All Eyes

 

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Naivete

    We were all the same. Everyone in my family had the same smooth skin and piercing green eyes. Everyone on my street looked just the same as my family members. My mother  had always warned me about the Others, the dangerous creatures with grotesque faces and solid brown eyes. My brothers told me bedtime stories about the Others barbaric ways: how they ate their own children and decorated their front porches with the skulls of their enemies and lurked in the dark corners of rooms and stared endlessly with their dark, pupilless eyes. At the time, I was scared out of my mind by these stories, and I often went to sleep with my blankets over my head in a pathetic attempt to hide from the ever-lurking, brown-eyed Others.

    I was a naive child, believing any stories anyone told me about anything at all. My parents filled my head with warnings about the dangers that waited for me outside our walled city, and I was inclined to stay close to home when I wandered. Their words were well-meaning, but paired with the horror stories my brother’s told me, they frightened me more than any plague or wild animal could.

    “Don’t wander past the outer gates, Étaín,” my mother told me in the morning when I left for school, as if I needed reminding. The previous night’s story, courtesy of my brother, Ciaran, had featured the brown-eyed scouts that lived at the border of our city and pulled children under the gate into the woods outside. Mother had come in to say good night before Ciaran could tell me what the Others did to the children in the woods, but I had heard enough get the idea; those children never came back to the right side of the gate.

    I nodded to her and left the house, glancing warily at the dark alleys I passed on the short walk to school, afraid I would see a pair of dark brown eyes staring at me. The walk to school passed without incident, unsurprisingly, and I took my seat.

    Miss Brogan told different stories about the Others than the ones I heard from Ciaran and Aedan. She told stories about the partnership the Others used to hold with our city decades ago. She never told us anything about cannibalistic border scouts or porches adorned with freshly removed heads. She would probably get fired if she did. Instead she explained why the Others had left the city; she told the story of their oppression of the green-eyed citizens and how they were chased out to live in their own city in the outside. I didn’t believe a word of it. Miss Brogan’s story sounded too simple to be the truth. Surely, I reasoned, the actual story would be a lot more scary and interesting than the “political uprisings” and “social injustices” we learned about in school.

    “No one is allowed to associate themselves with the Others,” Miss Brogan told the class. “They are a danger to this society and all us green-eyed folks.”

    “Because they eat children?” I asked suddenly, not bothering to raise my hand. My classmates immediately began laughing. Even Miss Brogan smiled a little.

    “I don’t know where you heard that, Étaín, but the Others do not eat children,” she said kindly, and the other students started to laugh even harder. I could feel my face flush a deep red, and I sunk down in my seat.

    Miss Brogan continued, “They are very different from us, too different for us to live together, but they are not so different that they have been returned to the primitive practice of cannibalism.”

    “Surely the Others have killed people though!” I spoke up again, reaching for anything that may make me look less like a fool.

    Unfortunately, my words seemed to turn the conversation to the opposite pole. Miss Brogan’s lips pinched together and any amusement in her eyes vanished. “The Others have killed a lot of people,” she said quietly. “I think you had better stop asking questions, Étaín. We need to cover our math for today.”

    Miss Brogan’s avoidance of the topic caught me off guard, but it only made me more interested in the mysterious Others. When I got home, I asked my father the same question that had caused Miss Brogan so much discomfort.

    “Of course they’ve killed people.”

    “Who did they kill?” I pressed. “Were they green-eyed?”

    Another uncomfortable silence. Why did the question seem to carry so much bad energy?

    “Yes, they were green-eyed. All of them.” Finally some progress. Maybe I had finally come upon the real story of the Others. Father took a deep breath and said, “It was almost fifty years ago. Tension had been growing for decades between the two groups: they were just so undeveloped, so uncivilized. They didn’t understand how we lived or why we treated them as inferior. They didn’t see that we deserved to be in control, so they attacked.” He took a moment to remember before he went on, leaving me hanging on his every word. “A group of brown-eyed soldiers stormed the capitol building, and the government officials had no choice but to fight back. Many people died before the Green were able to push the Others back out through the city gates.” He sighed as though the story had added about ten years to his age. I didn’t understand why a story took so much of an effort to tell. The Others were clearly dangerous, and the Green had done the right thing in driving them from the city.

