Doll Eyes
by Robert Repino
We walked along the pond, me, Bryan, Kim, and Tara. It was back when I liked Tara—when I still thought she might like me—but before Bryan and Kim started making out at parties. With our shadows getting longer, I suggested heading down to the pond on our way out of the park just to prolong the afternoon. Everyone seemed pleased when we came across a young hip family—the mother and father both covered in tattoos—feeding some geese in the water. The birds were very active, nipping at the Cheerios that the baby tossed to them. One of the geese even stood up on a rock and wiggled its butt, flicking water from its feathers. Mother and child laughed at this, and Tara said, "Awww." While everyone focused on the one goose, I noticed another in the distance pecking at the surface of the pond. Something wasn't quite right, and I had to tilt my head before I noticed that its upper beak was missing, broken off at the two nose-holes (if that's what they're called). The pink tongue rested on the bottom part of the beak, extending like a wet worm toward any nearby food. The eyes were as expressionless as those on any other bird. They conveyed no disappointment or anger at the bird's situation. It all begged the question of how long the goose had been like this. Long enough to pick up the Cheerios after a few sad tries, it seemed, but not long enough for the bird to have contracted some infection or lost out in some other evolutionary competition. And how did it happen? I imagined the bird crashing into a clean window, or snapping at a rock thinking it was a loaf of bread, or losing a tug-of-war with the alpha goose. Then I imagined a hand, my left hand, holding the goose's head against the concrete while the my right smashed the beak apart with a hammer, splintering it until it flaked away, Tara crying behind me. I imagined it with and without blood. I thought about not pointing out the bird, but I figured that someone would notice the worm-tongue eventually, so I showed my friends. "Isn't that sad?" I said while Tara and Kim covered their mouths with their hands at almost the exact same time. "Oh noooooo, poor thing," Tara whispered. Bryan shook his head, but I couldn't tell if it was at the bird's plight or the girls' reaction. For its part, the bird seemed unimpressed with our sympathy. Instead, it continued trolling for food, its doll eyes focused on nothing. It had accepted things. "Oh, my god," I said, "why is the world so relentlessly awful and hopeless?"
Robert Repino grew up in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. After serving in the Peace Corps, he earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Emerson College. His fiction has appeared in Hobart, The Furnace Review, Word Riot, Ghoti, JMWW, and the anthology Brevity and Echo (Rose Metal Press). His screenplays and novels are getting rejected somewhere as you read this. He currently lives in New York.