by Madeline Crawford
Polly lived with her mother and father in a white columned home near the main street of their small town. She was permitted to walk by herself to pick up candy from the shop. Her parents, both osteopaths, would drive to their shared practice after dropping Polly off at the local elementary school, where she played the oboe, received good grades, and participated in chess club. They couldn’t be prouder of their daughter, as reflected in their beaming faces upon hearing glowing praise of Polly’s behavior and academic performance at parent-teacher evenings. The girl would blush with the knowledge that any compliment was undercut by the one large eye just above her nose.
Polly maintained a smiley, optimistic demeanor, mostly for her parents’ sake, but would, only occasionally, upon hearing the cruel words of a classmate or neighbor, come to her mother in tears.
On one such occasion, Polly, tossing her school bag into the car’s back row, slumped in the passenger’s seat. She could not conceal the redness in her face, a color that her mother had in fact noticed from the carpool lane as soon as her daughter came into view. Polly began to sputter when her mother asked what was wrong and recited the rhyme the school children had made up for her:
One eye, one eye
Can’t get a guy
One eye, one eye
Might as well die.
“And I wish I would die!” She buried her face in her mother’s lap and received strokes from her mother’s hand.
“Polly—.”
The car behind them honked, urging Polly’s mother to leave the carpool lane. She tsked, and with one hand on the wheel and the other on her child’s back, steered the car off school grounds and onto the highway.
“Everyone at school hates me, so I might as well die.” The child whimpered. Her mother felt, through the fabric of her dress, the skin of her stomach becoming wet with Polly’s tears. Despite her daughter having half the eyes of most, her tear duct seemed to contain enough for four eyes.
“One less eye in our family is one eye too many. You don’t know how much your father and I would miss you.” Now on the highway already en route to the mall, she suggested to her child that they get ice cream. Polly bucked up, her mother always knew what to say.
—
Dr. Lennox, who almost never had an afternoon off, sat alone in Old Stone Creamery. Nearing retirement, the doctor was slowly decreasing his hours at the hospital with the intention of spending time, not with his second wife, who was two decades younger and in the prime of her career, nor his children, one of whom was in college and the other who had started the third grade last week, but with himself.
He watched every patron that entered and exited, mostly teens or parents with children. He knew many people in this town, having delivered about a quarter of them, including Polly, who walked into the shop with her mother and a salty, blotchy face.
On the day that Polly was born, one which Dr. Lennox remembered well, he had tried to postpone the baby’s introduction to her parents as long as possible, racking his mind for explanations, solutions, consolations. Despite the whispers of “cyclops” traveling through the group of nurses, the now-parents received the bundle eagerly. The room held its breath.
The O of the baby’s wailing mouth mirrored the O of her singular eye, forming an infinity sign with her nose as its center. The parents looked up, their wide eyes begging Dr. Lennox, What’s happened?
In the following week, baby Polly was inserted in and out of machines, examined by doctors and specialists, spoken to with cooing and worried words. At the same time, Dr. Lennox scoured the internet, medical textbooks, called colleagues and found no pretense for Polly’s condition. Had she been born with a malformation in one eye, or even blind, Lennox could supply answers for that. But Polly was only a cyclops.
Polly’s father waited at home, his wife still recovering at the hospital. With every corner of the house he tidied, he remembered the uncomplicated hope with which the couple had purchased the cradle, the blanket, the picture books on the shelf. These were items bought for Polly the normal child, not Polly the cyclops. He couldn’t imagine introducing their child to friends, to family, or to his mother, who had sobbed when she learned that they were pregnant. Polly could not be celebrated by others when even her father chilled at the sight of her.
Much to her parents’, and the entire hospital’s, astonishment, Polly, upon her birth, was a perfectly healthy baby girl. After Dr. Lennox exhausted all possible tests and attempted to leave the parents with encouraging words, the couple took the baby home in the dark of the night. The cab driver congratulated them. They smiled weakly and pulled the blanket a bit farther over Polly’s forehead.
—
In her early days, Polly’s parents would walk around town and parks with the canopy pulled over the carriage and would indicate to anyone who wanted to see that the baby was napping.
The celebration welcoming the baby was small, with Polly’s parents inviting only her grandmother and an aunt. The couple laid out a platter of vegetables and cheeses and had a cake made with frosting writing, “Welcome, Baby Polly!”
