When He Was Whole

He was four years old and already used to being alone.

His momma had run off with the Hoover man, so Walter Earl played by himself under the back porch, diggin’ trails in the soft dirt for imaginary cowboys.

One afternoon the clouds shifted and something glinted in the silt—a silver coil, half-buried, shining like spinnin’ top.

He reached for it, daydreamin’ of the fort he’d build for his soldiers.

The world went black.

Pain exploded behind his eyes.

He screamed so hard it felt like the sky split open.

Something sharp and mean whipped across his face. He shrieked for his mother.

She wasn’t there.

Daddy found him eventually, scooped him out of the dirt, and ran. At the hospital they took what was left of the slivered eye. The other eye, untouched by the spring, went blind too.

Total darkness.

For months there was nothing.

No sunbeams sneaking through curtains.

No moonlight through the trees.

No fireflies tempting him to chase them.

That Christmas there were no lights on the tree—he wouldn’t have seen them anyway.

Right before Easter, sight crept back into the good eye. The bandage came off and an eyepatch went on.

He never went back under the porch again.

He gave up on cowboys and soldiers. He even gave up on bein’ a pirate, though he finally had the patch. Some things stop being pretend when they come true the wrong way.

He kept the glass eye they gave in a small box on his dresser.

Sometimes, when no one was looking, he’d take it out and hold it in his fist—rememberin’ when he was whole.