I too believed it was gouging, back then. Some poor woman had fallen afoul of a stranger, had his thumbs in her eyes before she knew what was happening. It seemed the simple answer. It’s easy to blame someone else. No one thought that the problem had come from the inside.
The second body, weeks later, was an older man on a golf course. The third, a business owner who had stayed late for stocktaking and was found the next morning with the remains of his eyes congealed upon the till. After that, there were too many to keep track of. It didn’t seem like a random killer anymore — no one could be in multiple parts of the city at once when seventeen people dropped dead within an hour. I don’t know how long it takes to gouge out someone’s eyes, but having to clean yourself up takes time so the next victim won’t see the mess, and there wasn’t enough of it.
One night on the news there’s a video. Just some kids playing around, and in the background there’s a real estate agent putting up a sign. She stops for a moment, raises one hand as if to rub her eyes, and that’s it, out they come. It’s quite explosive. Both eyes in an excess of pressure, although it’s not possible to see the whole splatter zone because she’s mostly faced away, and the eyes burst across the picket fence and into rose bushes. The evening news features some scientist types afterward, on their knees beneath the blossoms, sifting through dirt. Trying to find remains, I guess, calculating the blast distance. The body’s still there while they work, though with one of those forensic tents around her. Like that’s going to make anything better. The worst of it’s already been broadcast.
Some kind of plague, maybe, although we’re all fed up with those. Maybe a parasite. They can do disgusting things to a person. I start boiling my drinking water, just in case. An old acquaintance of mine starts putting bleach drops in hers. She says I should do the same, but the day I take Elsie’s advice for anything but sponge cake is the day I deserve to drop dead of anything preventable.
I didn’t expect it to be sea urchins. Of all the awful possibilities, sea urchins. They’re the size of softballs, some of them. How are they cramming themselves into craniums?
More importantly, why isn’t anybody else seeing them?
• • •
The New Zealand sea urchin, commonly called kina. Herbivores, they feed on red and brown algae. The smaller ones live under rocks, often in intertidal areas, but migrate to open shallow water as they grow.
Under current environmental conditions their population is rapidly increasing.
• • •
Breathing.
That’s what it looks like anyway: a gentle sort of pulsing, with the surface of the eyes bulging a little every other second. There’s no urgency in it, but it’s not natural either. It takes me a few side glances before I see the spikes. And then the woman with the spiky, breathing eyes leans forward for her phone and there’s the tiniest whiff of saltwater beneath the hairspray, and it’s suddenly clear to me that they’re kina. I used to play with kina in rock pools as a kid, and those bloody things are everywhere now. The barrens would be a national conversation if more people could be bothered.
Elsie says that it’s a lot of fuss about nothing, which is about what I’d expect of her. Maybe she’d find the barrens harder to ignore if she could see them forcing their way out of eye sockets, but maybe not. All I know is if I were young Sarah and I’d to put my hands near those things it would be with the business end of a rat-tail comb and nothing else. Maybe the scissors. Something sharp, anyway, because if I were to try gouging sea urchins from sockets with my bare thumbs I’d be pulling prickles out of them for days. An unappealing prospect, considering I don’t know how it spreads.
I don’t bother to question if it does spread. Those urchins will be coming out of that poor woman’s face one way or another, whether the people see it or not, and that would go some way to explaining the sudden rise in the eyeless dead lately. I find myself leaning to the side, away from the approaching explosion. Ellen asks if I’m alright, and when I tell her I’ve got a migraine and would like to leave early it’s a lie, but not for long. I get them enough that I know how to induce them if needed. Half a bottle of gin brings the headache on, which is not ideal, but under the circumstances I don’t think anyone can blame me.
Just to make sure, next week I take the kitchen scissors and hack off a bit of hair behind one ear. Ellen gives me an emergency appointment after I tell her my toddler grandson got chewing gum stuck in there, which is an absolute lie because I never had kids, let alone grandkids, but she’s soft on the little ones, having three of her own; and it’s there I hear the gossip about poor Mrs. McAllister, whose eyes popped out of her head three days after I saw her in that chair — at least she’d had her hair done recently so it looked nice for the funeral. I would have thought there’d be a closed casket, but apparently stuffing the empty sockets makes them look less hollow in the coffin, which I suppose was nice for the family.
“I think they’re probably quite glad to be rid of her, to be honest,” says Sarah, which is an unsympathetic thing for a nice young girl to say and is therefore probably true. I can’t say I noticed anything off-putting about the dead woman, but then I only sat next to her for half an hour and nearly anyone can be pleasant for that long. If I were a hairdresser and she were a regular I’d get to know her better whether I wanted to or not.