Polly’s grandmother, on the verge of tears even before the front door was open, redacted her emotions upon seeing the baby. She kept her distance and denied offers to cradle her granddaughter.
After only twenty minutes, none could remember what was said at normal parties. Each individually had the thought that this more closely resembled a wake. Two wrapped gifts sat on the coffee table around which they sat; inside one a baby princess outfit and the other an illustrated children’s edition of the hero Odysseus’ adventures.
Polly’s aunt, realizing that the funereal atmosphere was misplaced and that, after all, a new life had been brought into the world, broke into the silence, “Well, at least no one will say she has her mother’s eyes!”
After a quick glance at each other’s faces, one-by-one they started to laugh. Polly’s grandmother and aunt then both delighted in holding the baby.
—
In the ice cream shop, Polly’s mother recognized the doctor immediately, and remembered that he had worn pink shoes on the day of Polly’s birth, and he likewise wore blue when he was delivering a boy.
She reintroduced herself, “Dr. Lennox, you wouldn’t remember us, but—“
“Yes, it’s Polly,” he looked at the mother and daughter both, “I remember.” He inserted his spoon of ice cream into his mouth, unsure of what to say next.
Polly’s mother asked how he was, and he gave the same speech he had started to memorize since his entry into retirement, that he was winding down his hours, taking advantage of weather like today’s.
When Dr. Lennox asked how Polly was finding school, her mother helped answer, “She gets very good grades. She’s very well-liked by her teachers.”
“And what are your friends like, Polly?” He was crouching down, hands on knees, to ask the question. He kept the slosh of his warming ice cream from dripping on the child.
Polly, still half behind her mother, stared at the man, who contemplated the girl’s face, wondering how she differentiated between a wink and a blink.
The mother again responded for her, “She’s in a very lively class. They all get along very well.”
Dr. Lennox, in fact, knew this was not true. His own daughter, not the one in college but the one in the third grade, the year below Polly’s, reported on the “child cyclops,” as even the children at school called her.
He stood up straight, “How good to hear.”
He then lowered his voice, “You know,” directing his speech towards the mother, “a lot of kids just like Polly—not just like, but similar to, different kinds of kids—get a pet! For companionship.” He smiled, looked at the cream soup that his ice cream had turned into, nodded at the pair, and left.
—
Even after just one week, the family couldn’t imagine what it was like before Lamby, almost like fate had posted the advertisement for farm animals for sale on Polly’s parents’ office notice board. Fate instead of the farmer himself, who, taking notice of the daughter’s physiognomy when the family walked towards him upon their arrival, knew just the animal to pair her with.
Lamby did not shed, bark, growl, or beg for attention. He was let out into the garden several times a day to pee and poop and happily accompanied the family on walks. Their walks together elicited stares from the neighbors, but this was not something they were unaccustomed to. Polly’s parents figured that a many-eyed lamb was more abnormal looking than a one-eyed girl—let the neighbors stare, as long as it was no longer at their daughter.
Polly spent many hours in the front yard, holding Lamby’s head still while trying to count his eyes. The totals ranged anywhere from 42 to 106, with Polly reporting her findings to her parents after each try. She concocted a system: place a gold glitter star on each lid when she had counted it. But each attempt rendered new eyes, ones on Lamby’s cheeks and back, that Polly hadn’t spotted before. She would give up, out of breath, wondering how big numbers could even get.
She wished Lamby could just tell her how many eyes he had, but each time she asked, Lamby replied, “Only a poor man counts his flock.”
Despite her newfound companionship, Polly still found socializing at school difficult. In an attempt at normalcy, her mother took the child to the mall to get her ears pierced. Unfortunately, an allergy to nickel revealed itself, and the girls at school were even crueler about her infected ears than they had been before. They found something pathetic in Polly’s attempt to get prettier, likening the action to putting lipstick on a pig. They barely spoke of her eye anymore; they would tug at her earlobes to make her yelp and exaggeratedly sniff her to cry out how terrible the infection smelled.
While Polly’s usual instinct was to die, as her classmates’ chants recommended, with Lamby as a reason to live, Polly decided instead to escape. She informed her parents of her decision, told them where she would be, and left.
The cave in which Polly and Lamby dwelt was damp but cozy. She welcomed other animals into her new home. For them, Polly produced fire at night to illuminate the cave, breakfast in the morning to fill their bellies, and songs all day to gladden their ears. Just as Lamby did, the birds and squirrels spoke to Polly, believing they were speaking to a god, or something that did not answer to the gods.
