Eden's Eyes by Sean Costello

spikes had been driven into her sockets. During these attacks the nurses would be forced to restrain her, binding her wrists and lashing them to the side rails. And until the next injection took effect, Karen would flail and sob and beg them to remove the grafts. She had come close to rejecting her new eyes, Burkowitz told her later, and the pain had been a result of the tissue inflammation. When Burkowitz reported this to Hanussen over the phone, the surgeon expressed some amazement at the severity of Karen's reaction. In all of his prior recipients, graft rejection had been the least problematic complication.
    By the start of the second week, when the pain had mercifully pulled most of the way back, Karen had pretty much forgotten the details of those first few delirious days.
    There arose the occasional stark recollection—impressions of mutilation, of death already upon her, and worse, of damnation's fires blistering her back where it lay bare against the floor of a balsa wood coffin—but she ignored these, perhaps realizing that she'd come through a period in her life that was best left buried. Dark things had spawned in the ooze of her pain- and drug-riddled mind, and the door which held them back now seemed flimsy enough without her poking at it from the other side.
    The memory of one event (real or imagined, she would never be certain) refused to be dislodged however, and in the days that followed it reared up time and again to haunt her. She had been drowsing fitfully that night, long after visiting hours had ended, when the pungent odor of sweat mixed with feculent farm smells had wrenched her fully awake. A moment later a coarse hand had brushed her cheek, and then Karen had felt the heat of quick, ragged breathing on her neck. She had cried out. . . but when the nurse arrived there had been no one else in the room. For a crazy moment, before she realized she'd been dreaming, Karen had thought it was Danny.
    But it was a busy stretch that second week, with little time left over for reflection. Between regular barrages of tests, constant assaults by inquisitive reporters (who had precious little regard for privacy, Karen had decided by the end of her second interview), and daily visits from her psychiatrist, there was scarcely enough time to eat.
    The psychiatrist, Dr. Smith, was the same one Karen had seen a few months prior to her surgery, as part of a "suitability" screen each prospective eye recipient was subjected to. Because the process was new, they told her, it was imperative she be deemed emotionally capable of surviving the potential rigors. During the interview the doctor had cited a case in point, one of the European recipients who had suffered a complete psychological breakdown two months following his successful surgery. Stricken with horrible dreams and bizarre hallucinations, the man had ended up having his new eyes removed. Karen liked Dr. Smith ("Call me Heather"), a wry old gal with a chatty English accent, and appreciated her easy, open manner. It helped to know what might lie ahead.
    But it was during the strung-out days of the third week, when boredom and uncertainty replaced the worst of the pain, that Karen's fears gradually got the best of her. The tests were done, the reporters gone, and the days grew impossibly long, the hours previously spent in a mellow narcotic haze suddenly stretched out endlessly before her.
    She tried in various ways to fill up the time: visiting other patients, chatting over the phone (mostly with her dad, who came down to visit as often as he could—but it was a forty-mile jaunt and he had a farm to run), reading through a few pages of fiction in braille. She even got as far as hauling out her manuscript. . . but that was it. Concentration was simply impossible.
    So she worried. And the worry summoned its hectoring sister, paranoia. Were the doctors hiding something? she puzzled as the hours crawled past. If not, then why weren't they around as much as they had