V rámci našej súťaže Short Story Competition 2025 vám dnes prinášame poviedku „Four Eyes“. Je to citlivý príbeh o tom, ako sa pohľad na svet – aj na seba – môže zmeniť jediným momentom. Autorka/autorkin rozprávačský štýl vyniká jemnosťou a silou zároveň. Prečítajte si poviedku, ktorá pripomína, že to, čo nás kedysi oddeľovalo, môže byť nakoniec našou silou.

Four eyes

They had no map, only a dream and the will to move forward.
That´s at least what Isla said to her mother in a dramatic retelling of their less-than-wanted, but not nearly as fantastical situation.
In reality, the two women were walking down a neatly cobbled street, in a suburban part of town, entirely safe and lacking in the whimsy of anything that was said. It was true that they had somewhere to go and the will to get there, however, the dream was to get Isla a present for her birthday from the antique store a few streets away from her school. The will to move came from the fact her birthday was mere days from this one, it was quite last minute, most things in the household were. And the only reason they “had no map” was that her mother´s phone was acting up and wouldn´t load Google Maps and Isla´s own cellular device had been drained of energy long before this trip.
Her mother always told her to spend less time on her phone, isolated from her peers at school by a plexiglass screen, but Isla knew her reasons to stay safely guarded by the dim, blue light of her screen.
It was a lovely, sunny afternoon as they briskly walked down the picturesque street. breeze ruffling their hair in an affectionate manner, their long matching trenchcoats catching the wind in a way that made it easier to walk.
The early spring had always been the little girl´s favourite, what with the newly blooming trees, gentle sun rather than the harsh beast it became in winter or the glowing giant in summer. It was peaceful, in a way many things become once somebody doesn´t have worries.
Isla wasn´t one of those people though, and the incessant warm puffs of air today made her annoyed rather than thankful for the nice weather. Her boots soaked up the last of yesterday´s quick spring shower and the whole way there she was contemplating why ever she had decided she liked this type of weather. The annoyance, the quick walk of her mother that forced her to constantly catch up made her bristle in a way many teenagers did when forced to do something they might not be happy with. In turn, she lashed out by switching between being dead quiet and chattering on about this or that, in that overzealous melodramatic tone many young people adapted once pestered.
The antique store she had been up until now unsuccessfully eyeing up was just ahead and the dark orange brick, tinted red and brown with age, rose before their eyes in the shape of an apartment. The only one on the street that was lacking in renovations, original and beautiful, and so entirely out of place. It had certainly caught Isla´s eye the first time she passed, yet she never dared to enter. Now, her mother had no clue what her daughter might want, so she chose the easy way and dragged her along to choose her own present.
They walked in and it was much less magical than what the fantasy-obsessed girl expected, plain door, no jiggling bell to announce their arrival, no grandiose in any sense. It was quiet, the whole store, perhaps the world in that moment, and Isla was pushed into trying to find something she might like by her mother. The older woman hung around the front, not exactly happy to be breathing in dust and old furniture with paint that might still have mercury in it. The air was stuffy and reeked of decay. stifling like old clothes, too used and too unusable now. It was as if entropy itself was in the air, not a single ounce of humidity to be seen.
Isla didn´t mind though, she had been quickly dazzled by the objects. They were right up her alley, old photos with no meaning behind them yet so full of history, or vintage fabrics and clothes that held all of the sparkle and glamour of their decade.
The only issue came up once she got to the bookshelves, tombs lining the walls in an organized manner, all leather-bound and daunting. As she flipped through the pages of one such artifact, the dust coated the lenses of her glasses, forcing her to wipe them down continuously as she rifled through the other books.
Her hand was guided to one in particular, a dark purple issue, with drawings of the phases of the moon. It certainly could have belonged to some pretentious, Twillight-obsessed teen back in the 2010s, it looked to be a journal after all. Isla saw it for much more, however, and she checked if any entries had been jotted down, poems perhaps, or simple teen symbols of hearts and initials.
Emptiness littered the front page and more of it could be found throughout. There wasn´t a single mention of human contact with this book, nor a single record of it. Not a scratch or dent could be seen, peculiar stains were absent and it truly seemed like it was unused. All that showed it wasn´t some standard A5 paper were the symbols and the pictures on the cover and around the edges of each page.
It was decided then and there. This mystical old journal would be coming with her, and she bound to her mother with a new spring in her step. They were rung up by another teen, working there part-time by the unabashedly disinterested attitude he showed, and they left in record time since Isla´s mother was antsy to get away from the book rot and moles she suspected were hiding in the cloth.
Her gift was thoroughly examined by her parents, not because they weren´t willing to see it as a fitting present, but to assess the risk it could possess. And by risks, they meant the aforementioned book rot, bugs, or some sort of unspecifiable stain that could be an endangerment to their child´s health. finding nothing, they handed it back to their daughter, saying her celebration would follow her actual birthday.