I’d ask, but I honestly don’t think it’s relevant. Maybe she was mean or needy or annoying. Maybe she was perfectly normal and just didn’t put up with bullshit from mean, needy, annoying people. Still, if all it took for urchin larvae to settle in the watery environment of eyeballs and grow there was an unpleasant personality there’d be a lot more passing on than there are currently, and I say that knowing that the daily death count hit triple figures yesterday.
One would think that this rash of unusual deaths would garner a more hysterical response. True, it’s a little challenging to be walking down the street, or the aisles of the supermarket, and have the little pop-pop-splatter followed by the weight of a falling body and a small circumference of slime, but apparently people can get used to anything. More and more shops are requesting that customers wear goggles, in order to limit any mess. The people who wore masks when it was COVID wear the goggles now, and the people who didn’t wear them then think that stores should just hire people to clean up the biological hazard, but of course the shop workers who do wear protective gear are getting harassed by the non-goggle wearers. It’s the argument that never ends.
I get some goggles, and luckily for me they can be fitted with dark lenses, which helps with the light sensitivity of migraines — gin-induced or otherwise. It makes me wonder, though… all the different types of goggles. Some of them are the small streamlined ones worn by competitive swimmers, and some are the large type people wear when snorkeling. The last ones really catch my attention, it seems like an easy way to catch the kina expelled from eye sockets, and goodness knows it’s less noticeable than rubber gloves or butterfly nets. Even so, one can’t really snatch the goggles off a dead person in the yogurt aisle and scurry off without looking a little guilty.
Perhaps it’s morbid curiosity, but if I’m the only one to see them I might as well see them close up.
• • •
Without the population control of carnivory, the kina have eaten their way through the kelp forests, consumed them down to bare rock, and the resulting systems support even less marine life than before.
The kina, however, endure. Divers along the coast swim above broad stretches of bare subtidal substrate, a desert studded with hundreds and hundreds of voracious urchins.
• • •
The whites of her eyes are speckled, as if dark spines are slowly rising to the surface.
It’s an opportunity. I admit I’ve never much liked her.
“You should treat yourself,” I tell her. She’s not the first person I’ve seen with speckled eyes and incipient spines. There’s a lot of people with kina growing out of their eyes now, and close observation has allowed me to establish a timeline. First, there’s the pupillary effect: little glints that shine like sunshine on spines. Then the speckling, after which the edges of the pupil begin to lose their solidity. They get all ragged, with tiny rays poking out like distant stars, and then they start to bulge. There’s a definite three-dimensional effect, and as the kina gets bigger it takes over the iris. Then the spines emerge from the whites, and finally all I can see, through the migraine flash-and-blind of my own ocular deficiency, is that spiny bulge forcing its way out of socket.
Elsie doesn’t have long, I think.
I suppose I could have told someone. The cops, maybe, though I don’t know what they’d have done. One of the nurses down at the community health center, but I’d have been the one checked in after that. A marine biologist? I don’t know any of those, but I saw one on the television a few weeks ago, talking about the barrens, and I suspect if I called up the university they could have found me someone. There’s no guarantee that they would have believed me — but if they did they might have taken Elsie off for observation by someone other than me and I’d lose my chance. I realize that sounds a little cold.
“Not a fan of goggles?” I ask her.
“I don’t like the way they make me look,” she says, and that’s clear enough.
It’s certainly easier to see her eyes without them.
Two days later I pop round to her place with some biscuits for morning tea. The biscuits have chocolate in them. Not much, but they were on sale and I honestly don’t like the woman enough for French fancies or those little pink wafers. Chocolate’s good enough: a little bit special, even if it’s not what she’d have picked for a last meal. That would have been crayfish. I know. I asked. There’s enough people keeling over these days that last suppers are a popular topic.
“You could always have kina,” I suggest, just to see what would happen. I can see the urchins pulsing in her eye sockets, pressing outward — is their presence simply lethal, or is it manipulative as well?
“I don’t like them,” says Elsie, which is not a great surprise as she’s never liked anything, apart from complaining.
“They’re too bitter,” she says. “And they taste too strong, and I think they cost too much for what they are.”
Kina are cheaper than crayfish. Then again, there are a lot more of them than crayfish.
“But I like crayfish,” says Elsie. “I pay good money for them. They were cheaper when we were kids, I remember that, but then people don’t like to work these days. It’s why everything’s so expensive now.”
That’s her speaking alright, not the sea urchin.
