POKE YOUR EYE OUT
It was under the table, it was always under the table. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner it was under the table. No one knew, no one thought about it, no one noticed and no one seemed to care. I was in this alone with only myself to depend on. The only time it bothered me was when everyone in the house knew that I was headed somewhere other than work, and that was always on a weekend or on my day off. It would grab me by the ankle and it wouldn’t let go, that is until I threw some table salt at it. As luck would have it I went a day-long fishing trip out near Alan Davis, instead of catching fish I got sunburned and dehydrated.
The long trek back out to the main road was only made worse by the fact that I failed to take the line with the fish hook at the end and tie it around the pole securely. It got loose and the wind began to blow it around and yes, you figured it out, the hook got stuck inside my eeyelid Thank goodness for the last minute blink otherwise it would have gotten me in the eye ball.
I managed to drive myself to the ER at Kapiolani hospital. The door man took one look at me and lost it. The face he made was hilarious but for me, it was too painful to laugh; after some anesthesia, they had to cut the part of the hook that stuck into my eyelid and remove just that part. The other part, they had to peel my eyelid back and push the barbed part of the hook out through the fleshy part. My room mates freaked out when I walked into the kitchen and saw the left part of my face all bandaged up. Moving past them as they all sat at the table, I could see it moving about peeking out from between their feet and through the legs of each chair. I ignored it and went up stairs to lay down when I woke it was dark out. My head was groggy and my legs weren’t cooperating but my bladder was full and I had to piss really bad. It’s usually about ten steps from my bed to the light switch at my door, I wasn’t even half way there until I bumped into something and tumbled head over heel. I landed on my wounded eye and screamed, “Mother fucker!”I reached up from my carpeted floor and found the light switch. When I flicked it on I saw the kitchen table positioned to face my bed. The sigh of relief I exhaled was only momentary because it wasn’t under the table but I was wrong, it was, it was there on the underside of the table. It crawled out with its back facing me and it sat on top of the table with its knees up against its chest. Its hands were wrapped around its legs and its flesh was pale and almost gray in color. When it would inhale and exhale I could hear a gurgling sound that made my skin crawl. Suddenly, It slapped it’s right palm flat on the table and turned itself around to face me, it was a little boy about nine years old. The sympathy I felt for him didn’t last long because when he fully faced me, I could see a huge rusted fish hook gouged deeply into his left eye, almost the same as myself. As I was in the middle of screaming holy hell, his ghost disappeared, a second later my room mates were standing at my bedroom door screaming as well because they witnessed the whole thing. “We thought we’d bring the kitchen table up here for you to have your meals so you wouldn’t have to come downstairs.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “I’m good, you can bring it back to the kitchen.”
Rather than return the table to the kitchen, they tore it apart and burned it and never got another one. After that, we always ate on the living room floor, each with our own fold out tables. I never found who that boy's ghost was or why he had that terrible injury to his left eye with that huge fish hook stuck in it. Neither did I ever find out why his spectral form was so attached to our old table and to me? That’s not true, I sort of do understand. I loved to go fishing on the weekends and each time he grabbed me by the ankles from under the table, was perhaps a warning of the injury to come, except it didn’t end up being as bad as his. Strange tale, true story.
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