When Isla was finally in her domain, her room, she sat down behind her ornate desk and unwound the string holding the covers together. Isla already had many notebooks, but because of the impending anxious frenzy she would have had had she written in any of them, she never did. She wanted this to be different, to be a meaningful item in her life, so she gulped down the nerves and dotted the first few words with a shaking hand.
She had made up her mind on the way back about what she would use it for. Her therapist, the one she was forced to after a case of bullying was reported at her school, had said journaling was a great way to soothe the soul and get to know yourself better.
The first entry was shaky and unsure, the words looked wobbly and only depicted her day in quick, direct words aimed to encompass that day as well as they could without any flourishments or feelings.
The journaling quickly divulged and it became a place for fantasy, for thoughts and dreams. The words were a way to romanticize the wrong and to forever etch the good into reality. Memories fade and weaken, ink stays firmly on paper. It was grounding in a way, to know whatever happened to her happened to those pages as well. Seeing things written down, having to think about the wording made them clearer, less burdened with guilt or pain and hurt. Throughout the three or four pages that were filled now, each text was longer, steadier than before. It hadn´t been long, fivedays, just in time for her birthday, but the girl had memento now and it seemed like the easiest way to detox.

On the day of her birthday, she started her day strangely somber, not at all how you were supposed to be on the celebration of your life. To Isla though, this day meant so, so much less. It was a day to pretend, to try and make it about that one person, but in her eyes, all four of them as her ruder classmates claimed, it was only a day to remember your own misery.
The well of pain only deepened with each hour, hope of getting even one “happy birthday message” weakening as if in sync with the clock on the wall. Three of her classmates, the one seated behind her had reached out, with an unpersonalzed “Happy birthday!” later in the day, but at that point her course for the following hours was set.
Her parents tried their best to cheer her up, coerced her to smile and be grateful, yet that night in her room, it wasn´t ink that first fell ontot he page. It was a tear. That day, even if multiple words were trying to claw out, long sentences of anguish, dread, of the dastardly feeling of being forgotten that all humans hate, nothing could truly come out.
At that moment, the feelings were too much to put into words as many people say, but it wasn´t because they were so large or so all-consuming. They were too raw. Words are in a certain way logical, they are thought-through and even in the smallest amount dainty. they cannot express, well and truly, how sadness feels, or how abandonment seeps into one´s bones and doesn´t let go until those same bones are laid to rest. Isla couldn´t, can´t have written more than one measly sentence, because it would not have been authentic. She wrote only one thing, a wish, something that could, in fact, be encompassed with the English language.

I don´t want to be so alone anymore.

If it was a wish, plea, or simply the melancholy all teenagers face, it didn´t matter. With silent despair etched into her features, she finally closed the book after hovering her pen over the yellowing paper and did the only thing that could shut her mind up.

She went to bed.