I’d tell her, but there’s no telling Elsie anything. I know that from experience. And really, what could she do? Gouge her own eyes out and hope she survived the shock of it? It’s not like she has a melon baller in her kitchen drawers. I checked while she was outside getting a lemon off the tree for her tea.
I don’t feel bad about keeping silent. Honestly, the woman’s a bore. I try to get her sponge recipe out of her because it’s not like she’s going to be making it again, what with those urchin eyes of hers, the spines sticking out further than eyelashes and pulsing. It always wins at the Women’s Institute, that sponge, but Elsie doesn’t know she’s going to pop so all she does is grin, not very nicely, and say it’s a family secret. Who she’s going to pass it on to I don’t know, because even her kids don’t talk to her anymore. All that complaining and gullibility; I’d be sick of her too.
I don’t know why we keep pretending to be friends. Sixty years of faking it, and all because our mothers had us in the same year and used the same kindergarten. I suppose a couple of years of watching your daughters eat crayons together is a bonding experience that’s lingered a generation more than it should. We never disliked each other enough to irritate anyone by dropping the acquaintance, but I can’t say I’m sorry it’s about to end.
I’m not pleased about it either, mind.
It’s not that I want to see her suffer. Elsie is tedious and stupid, but she’s not evil. I just want to see how it works. It’s good to have a clear understanding of cause and effect.
“You’re always been such a pessimist,” she says, but I don’t see there’s much pessimism in looking reality in the face, which is why, when those spines begin to shiver, I get up and shuffle a few feet back. I tell Elsie I’ve got a cramp in my leg, but really I just want to get out of the splash zone.
Her eyes explode like water balloons punctured from the inside and she drops like a stone. There’s a hollow thud as her head hits the floor that’s admittedly slightly less hollow than I expected, and I circle round the body, trying not to step on any small squishy bits, looking for kina.
I wore my best strong boots, just in case. The thought of having to sit, cross-legged, on that spattered floor picking spines out of my soles didn’t appeal. Not that I planned to stomp them; that was a last resort. I wasn’t even sure if they’d be alive. That’s the disadvantage of experiencing horror by proxy: the total inability to tell if sea urchins are actual urchins or, you know, some sort of metaphorical monstrousness, a commentary on deliberate ignorance and the ways in which it spreads.
Turns out it’s both. They look like sea urchins at first. At least, one of them did. The other rolled so far under the fridge that I can’t reach it. The fridge itself is an ancient old thing, too heavy for a pensioner to shift. Instead I use the oven glove hanging by stove and a pair of tongs I found while searching for a melon baller, and grab the other urchin. It has a glistening smear to its spines, like it’s been rolled in jelly, which I suppose is close enough in consistency to eyeballs, not that I’ve ever stuck my fingers in one to find out.
The urchin goes in an old jam jar, which goes in my handbag, and then I ring for an ambulance. While I’m waiting, I rifle through that little handwritten notebook she keeps on the shelf with the rest of her cookbooks and tear out the recipe for sponge cake. It’s safely tucked away before the doorbell rings.
Elsie’s only been dead fifteen minutes, and I was here ten minutes before that, so I fudge the timeline and tell the nice people in uniforms that she was like that when I got here. In case there’s a busybody neighbor who might’ve seen my car arrive, I say I fainted when I first saw her, and it took me time to come round and call. I claim a headache, which is true enough, and think very hard about the time I was once very unpleasantly sick on an airplane. The memory of heaving up all those dry-roasted peanuts allows me to vomit over the shoes of the nearest EMT.
“No,” I say, sitting on the sofa with my handbag in my lap, twisting the fake leather strap between my fingers so that the soft squeaky sounds drown out the even fainter scratch of spine on glass, “my head doesn’t hurt. I don’t think I’ve bumped it; I was just so shocked!”
After the ambulance leaves — quietly, and without sirens — I take the rest of the biscuits home. No sense wasting them. Except when I dig them out of my purse, along with sponge recipe and the jam jar, what’s inside that jar isn’t urchin any more. It’s just plain old eyeball, or what an eyeball would look like if it exploded. Undercooked egg, perhaps, if it had been taken out of the pot too early and dropped on the floor. You can see what the shape might have been from the bits that held together. Sort of globular.
