The Man With Hammered Nails for the Pupils of His Eyes

I'd been chopping most of the day. Chips of granite spread at my feet, dusted my sweaty shirt, clouded my spectacles. But I'd made progress. The boulder had scars on it: closer, certainly, to the monument I wanted than it had been that morning.

A man walked out of the Infinity building, grey suit, red tie, briefcase in hand. He stumbled against my rock, and staggered to his knees. I put the axe down and helped him up. It was there, his uncertain hand on my tricep, elbow in my palm, that I looked into his face and saw the pupils of his eyes: they were the heads of nails, and his eyes, I am quite certain now, were wooden balls, smoothed on a lathe.

He blinked, one lid catching, and slowly crossing over the nail.

"Your shoulder," he said. I smiled, proud of the muscle my endeavors had built. "It is torn. You are ruining yourself. You don't look well."

I helped him up and stepped back, annoyed. "How can you see anything?"

"I can't."

"Why do you have nails where your pupils ought to be?"

"They keep the eyes inside my head."

After a silence too long, he wandered down the sidewalk. I did not look to see if he navigated the intersection safely, but returned to my task, my shoulder throbbing.

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This is completely and wholly, as usual, the fault of a far greater writer.