The emotional toll of the unhappy “happy” day caused her to go unconcious the second her head hit the pillow and the deep, calming lull of sleep wasn´t interruptable at all.
Not even by the ominous glow of the diary, which had flipped itself open on her table…

The following day at school, Isla finds her table, and people around it stop talking at once. Some disperse, but four people stay and sit down at their desks. Isla´s seatmate offers her a tentative olive branch, a joyfully mumbled “Happy Birthday, Isla”, one day and one breakdown too late. She takes it in stride though and continues to sporadically talk to her friend. They never speak of much of value anyway, mostly school-related things, but at least it fills the eerie silence of life with the warmth only a connection can, however frail it is.
As she sat through class after class, a strange feeling had nestled into her body, as if into her ribcage directly. She could feel her heart stuttering through the beats just a tad too quickly, her lungs were a bit less allowing than usual, and while she knew the oncoming stages of a panic attack this was not it. The hairs on her neck raised and she recognized the feeling of being watched. Turning her head mechanically, Isla eyed all the people of her class. Strangers she knew too much about to actually be that, but not friends since none of them could well and truly see her, or so she thought.
She wasn´t an interesting person in her class, but her recent birthday caused at least some attention on her throughout the day. So, catching someone staring wouldn´t have been too shocking. But nobody was. She chucked the discomfort to the back of her mind, forcefully holding her focus on the lecture in front of her.
It wasn´t easy to pass the day, in quite contemplation of who might be watching, logically deducing nobody was, then catching herself feeling that way again, and repeating the whole process.
The feeling stalked her down the school hallways, each hole of the standard lockers feeling like eyes trained right on her.
It followed through the courtyard, each car mirror she passed and saw herself in brought dread to her stomach to the point that, when she was boarding the public transport, she felt like vomiting up the contents of her lunch.
It hadn´t come to pass even in the fairytale-esque park road that was on her way home, nor when she continued briskly around the edges of the forest. It became so discerningly uncomfortable she almost stumbled crossing the bridge before she finally took off running. The little girl was aware she would look like a lunatic, but the panic wasn´t subsiding and now, she would catch traces, shapes of eyes in her periphery. The glint of the fresh spring water wasn´t helping the delusions and she wondered whether closing her eyes would do more harm than good.
Getting to her front door, she fished out her keys and with her head swiveling from side to side as if one of those cheap tacky bobbleheads, she somehow fit the key into the lock without looking, made a single dash to the safety of their entryway and shut the door with a resounding thud.
Isla was vividly aware she still had goosebumps, that her flesh had yet to get the memo she was safe, but neither had her brain. It might have been similar to anxiety, but it was closer to the one time she experienced stage fright. She knew panic attacks quite well, this wasn´t one.
The little girl felt that eyes were everywhere, in the panes of glass of the window, mocking her like her former classmates used to, the symbol of her difference now being reflected to her in this twisted way..
They had called her “four-eyes” at school before, said she could see things that weren´t there probably, because of her thick glasses. It wasn´t true, she told them multitudes of times, yet kids that age don´t tend to listen to logic, or ethics in some cases.
Now, she was forced to think that maybe they were correct. maybe she was delusional. She started mulling over her options, knowing that telling her parents would result in an extended stay at the therapist´s office and she hated it there. The woman didn´t help her much with her past anyway, so having her try to treat her hallucinations seemed like letting the blind lead an even blinder, terrified person.
With no impending sense of danger or doom, lacking damning evidence somebody or something was watching her, Isla had to conclude it was her imagination, running a bit too wild. She chalked it up to her emotional turmoil and distress yesterday, secluding herself to her room in hopes it would pass with a good night's rest. That night, she didn´t even open her dear journal.
The next day followed in the footsteps of the first. Any circle would be misconstrued by her sight to resemble an eye, the ovals on the bus seats became twisted in an instant and the dozens of eyes staring back at her from her neighboring seat almost caused her to scream during her morning commute.
She didn´t know if it would be a scream of frustration, fear or confusion at that point and the constant stress of being watched was starting to catch up with her physically.
