The Artist Exchange

“Your eyes, or your hands,” they told him. What would they do, scoop his eyes out like ice cream, leaving empty sockets glaring at nothing? Or amputate his hands with a saw hilariously evocative of a poorly directed horror film?

“Eyes,” he told them. For without his hands, he could nothing. But without his eyes, he could only see nothing, and the lack of sight, he imagined, might turn out to be a good thing. Blind to the world’s ills, to the monstrous beings who shared his form, to the biased colors that dared to warp his visual interpretations—in fact, it sounded quite nice.  

Hands, however, were the medium for art, independence, and creation. He exalted his hands like they were some deity, letting them cast a condescending shadow onto the rest of the world’s body for him to mold.

“Two eyes, equivalent exchange for the two eyes of the woman,” they said in a pleasantly monotone voice.

The woman’s eyes had been jewels of an off-brown color, dull and ordinary from afar, but sparkling, moist, lively things up close. The artist that guided his hands had sought them out, lured her in, the butterfly to venus fly trap. In his quaint self narrative that he told in his mind as he performed the act, he had almost called it “stealing”. But it could not have been, for such was the enigma of art, boundless and free form, able to touch any soul with its fervor. The rest of the woman’s body, he reflected, had been useful too.

She had screamed when he had gouged out her eyes with his painting knife, a tedious process that ultimately yielded favorable results. But as his own eyes faded from his sockets, he could only feel a brilliant color, one he had most certainly never seen before—one that he could only ever experience through his mind.

He was ready. His hands were still intact and he could still create. As he heard the voice of a pretty (he assumed) young woman walking past him, the colors engulfed him and his hands itched as he turned around, ready to marry his craving with his new masterpiece.

But all he met was blackness.