    “The city’s a lot safer now that the Others are gone, isn’t it, Daddy?” I asked, climbing into his lap and laying my head on his shoulder.

    He smiled weakly and nodded. “It is much safer now, my love.”

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Autonomy

    After I learned the actual story about the Others, Ciaran’s renditions stopped bothering me so much. I could walk to school without feeling like I had brown eyes watching my every step. My peers eventually forgot all about the stupid questions I had pertaining to the Others, and I was able to rest easier knowing no one was laughing at me anymore. Still I was glad when I graduated from Miss Brogan’s class because after that day, she always stared warily at my raised hand as though I was a constant reminder of something she had lost and preferred to forget about.

    I soon lost all my previous interest in the Others as I no longer thought of them as a threat as I grew and matured. I took daily walks by the gates without any stray Other scouts pulling me under to kill me. I was as carefree as any teenager could be without bedtime stories to keep me up at night for fear of being eaten.

    I used to be too careful, but now I was not careful enough. Of course, I had no need to be careful. Now that the shadows in the corners of my vision no longer resembled brown-eyed leering at me, I had nothing at all to be afraid of in my safe, Green little city. Unfortunately for me, the edges of my little Green city were not as safe as the paved interior, and I stumbled quite severely, sliding down an unseen incline and becoming horribly entangled in the brush at the bottom of the ravine. I struggled to disentangle myself to no avail, and I fell still so as to save my energy until I could think of a way out. I cursed my wandering eyes and my aching back and my stupid self in general, and then I heard it.

    “Goodness gracious!”

    I couldn’t turn my head without painfully ramming my face straight into a particularly nasty clump of leaves and twigs, but I heard a voice shout from where I had fallen and slidy footsteps down to where I currently rested.

    “Thank God someone came along!” I shouted without looking back at my rescuer. From the soft voice and light steps, I judged them to be a girl about my age. “Could I bother you to help untangle a bit?”

    I felt tugging on the branches attached to the fabric of my left pants leg in response, and I tried to untangle my arms somewhat so I could help.

    “You have quite a talent for getting tangled up,” the girl noted as she managed to free my leg. Meanwhile, I had gotten one arm free and was working on removing the vines near my face so I could actually see who was helping me; I didn’t recognize the voice.

    “I’m not always so clumsy,” I promised with a yelp as I accidentally scraped a twig against my cheek. “I guess I got distracted. I’m sure lucky you were around though. Thank you for the help.”

    “It’s not a problem. I always try to help when I can. It’s the way I was raised.”

    “My name is Étaín,” I said, peeling the final bough away from my face and off my shoulder; my entire left side was now free from the plants.

    “I’m Branna,” was the reply. I was sure I had never heard of a Branna in town before, but I could have been mistaken. I tried to get a look at her face as she circled my right leg, unwinding vine after vine, but she kept her head down as though extremely focused. She worked incredibly quickly, and I had soon fallen entirely free of the brush.

    “Thank you, Branna,” I said again, dusting off my clothes and reaching out to shake her hand. She took it hesitantly, still keeping her head down and eyes averted. “You’re pretty shy,” I remarked, laughing a little.

    “My parents tell me it’s safer this way,” she said quietly and pulled her hand away from mine. I was beginning to feel a little suspicious of this Branna.

    “Safer?”

    “I have to go,” she said suddenly, urgently. “I don’t want to be caught on this side of the gate.”

    Terror. She began to scurry back up the hill, but I caught the hem of her shirt, and she stumbled back down and into my arms. She was severely off balance, and I took the opportunity to take a closer look at her face.

Confusion. She didn’t have green eyes like mine, but they weren’t brown either. Not really. For a few seconds I just stared, for I could not make heads or tails of Branna’s eyes; they were both green and brown at the same time. One eye was the same pale green as my own while the other was a dark brown almost the same color as the damp soil under our feet.