Her heart was pounding at any given moment, it was more of her hindbrain thinking than any other part. The deep, animalistic fight or flight instinct was rearing its wild head and it was becoming increasingly harder to keep it on its leash. Keeping herself calm, her nerves at bay, was near impossible by the end of the day when she figured nothing could help anymore.
Even after she shut her eyes, clasped hands over her ears, tore herself from the world by limiting her senses, she could still somehow feel it. The first day, she behaved the most rationally, but with her own sense of self crumbling beneath her thoughts of delusional and illness, it began to bleed into the real world.
Her parents noticed, of course they did, and increased the amount of time she was to spend at therapy the following week. With a quick, Icarus-like descent into paranoia, however, next week couldn´t come soon enough.
Isla didn´t dare mention the voices to her parents, either.
When she was alone, crossing the bridge, walking home, in her room, there came a deep rambling from somewhere in the core of the earth. No words were said, nothing moved, it wasn´t ever physical. There were never words included, not in English at least, but the noise remained. Some people liked white noises, perhaps they put on sounds of the rainforest to sleep. Isla was listening to something else when falling asleep though. And she didn´t enjoy it. In a strange way, it did help her sleep. That, or the constant fear of the day.
By the fourth day of being seen, for the first time and forever, there wasn´t a single word she could hear uttered without flinching towards it source, hoping the creature, the thing, following her would just speak to her, tell her what it wants, how to get it to leave. All she got was the same, indiscernibly peculiar noise. She had gotten used to it as humans do, adapted to the sound, so by now she recognized the deep purring was there and could ignore it.
Her classmates had tried to help her and through their voices, she couldn´t hear the other noise as clearly. It calmed her a little, so she forwent her phone for one break to speak to her seatmate about her newly acquired hobby of crocheting. After the bell rang and she realized she was finally in some state, however fragile state, of calm, she decided to probe her classmate for more information later, if only to not hear the voice.
Break after break, her 10 minutes were freed from the angst and the horror of Isla´s guardian creature, replaced by a high-pitched teen voice, talking about slip knots and hooks.
In the days leading up to the weekend, Isla got to know the people who sat behind her as well, truly know them, not just some cold, statistic facts.
They had chimed into their conversation, however one-sided it was, and joined in from there on out. It was refreshing, both being included and not having the nasty, dreadful feeling of being seen, as now, there truly were eyes watching her, only these ones belonged to humans.
Humans she had come to consider her friends in the short span of the week, knowing they were now her only cure to the creature, as she dubbed it in her head.
The therapy appointment came up and she lied her way through it, claiming it was simply the school load that got her antsy. She couldn´t have said a mysterious thing was watching her and that´s what whipped her into a frenzy. The therapist asked about her week, and as she spoke, her own voice filtered out the mechanic purring, which she counted as a win.
Her therapist looked mildly surprised by Isla´s sudden new interest in crochet and the three new people she mentioned in her stories from school, but she didn´t comment about it to the girl directly. Only once she was safely stuffed into the car, did she go on a long tangent to her parents, with the only words Isla could hear being “finally socializing”, “friends” and “could help overcome”.
What her final socializing and friends could help overcome, she didn´t know. She didn´t particularly care. They were overcoming, or at least pushing out the creature´s influence on her and that´s what mattered to her.
That weekend, she slept like a bay, and having woken into the same mystery-filled reality, to a new day of being watched, she lay there, not squirming or uncomfortable, in a way accepting of this new creature. It was there, it had been there the last week. She didn´t know how to get rid of it, so it most probably was going to stay. Could she live with it? She didn´t have to hear it 24/7 after all. There was at least an hour or so each day without it. Her breaks, time she spent with her seatmate and friends was spent silently, in her head at least. Physically, they were talking, and she finally couldn´t hear the thing haunting her. She could make do.
