your blood-streaked Mom trapped beneath a heaving, steaming wreck of a truck. The once-cherished, now-resented beauty of an ex-wife on a teenage wedding day. These emotion-stained photonic data-turned-dendritic structures set the foundation for so much of what we do – or can’t do – and who we are. Most we cherish. Many we just want to erase a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (if you don’t know this movie, SEE IT NOW).
The Blind Eye's Blinding Dust!
It’s the simple importance of the eye in our lives that led me to make the little sensor receptor such a critical device in The Blind Eye. When Hindsight sucks down Garbage Man Johnson’s eyeball like a pickled egg in some dirt road dive, know that it’s more than aqueous humor with a floating lens that he’s ingesting. When Guttersnipe pops a cap into a socket that had a juicy little orb in it a second ago, she was initially aiming to destroy more than just the tissue. And when The Blind Eye casts his blinding dust into the lids of a target, he has a rationale beyond combat advantage (although that’s not a bad reason, either…). Eyes have surplus value. They represent something more. As for Amanda’s motivation for drawing all of the ocular carnage I’ve laid out for her…well…that’s just exposure therapy. My psychology degrees at work…