Branna hurriedly stood up and backed away from me. “Please just let me go. I’m not supposed to be here.”

I couldn’t look away from her eyes as I slowly walked toward her. “How…”

She stopped backing up, but she still looked like she could die of fright if she didn’t leave soon. “It’s called heterochromia,” she said quickly. “Different colors.”

“I thought it was only green or brown.” I probably sounded like some sort of close minded idiot to her.

She took a deep breath, apparently realizing that I had no intention of hurting her. “Normally it is one or the other. I’m a special case, a hybrid. It’s just the way I was born.”

“Do you live with the Others?”

“If you mean the Cedar Eyes, then yes. I was told we had different names for each other.” Branna cracked a small smile. “Everyone back home calls your kind Moss Face.”

The shock of the situation was broken by those words, and we both laughed.

“I always thought that your people were bad,” I confessed. “My father told me that your people attacked the administration of our city.”

Branna frowned. “My parents tell a very different story. I was always taught that the Moss Faces exiled the Cedar Eyes for being different, so I should always be kind.”

“We can’t be that different if our eye color is the only thing that divides us,” I pointed out. “Clearly you are the proof that it is possible to cooperate.” It was hard for me to believe that I had lived my whole life thus far under false pretenses as to my past. Seeing how scared Branna had been on me just because I had green eyes had deeply disturbed me. We had never met and yet she had been taught to fear me and people like me. It gave me the sudden urge to do something, to make a change.

“Come with me to the capitol, Branna,” I said suddenly. “Maybe we can get the leaders to see that cooperation with the Oth- Cedar Eyes is possible.”

“No, Étaín.” Her voice was so firm. “It’s much too dangerous for me in your city. As much as I want our people to get along again, to all live together in one city, I just can’t risk it.” She stared at me with her intense contradictory eyes, and she looked so sad. I couldn’t believe I was ever scared of the people outside the city. If the rest of them were anything like Branna, they were just as scared as I was.

“I understand,” I said slowly, and I did. After all, I knew the leaders would not accept a plea for cooperation in just one day, especially after almost half a century of segregation. “I hope we see each other again, Branna. Thank you for your help.”

Branna smiled at me and shook my hand again. “I would gladly do it again, Étaín. I hope we meet again someday.” With a final stare, she turned away and scurried up the incline and back toward the gate that separated our people.

I went home more confused than I had been in years when it came to the dubious history of the city. Branna was a kind person who told a different story than the ones I had grown up with, and I didn’t know which to believe. Desperate for closure, I sat down and wrote the first of many letters.

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Unanimity

    Years passed. I delivered the first letter a week after my meeting with Branna. We met at the gate by the ravine every week after that to exchange letters from our respective governments. In that way, we became ambassadors to each others homes, two young people trying to get the old people to forget, to move on, and and to forgive.

    It took over ten years before an accord could be reached, but we didn’t give up. We were both adults by the time our leaders arranged a meeting to discuss tearing down the gates. Even then, it took still more time until an agreement was reached on that discussion and action was finally taken to bring the barrier down.

    People didn’t like the idea of our old enemies returning to the land they had forsaken. Branna reported to me that her people didn’t like the idea of returning to the land of the people who had forsaken them. Because of hesitation on both sides, it took longer still to actually integrate the societies again.

    I was entering my thirty-second year when I was called to the capitol building to welcome the Others back home.

    I was entering my thirty-second year when I embraced my good friend Branna on the front steps of the capitol of my city, of our city.

    I was entering my thirty-second year when I made a speech welcoming the Cedar Eyes back where they belonged.

    I was entering my thirty-second year when I proclaimed that it would no longer be the Others and Moss Faces or my people and their people.

    “The only thing that sets us apart is the color of our eyes. We are all the same on the inside, and in the end, isn’t it what’s in our hearts that really defines who we are? We are no longer us and them. We are one. We are All Eyes!”

    Applause began a new era of unanimity.

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