It’s been a rough-and-tumble day so I’m tired

The way they look at me lately is scary. Sister and Mother and Father and Friend. They all look at me with their eyes wide open and they’re so big and so wide that I could just jump into them and leap around and splash in all that eye-juice. But I won’t, because They tell me I shouldn’t. I listen to them.

Yesterday, I thought I saw them. There was a shadowy figure, thin and narrow, rising out of the steam as the rock concert blared on the background. I grabbed at them—“come!”—but they were gone. Later, they told me sorry, there was a miscommunication, I’d have to wait until later to see them.

It’s agony! This waiting! This waiting is agony. It makes me sick, sick, sick. It makes Sister worry—“take your mind off of it!”—but I shrug and tell her, “You don’t understand.”

What? She doesn’t.

They’re always telling me there are gnats in my stomach, gnats that gnaw through my liver and my organs and my intenstines. They say that that tube I slipped into my pocket without paying for—the lip gloss—is what attracted them. The slippery, gross substance in there coats all my internal organs and it attracts these gnats, who eat everything in their path.

How scary!

If I didn’t have the Eye Sickness, they said, I’d be able to peer in and see the gnats.

Wouldn’t that be interesting?