BY RUTH JOFFRE
“Hexagons,” Ms. Katherine said, “are the most efficient tessellations. See how the bottom of this honeycomb curves to fit the inside of the jar? That’s because this piece was built inside an old wood barrel the bees used for their hive. By using hexagons, the bees were able to build right up to the sides of the barrel without wasting any space.” She passed the jar of honeycomb around the classroom, allowing each of us to hold it in our hands, to lift the jar over our heads and watch the sunlight filter through the raw honey, like love through an amniotic sac. She had forbidden us to open the honey jar, afraid that we would spill and get our desks sticky, but for once we did not mind being told no, for she had appeased us with plastic honey sticks in various hues and flavors: buckwheat, coffee blossom, star thistles, clovers. Mine was blackberry. It tasted like ripe summer days and the sun-warmed fruit we mashed against our tongues as we walked to the public pool.
“Now it’s your turn for Show & Tell,” Ms. Katherine said, addressing all of us as a group despite our shyness, our sleepy, sugar-softened brains. It was midday (that awful hour after lunch when even Ms. Katherine’s kind eyes couldn’t keep us from counting down the minutes until our parents picked us up or we clambered on the bus), and I was five and a half years old—young for first grade, though not by much. I had brought something simple for Show & Tell: a butterfly my grandfather had carved for me out of wood from our backyard. It was delicate and thin, the wood shaved so fine I feared the butterfly’s wings would snap. I carried it as if it were alive. When Ms. Katherine first announced that spring’s Show & Tell four weeks prior, I had dreams of becoming a lepidopterist, of coming to school with a butterfly net and a magnifying glass and showing off a collection of neatly identified specimens, their paper-thin wings pinned to a board and encased in a thick ribbon of glass. My afternoons in our backyard yielded nothing, however, and so I arrived at school that day sullen and vaguely ashamed.
I found solace in Ms. Katherine’s offering and in the presentations of my classmates, who brought in small personal items similar to mine: a pocket watch that had stopped ticking, a camel crocheted out of yarn, a poem one girl’s mother had written on the occasion of her sixth birthday. None of these items sparked anything more than the briefest awe or wonder, my classmates and I being by and large the kind of children who like new things and like even better to forget them or leave them behind. After each presentation, we clapped and passed the item around if appropriate and waited patiently to be impressed or be offered a gift. When the last girl walked to the front of the class, we took notice, because she wasn’t carrying anything and because she was the girl who insisted on wearing sunglasses at all times—even inside, even when Ms. Katherine turned off the lights for an in-class movie. Her reasoning for this was that she had a medical condition: her eyes were too sensitive to UV light, her parents claimed, and she needed constant protection. Many of us had during recess come to the consensus that she was partially blind and didn’t want to tell us, but we never mentioned this to her, afraid that we were right, that we’d been judged unworthy of the truth.
When the girl reached the front of the class, Ms. Katherine asked, “What did you bring us today?” Her expression was one of soft, expectant concern, as if prepared to assure the girl not to worry or be ashamed if she’d forgotten about the assignment. But the girl had brought something for Show & Tell: her eyes. “Your eyes?” Ms. Katherine said, a soft pout drawing the cliffs of her eyebrows together.
“Here,” the girl said, lowering her sunglasses. “Look.”
Ms. Katherine bent down obligingly, perhaps thinking there had been another outbreak of pink eye and she’d have to call the nurse. Instead, her mouth fell open and after a pained moment asked, “Are those contacts?”
We leaned forward, fascinated.
“No,” the girl explained, “the lenses are reflective; they catch the light.”
Ms. Katherine frowned then and, in her confusion, failed to say thank you, to cut Show & Tell short and warn us to remain in our seats because there was a quiz coming up. Instead, she let herself get lost for a moment, let the girl invite us up for a closer look, and let us file hesitantly to the front to see for ourselves: the girl’s eyes were like a kaleidoscope, one boy said, the pigments in the iris constantly shifting, twisting, colors rearranging themselves into patterns so that one kid thought he saw flowers and another, tiles: the brilliant, hexagonal mosaics of the mosque she had visited once with family overseas. Myself, I saw none of these things, nor did I write it off as just some trick generated with computers and holograms. In the kaleidoscope, I saw wings, legs—the writhing, shuddering mass of insects so minuscule that when brought together they looked like an ordinary eye: here the iris, here the pupil, here the whites laced with red as if she had not slept. In the girl’s wide smile, I saw no weariness, no pain, no direct indication that I should be afraid; but when I looked into her eyes I knew: the insects inside her mind were watching me; they had been all year.
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle and teaches at Hugo House.