Life in the cave became regular. Polly’s parents, visiting frequently, had supplied the odd companions with blankets and sleeping bags and food that Polly could cook over a fire, a fire that her father had taught her to maintain. Without the laughing and teasing of school children, Polly was finding it easy to live.
—
Believing footsteps outside to be her parents for their biweekly visit, Polly placed cookies on a plate and asked a squirrel to fill a carafe with water from the river.
After weeks of interacting only with her parents, Lamby, the birds and the squirrels, and a puddle in which her image was reflected, Polly was disappointed to see the girls from school standing at the cave’s mouth.
The girls, confronted with Polly’s rustic appearance—she had bathed only with river water for the last month—and a hoard of animals at the girl’s side, contained their gasps, deciding that teasing would defeat the purpose of their visit.
They smiled, and Polly, puzzled, gestured in invitation to the garden furniture her parents had delivered for the purpose of their visits. Each of the girls sat, took a cookie from the plate, and chewed politely. Polly had not yet spoken, still unsure how to phrase her question kindly, What are they doing here?
When her classmates had each swallowed their cookies and poured themselves glasses of water, they presented Polly with her answer, “We wanted to show you something.” They pulled out their phones and showed the cyclops girl an image: a young woman, with straight dark brown hair in a cross-legged position in grass. The woman smiled with her arm outstretched and hand placed on an animal, at whom Polly had to squint to make sure she was seeing correctly.
The woman, the girls from school explained, was Niki, a pop star that had risen to fame during the period of time Polly had been absent from school. Niki had just adopted Cricket, the many-eyed lamb featured in the photo that the girls had just shown Polly.
“Basically,” they said, looking at each other, as if to make sure they were still on the same page, “we think Lamby is really cool.”
“So we think you’re really cool.”
“We want you to come back to school.”
“We want you to be in our friend group.”
Polly still had not spoken, baffled by the sincerity in the girls’ eyes, something she had never seen on them before and convincing enough to have Polly contemplating returning home, returning even to school.
After the girls gave Polly updates on their fourth grade class, she politely sent them off to contemplate their proposal. Before bed, she listened to Niki’s music, and the next day had her parents show her videos of Niki and Cricket playing, wondering if that was how she and Lamby looked. She wondered too what it would be like to be in the girls’ “friend group.” She had not been in one before, at least not one made of human girls. She thought of what the girls had said—that she was a trend-setter for adopting Lamby before Niki adopted Cricket, that it was so cool she lived alone, that blue eyeshadow would look pretty on her eyelid—and thought each compliment sincere and hollow.
—
Due to the remoteness of the dwelling, the animals that Polly and Lamby welcomed had never seen a person or a lamb before this. They thought there could not be more beautiful creatures. Since moving into the cave, Polly’s appearance began to change, though, and when she would catch a glimpse of herself, she despaired. She could not bear to consider returning to school looking like this, and her animal family worried that she dwelled more and more on her looks since the schoolgirls had arrived.
The morning after a rainy day, Polly peered into the puddle she used as a mirror, with Lamby and the animals behind her.
Because of her recent growth spurts, she wept to herself more than her companions, “Look at how huge I am.”
The animals glanced at each other, disheartened that such a beauty as Polly could speak so poorly about herself, “But…but God in the sky has no greater a body!”
Already needing a haircut before her departure from home, Polly cried out, “And all my hair hangs over my face!”
“And shades your shoulders like a sacred grove!”
Polly’s pubescent leg hair had recently appeared, and had to remain, with no razor in her cave, “And my body is rough with stiff bristles!”
“A tree without leaves is ugly!”
“A horse’s neck with no mane is ugly!”
“A bird with no feathers is ugly!”
Even with her bodily changes, her rare baths, and the dirt from the ground on which she slept, the animals believed that their soothing words must have comforted their dear friend.
But Polly still sobbed, even more potently now, “And I have only one eye in the middle of my forehead!”
The squirrels, the birds, and Lamby, having thought many times about Polly’s best feature, replied, “But to us it is as powerful as a great shield!”
*Much of the dialogue between Polly and the animals regarding her appearance comes from the author’s translation of Polyphemus’ comments about his own appearance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XIII: 824, 842-852.
Madeline Crawford lives, teaches Latin, and writes in London. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Die Quieter Please, mnemotope, dadaku, Discount Guillotine, and Midcult, among others.
High Horse 