It still chilled her to her core, the eyes and the voice, speaking to her as if a friend, in its own demented language, but she realized she wasn´t to be harmed by whatever it was and as her mother often used to say, “ If your life isn´t on the line, it´s not that important.” It wasn´t that calming really, one could not be a tyrant over their emotions, but it was familiar and Isla held onto it like a ship to its anchor.
Monday rolled around, Isla had become just that bit less deranged in her behaviour, and she held out the whole day without making eye contact with all the eyes that sprung up in her line of vision on the bus daily.
The day didn´t go off without a hitch though, and when she arrived to take her seat, she could see her three friends whispering. Doubt was sown within her, she had seen this before, she had heard of this before and she dreaded what she would hear once she arrived. perhaps they had grown bored of her, or she annoyed them. She didn´t have time to think that way though as a voice chimed up.
“Isla, are you okay?” asked the young boy on the right of the desk behind them, who himself had been particularly quiet, more because of his introversion, not because of fear.
She answered with a non-commital hum, staring blankly ahead, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It did, but to continue the metaphor, it was an entirely different shoe that had dropped.
“No, Isla, you haven´t been okay this past week! I sit with you, I know you might not be the most chatty, or confident, but you´ve been downright frightened this whole time! Have we done something?” exclaimed her seatmate, it was acutely clear she had been holding that close to her chest for a week.
Isla knew there were prongs in the street she found herself on, two answers that led to different results, a whole different future perhaps. This was a moment that would define them. Her and her “friends”.
It had been too much, all of it, so she broke down. She told them of the eyes and the haunting, in whispered noises. She told them how much she hated being seen, being perceived ever since her appearances had been used to ridicule her at the past school. And now there were eyes everywhere. They weren´t limited to the two of a little human bully, nor to the four they claimed she had because of her glasses, She hated that. All of the tension, all of the fear she held was now suddenly pouring out in waves and she could not stop shaking. She knew a panic attack and this was one of them.
Her classmates, her friends comforted her. They didn´t know what to believe, if the hallucinations were true, but they knew Isla was their classmate, somebody close to them whether they liked it or not. There was a certain sense of camaraderie there, that is set on helping each other cheat or sitting through a horrible test. At this school, it was as things should be, and students helped each other. That´s what her friends did too.
Her seatmate took her to the school nurse, not mouthing a single word of the hauntings, but listening patiently as the gentle nurse told her how to react next time her friend gets another attack. She didn´t say anything when she called Isla that, “her friend”, because ever since they got seated together she had thought of Isla as that. She was the quiet girl, the one who loved fantasy and was organized, the one who always had a pen to lend to Ben, at the desk behind them, she could always explain anything to them if they asked and she had. Isla was the only one who hadn´t noticed they liked her before.
Relationships, humans, are best shown in times of need. When crisis strikes, ally and emeny get a certain distinction they hadn´t had before and friends become family. In a way, reality is revealed and the fantasy, the self-hatred clouding judgment, the fog, dissipates.
Isla only wished it had come sooner, perhaps less painfully. But that evening, freshly awoken from a nap after she was brought home, with multiple check-up text messages on her phone and three new friends in her mind, she opened her journal. The on mentioned so far back, the old one with the runes and symbols.
There was still the presence of the monster, the eyes blinking slowly at her with each page she flipped. Perhaps it was Isla whowas weaker, but the voice sounded more distant and in her window only two dark eyes stared back. They seemed almost affectionate, watching over her rather than staring at her. It was stll discomforting, so she averted her gaze to the diary.
There, under her last, rather depressing entry, in darker ink than hers had been, cursive with several flourishes, stood new text: You won´t be.
It gave her a good scare, the foreign writing and the seemingly magical property of it, the explanation of her haunting. The notebook had in some creepy, mystical way tried to grant her a friend, just as she had asked. A friend who always saw her, talked to her, heard her. In this pathetically scary creature, te wish had been granted at first glance.
Under the journal´s answer, she wrote, not in the least scared of this item that had seemingly only tried to help: I´m not alone, but not because of you. Even for how bad my sight is, I´ve been blind. I was never truly alone.