At some point everyone makes the same joke: it must be nice caring for babies who never cry. But the babies who have no eyes do cry; they’re born crying just like everyone else. You can see their tear ducts if you look closely, black pinpricks in the smooth flesh that surrounds the holes in their face. When the tears well up in them, they look like bubbles which swell and swell until they pop, and then half of the tear slips down the face while the other vanishes into the doll-eye open head. I tried describing it to someone once, but they made a face and told me to leave the horror stories at work.
I guess that’s what this is. A horror story.
If I had known this was a horror story back then, I would have felt a pang of dread when a woman who was about ten years older than me called me Leah on accident and grimaced the way you do when you’ve just remembered someone dead. Instead I laughed and introduced myself. Anna, I told her.
“Rachelle,” the woman said.
All the rooms are kept dim, nearly dark, because the babies are sensitive to the light. They like to crawl into corners where the shadows cluster and follow you with their hollow sockets. Our eyes shine when we look at each other, but theirs are inky black spots, holes in the room, in the universe. The gaps in their faces are always thirsty, like drains in a tub that never empties.
On my third day, I saw them carrying away the quiet girl with the accent whose name I don’t quite remember. I didn’t get a good look at her, thankfully, but I could hear her muttering to herself about windows, or at least I thought it was windows, and I saw the two trails of blood down her cheeks. That should have been the moment my face paled or my knees turned to jelly or a cold chill crept up my spine, but all I remember thinking was “I guess there’s no coverage this afternoon.”
I asked Rachelle whether we all end up like that.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, and laughed.
To Rachelle, the whole world was divided neatly into two; on one side, real problems, and on the other, no big deal. She always told you which one you were looking at with the certainty of a scientist identifying a strange insect. The coffee’s out but it’s no big deal. One of the babies is missing and it’s a real problem. Real problems were rare and got dealt with quickly, so most of the world was no big deal. I started to like her more and more.
Meanwhile I looked for ways to hide from the eyeless babies. I walked quickly through rooms and pressed myself flat against the walls when I arrived. I wore dark clothes and stood near cabinets and half open doors. I learned to walk with the other attendants rather than alone and we subtly jostled each other to be the farthest from the corner where the babies had gathered. The babies knew what we’re doing, but they weren’t the ones we’re trying to fool. I think they knew that too.
On the weekend, I spewed my resumé to any company that said they’d take it, but I didn’t hear anything back. Sometimes I mentioned taking care of the eyeless babies and sometimes I said I currently have no job, but it all ended in the same silence. I think even if I did get an interview, they’d be able to tell what I do for a living. After a few days working here, you start to smell like truth.
The word “truth” floated in the back of my mind every time I saw the babies who have no eyes. Because we all know truth is meant to be hidden away on the other side of a job you don’t think about unless you have it. Our eyes are plugs that keep truth out, that bend it when it tries to force its way in. The babies sat in their corner and stared back.
Rachelle grabbed my sleeve as I was on my way to get a new diaper. “The eyes are the window to the soul,” she said.
“Are you doing okay?” I asked. Her voice was tighter than usual, the facade of her friendly wisdom cracking to reveal a churning, tightly-packed something below that I wished I could look away from.
“A house with no windows. The rain pouring in. A real problem. All over the floor, the rain pouring.”
We make seventeen dollars an hour for this.
The problem wasn’t that they stared at me, but that more and more, I found myself staring back. I wanted to see an answer in them. I wanted them to be angry or bored or disgusted. I wanted to be forgiven or condemned, but there was no judgement in those blank circles at all, no feeling, nothing, nothing at all. Three of them were sitting in one corner, all watching me. One was on his side, one was leaning back on the wall and the third was sprawled forward. If there were a little more light, if I just squinted, I could see into their eyes, and I could understand them the way they understood me. I was standing in the rain with my face pressed against the glass, but there was no glass.
This should have ended with me walking into the break room and seeing Rachelle, one eye gone, holding a dripping red pen in a bloodless grip. That would have been the big frightening climax to make sense of it all, but instead, there was a new girl one day. I said how glad I was to meet her, and while we were talking about movies we’d both seen, I accidentally called her Rachelle.
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Lillie E. Franks is a transgender author and teacher who lives in Chicago, Illinois, but is normal about it. You can read her work at places like Flash Frog, Scaffold, and Havehashad or follow her on Bluesky at @lilliekoi.bsky.social. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.