There’s only so much you can do with an eye like that. Putting on the yellow rubber gloves from under the kitchen sink and poking at it doesn’t do a damn thing. No matter how carefully I pressed, I couldn’t feel any sensation of spine. I tried pouring a few tablespoons of salt into the jam jar and filling it up with water, to see if salinity might provoke a return to urchinhood, but the salt doesn’t dissolve quickly enough and, impatient, I give the whole a gentle swirl, and when that doesn’t work fast enough either I use a chopstick to stir, and whatever cohesion the eye had doesn’t last long. Gelatinous disintegration, so I tip the whole lot down the loo, eat the rest of the biscuits, and go to bed.
The next morning I make a sponge cake.
The cake rises perfectly. Elsie would have hated to see it, the selfish cow.
• • •
It’s not enough to remove the immediately visible problem. Restoring the kina barrens requires multiple approaches and long-term investment in sustainable practices.
• • •
Why can’t they feel them, the people with urchins in their eyes? I can understand not being able to see them. It’s easy to see what’s not there, or to see and refuse so thoroughly that it’s like not seeing at all. Visual hallucinations exist. But even if one sense is compromised, to not feel the sensation of spines in sockets?
I get a bit of grit in my eye and its stings like a bitch, but the infected? Their lids just keep going up and down, up and down, not caught or punctured. I wish I’d thought to pinch up one of Elsie’s sagging eyelids as she lay on her kitchen floor, take a look at what was happening underneath. There should have been blood trickling down her cheeks long before the kina forced their way out.
I’m in luck when next door has a drainage emergency and has to call in a plumber. I am standing by my letterbox when he arrives, wave to him as he gets out of his van, and even from a few meters away, I can see the bulging. It’s a good thing he’s not wearing sunglasses; I might have missed an opportunity. As it is, I watch him keel over right in the back garden. Allison works from home, in a study at the front of the house, so it’s going to be a few minutes at least before she realizes. By then, I’ve scurried along the side of her house, avoiding the splatter over all that new paint, and scooped up the kina before they can roll their way into the gutter and back out to sea, probably. More importantly, I get an answer on the eyelids. The kitchen gloves make it difficult — they really are too clumsy for fine work — but I can still feel the patina.
The inside of the eyelids have gone nacreous. Hard and smooth, like the interior of a seashell. No wonder the kina spines aren’t puncturing them. I imagine that there’s a very unpleasant scraping sound, but maybe the infected don’t notice that any more than they notice the spines or the lingering scent of seawater.
I’ve stripped off the rubber gloves and have them soaking in bleach in the kitchen sink before Allison musters up the manners to offer the plumber a cup of tea, but I hear the screaming when she finds him.
Poor thing. I’ll have to make her a cake.
• • •
• • •
I’ve also experimented a little with nail polish. Just a tiny dab on the tips of spines, and I can tell which kina came from which person. There are a lot of singletons; I’ve only managed to get complete pairs from three different people. Sometimes the eyeballs are just too damaged and then it’s better not to bother. For the life of me, I can’t see any sort of pattern. The red-polish kina behave no differently to the purple-polish ones, or the pink pair with glitter. Perhaps if I knew more about their hosts, but I have to take what I can get. Just because I can see the eyes of people who’re about to burst, doesn’t mean I have time to rifle through their pockets for an identity before another witness comes along. Collecting the urchins has to take priority.
I’m a little too successful. The bath fills up, then the laundry sink and the washing machine. It’s a top loader; they’re fine in there. Bloody urchins are always fine, but it strikes me that the problem of the barrens isn’t solved by my helping them to colonize yet another environment, so. I’ve got to get rid of the excess somehow, and the answer’s pretty obvious.
Unfortunately, the elderly are most at risk from toxic shellfish poisoning — and that includes kina. With all the urchins I’ve been eating, it’s not surprising that some of them have been contaminated. Of all the symptoms, though, it’s not the paralysis or the difficulty swallowing or the disorientation, all of which are warning signs that might be expected but never arrive. The only symptoms are double vision. Not in both eyes, fortunately. Just the left, but the effects on that eye are so severe they become disabling. I could cut back on the kina, but if I did they’d overrun the place.
It's not enough to kill them. They need to be eaten. The barrens have always been a problem of consumption, so it makes sense to me that the remedy is more of the same.
• • •
• • •
I don’t have a melon baller. It always seemed like too much trouble; I use a knife for cantaloupes. I’m not sure, for an eye, which is better or worse. Especially if I have to do it myself and without anaesthetic. A knife perhaps would be quicker — more damaging, certainly. One quick stab and a twist, and I could leave the rest for surgeons to sort out. The important thing is to lose one of them and keep the other.
