Eyesore

I went to dinner with a friend last night. While we waited at the bar for our table to be ready, she began telling me a story about something or someone, but I was having trouble paying attention, because I was distracted by the woman sitting behind her, a couple seats down the bar.

This woman, while otherwise attractive, had a hideously disfigured eye. She reminded me of one of the zombies on The Walking Dead. She wore glasses, which masked it a little bit, but it clearly appeared that her right eyeball was rotated about 75 degrees backwards, into her skull, and what was visible of her iris was clouded over with a milky blueish cataract. It was, in a word, disturbing.

I interrupted my friend in the middle of her story. "I'm sorry," I said. "I can't really focus on what you're saying, because the woman behind you has the creepiest eye I've ever seen."

"I have to see it," my friend said.

"No, it's not possible for you to just turn around and look. We have to somehow switch places so you can see it from where I'm standing."

She casually pretended to drop something, I shuffled over so she could pick up this imaginary object, and a few seconds later we had switched positions. I saw her face register mild horror. "I don't know how you were able to listen to even one word of my story," she said.

"I didn't," I said. "I couldn't."

The woman was with a man who, god bless him, did not betray anything out of the ordinary while he was conversing with her. I don't know if they were married or if it was their first date, but I felt bad for him. You can't avoid looking at something like that; it's not like a cauliflower ear or a hook-hand: you look someone right in the eyes when you speak to them.

This woman knows full-well how off-putting her zombie eye must be; the least she could do for her date, and the rest of society, is wear sunglasses, or an eye patch. That's what they make them for.