ONE LATE EVENING IN the Public Eye Studio, when the sky was dirty yellow.

Speaker: Let’s get this interview started, Mr. Reporter, shall we? Your tie is too white.

Mr. Reporter: Sure, welcome to Public Eye, so how did you…

Speaker: Spare me the boredom of those conventional questions. They stink. Let me tell you something interesting: from the moment I was in, I knew this body wasn’t the right fit. It’s too small for my eyesight…can you please tilt the camera to the right, a bit more? Thanks, Mr. Reporter.

Sorry about the in medias res introduction. I am an eyeball. Yes, I can talk. That’s not the best/worst part. I can fly, or should I say jump? Whatever, you've got the brains, you figure it out.

Humans think we belong to them. Ha! Poor creatures! They have no idea that we have a mind of our own. We can abandon their bodies if we feel like it.

Mr. Reporter: How do you decide if you like a body or not?

Speaker: Well, we eyeball the ingredients. Meaty or bonny? High Cholesterol level in blood? Diabetic? Calcium level? And many more. The pickier the eye, the more ingredients they eyeball.

Once we find a match, we don’t waste a second. We jump into the newfound match.

Mr. Reporter: How does that work?

Speaker: Have you had pizza before? Imagine the cheese pulled from a stuffed-crust, fully loaded pizza. It looks the same when an eyeball jumps to their next match. The optic nerve shoots out like a blood cannon from the retinal vessel. The extraocular muscles also eject. This leaves the old body with hollow, bleeding eye sockets and the muscles hanging out like remnants of cheese-strings that dangle from a pizza slice after the cheese has been stretched beyond its elasticity. Maybe that’s your stomach’s way of telling you that it found a new target and wants to get out of your system.

We weren’t like this. We used to be pretty content in our predestined human bodies. What motivated us to mutate and get brains of our own? I like how this interview is going. Well, we noticed something. We noticed how you mishandled us! You thought we wouldn't realise?

You’re stuck on the word mishandled, as if you don't know what organ trafficking is. We were increasingly trafficked from the dead and the living, vulnerable bodies from hospitals, graveyards, and even funeral homes. Is there a limit to human downgrading?

We don't like to be priced. We’re priceless. Ask somebody who doesn’t have all their organs, and you will know.

Before the next question, I have eyeballed your body, and it has more Vitamin A than the one I am currently in.

Where are you going? Taking steps backward isn’t gonna help. You should have thought about it before you began extracting, packing, and selling us…Oops! I think I stained your white tie. It looked boring anyway.

Later Daytime, the Sheriff’s office, 3rd Street.

Hasty steps outside, and the door to the Sheriff’s cabin opens swiftly, and the upper body of a man with a white tie leans in to look at the Sheriff.

Sheriff: Hello, Mr. Public Eye, what brings you here on this fine day? Like the dye on your white tie. Avant-garde art—

Mr. Reporter:—Sheriff, this is urgent. I have to tell you about my interviewee from last eve…

The phone rings while the Sheriff is in conversation with the reporter.

Sheriff: Excuse me, Mr. Reporter. Hello?

Caller: Another body with empty eye sockets, sheriff. Could this be a psychotic or a serial killer?

The reporter giggles while the Sheriff is still on call.

Sheriff: What's funny?

Mr. Reporter: That's not me, Sheriff, that’s the eyeball. We don't have much time. You need to know…

The eyeball shoots out of the reporter’s eye sockets and winks at the Sheriff before getting fixed into his left eye, leaving behind the winking corpse of the reporter and the corpse of the Sheriff with an unsymmetrical pair of gaping eyeballs.

Caller (over the receiver clutched in the left fist of the Sheriff’s gaping corpse with disproportionate eyeballs ): Hello? Sheriff? Are you there?

Just then, a jolly server enters with a tray with two teacups.

Server: Here, Sheriff, your perfect cuppa tea! I eyeballed all the ingredients…

The server looks at the Sheriff only to find his lifeless body with the bigger eye winking at him.

About the Author:
Joyeeta Das is currently a Eugene and Marilyn D. Webb Scholar in the Department of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, Seattle. She pursues creative writing to get a whiff of rhetoric between her academic endeavors.