I choose the knife. It’s revolting, and I don’t like to think back on it but it’s done. Once the socket heals, I can opt for a prosthetic. I can’t just shove a sea urchin in there without any sort of preparation. I lack that nacreous interior, the smooth, hard build-up that keeps the spines from damaging the eye any further. I’ll be glad for the prosthetic. People look at me strangely now; with the eyeless dead increasing by the day, I have the appearance of lucky escape. No one who has been colonized by the urchins has survived their expulsion, and that I appear to have done so — even if the general public is unaware of their existence in the first place — is notable.
“I wasn’t sick,” I learn to say. “There was an accident with a carving knife.” I repeat this so often that I learn to add, quite straight-faced, “I felt something crawling about in there. Thought I better get it out before things started to get, you know, messy.” This is of course a lie, but it’s amusing to see people start to scratch, the phantom sensation of itching. I wonder if any of them will try it themselves. “I should have used bleach,” I tell them. “I hear that stops it.”
If they’re stupid enough to fall for that, they deserve the blindness they get. The kina will colonize them anyway, and they were never going to see it coming.
The man who does the prosthetics blinks when I tell him I want something that can be taken apart and filled, like a Kinder Surprise for eyes. There’s got to be a way that doesn’t irritate, and with a bit of trial and error we find it.
I try stuffing it with kina first. Not a whole one — it wouldn’t fit — but the orange meat inside, the reproductive organs. It doesn’t do anything, so I pop the eye out, grateful that I don’t need goggles, and scrape out the meat with a teaspoon. It’s like eating the yolk out of an egg, but much stronger tasting and less runny. Cramming the false eye with snipped-off bits of spine makes no difference either, but it does seem to attract those people with urchins in their eyes. I find myself running into them more often, starting up friendly conversations at the bus stop. It’s as if they recognize something in me. A shared blindness, perhaps, and it’s disconcerting enough that I empty my eye of spines as quickly as I can.
A dried-up piece of kelp, inserted instead, only makes me weepy. Reconstituting it in sea water and stuffing it, sodden, back into the prosthetic, ends up soaking every handkerchief I have. The fish are more successful. It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a fish — especially snapper. I couldn’t justify the cost. I try the prosthetic with flakes of flesh, with fishbones, with scales, but I think even as I tried I knew they wouldn’t work. I needed the eyes, poor sunken things that they are, barren and dull.
I used one of those small melon ballers. I suppose I could have cooked the fish whole and sucked the eyeballs out of that steamed head, but if I’d swallowed them by mistake there’s no saying what stomach acid might do to them. Instead, I scoop them into the prosthetic and set it into socket.
This time, it makes a difference.
It takes me a while to figure out what I’m seeing, but it happens at the hairdresser’s. I have Ellen again, and Sarah has the woman next to me… I’ve seen her before, picketing outside the library. Denuding the shelves as if they were kelp, spreading the barrens. Just like Mrs McAllister, there are kina pulsing in her eyes. It’s not the kina I’m looking at, though, because Sarah’s fingers, steady on her rat-tail comb, have a raised rash along her knuckles. The rash is violently red, the color of rock lobsters before they go into the pot. It could just be from hot water or hair dye, but the red is not the only change. In the mirror, above the pulsing urchin eyes of her client, Sarah’s eyes reflect the light.
Human eyes don’t do that.
Lobster eyes, though… they do.
I wait until Sarah has finished brushing the last, trimmed bits of hair from her client’s cloak. The woman leaves, and Ellen is confirming a reservation at the counter while my hair sets. Sarah smiles at me in the mirror: a professional expression, and one which she gives to all the customers here.
“How long before the kina come bursting out of that one?” I ask, and her smile sinks. She leans in close, pretending to adjust one of my curlers.
“I thought I was the only one who could see them,” she says. “I actually tried warning the first one, but it’s hard to believe what you can’t see. I know I sounded crazy.”
“I’ve been keeping sea urchins in the bathtub,” I tell her. “Crazy is as crazy does.”
“I stashed a couple in the shampoo sink once,” she admits. “The last client of the day. The urchins burst out and bounced off the mirror and into her lap. Thank goodness for the cloak; it made clean-up easier. I put on some gloves and swept them up with the dustpan we use for off-cuts and let them swim a bit while I called the ambulance. I didn’t know what to do with them after. I thought it would look a bit suspicious if the cops came and saw some exploded eyeball sea creatures swimming in the sink, so I took them home. One of them actually stayed alive for three days.
“And then, well.” Sarah shrugs. “I got hungry, I guess.”
She looks a little shame-faced, as if embarrassed at the admission. There’s no need. Really, what else can you do with them?
