Henry Oxford Wallace walked through the doctor’s garden with his head wrapped in mist, squinting as if seeing its verdant splendors for the first time. Sunlight streaked across the sky like soapsuds. Clockwork hummingbirds siphoned gasoline from metallic flowers. In the distance, nude children danced with animals and uprooted saplings in some kind of mindless, wind-up pantomime. This made Henry want to cry, but no tears would come. He raised his hands to his face, brushed his fingertips along his scarred and bearded cheeks. Then he felt them, smooth as bone. The dice. He remembered: He’d been given dice for eyes. “Henry?” The voice behind him gave him a start. “Henry, come back to the house with me. The doctor can help. There’s too much to see out here right now. We’ll come back when it’s dark. It won’t be so frightening then.” “Yes, Eleanor,” he said, taking his sister’s hand. He dared to glance down at it. Instead of skin and nails, the flesh of her fingers was sheathed in waxed paper and shattered glass. ◊ When they returned to the house—the doctor’s country estate, far from the gaslit streets and loud Model Ts of the nearby city—Eleanor called upstairs to their host. Dr. Islington came down, spindly and flushed, and led Henry to his examination room, shutting the door behind them. As the larger man took out his notebook and pen, Henry stood shivering in the middle of the room, trying to avoid the large mirror hanging alongside the charts and diagrams on the wall. But a stolen glimpse reflected the same image he’d begun seeing the day before: two bone-white dice, polished to pearly opalescence, pivoting in the deep, wide sockets where his eyes should have been. The numbers six and a three were facing forward, nine tiny black dots, dilated and OCTOPUS fAcToRY GAlAxY BY JASon hEllER baleful. “Sorry, Henry, very sorry.” Dr. Islington gestured at the mirror. “I should have covered that up. It’s, ahem, still the dice you see, eh?” Henry tried and failed to tear his gaze from the mirror. “Yes, Doctor. But… it’s more than just that. I’ve been seeing other things, too. In the garden today, with Eleanor, everything around me looked strange. More so than usual, even.” The doctor began scratching in his notebook. “Sit down, my boy,” he bid Henry. “Describe it to me.” Henry did. He told Dr. Islington about the carnival of visions in the garden, the odd and impossible phantasms that swam in the corners of his new eyes. He tried to put into words the children and animals, the hummingbirds and flowers, the sun and its vibrant scum of lemony foam. But that wasn’t all, Henry continued. Earlier that day he’d sent the doctor’s servants out of the kitchen so that he could cook breakfast with Eleanor. They’d loved cooking breakfast together as children. But as Henry cracked eggs into a bowl, each yolk appeared to him as a jellied ocean squirming with swarms of unborn stars. Then, just as his knife was about to descend into a loaf of dark rye, it turned into a little, slate-shingled 20 ISSUE 6
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