The Subtle Worlds of Multicolored Eyes

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Her blue eye contained a city where it had been raining since Tuesday.

Her amber eye contained a country that had never heard of Tuesday. Birds flew over its mountains carrying small pieces of the sun.

We met in a café between them.

She held a porcelain cup with flowers painted on it. Some of the flowers were no longer alive, but porcelain is good at keeping that sort of thing to itself.

“Which world do you live in?” I asked.

“The one that needs me,” she said.

Outside, people hurried toward appointments. Inside her other eye, a woman stood on a cliff waiting for a moon to finish growing.

I had ordered coffee. It arrived looking like something I had already regretted.

There was a red poppy beside her cheek. It seemed to have found the only place in the universe where it could afford to be red.

She told me that every night the two worlds exchanged a little weather.

Sometimes a mountain appeared in the city. People walked around it on their way to work. Sometimes a café chair appeared in the wilderness and remained empty for a thousand years.

“Does anybody notice?”

“A few people sit down.”

Fine white lines crossed her face: diagrams, calculations, handwriting from somebody who had tried to explain her and run out of paper.

I wanted to brush them away, but she said they helped the birds find their way home.

We stayed until the waiter began turning the other chairs upside down.

In the blue world, somebody missed the last bus.

In the amber world, a bell rang beneath the ground.

She finished her tea.

For a moment I could see myself in both her eyes. In one, I was an ordinary man getting older in a café. In the other, I was walking toward a small house with every window lit.

Then she blinked.

I went home through the rain.

There was a porcelain cup on my kitchen table. I had never seen it before.

I put the kettle on.

It seemed rude to keep somebody waiting.