The Lapidicolous

by Nessie Sturm

Did that vessel always split into three? Dani’s vision was stained red and black from pouring her phone light into her cornea. Maybe if she lit it just right, it would go back to how it looked before. How she thought it looked before, at least. She could’ve sworn she had stared at this exact vein; the large blood vessel on the inner side of her left eye which was always a little larger than the rest. It made her dysphoric in the same way the veins on her hands did. While years of HRT may have reduced those, it did nothing for the whites of her eyes. She tried reassuring herself that the blood vessels in cis women’s eyes also became more visible on occasion, until the image of her mom’s, bloodshot and furious, flashed in her mind.

“Stooooop,” she groaned into the empty bathroom. The word reverberated while Dani feverishly buried the memory with the rest of her unprocessed trauma.

If only she had an old picture of her eye to reference. Without it, the three-pronged vessel would soon replace her vague memory of the single thread that stopped right before her brown and yellow iris. As she pulled her phone away from her eye, an explosion of scotomas overtook the left side of her vision. Dani searched "Eye vessels splitting over time". The query returned: SIGNS OF SUBCONJUNCTIVAL HEMMORRHAGE.

“Fuck that…” Dani scrolled through various eye symptoms until she stumbled on a forum where someone appeared to be suffering from the same delusion she was.

lylawhyla: My eye vessels changed? They seem to split more than they used to. Is that normal?

Underneath the question was a blurry photo of two fingers propping open an eye. The poor lighting made it difficult to even tell what color their iris was, let alone if their eye vessels split. Dani set about proving she could do better, but every angle and flash setting resulted in photos just as blurry and distorted. Giving up, Dani frantically scrolled past lylawhyla’s question, hoping for an answer to their shared paranoia. Advertisements for fertility medication Dani would never need made her old phone cook.

User3819: If you notice any change in your vision you should go see an eye doctor.

The only reason her vision changed was from shining a light in her eye for 33 minutes. Dani did a double take on the time. This impulsive, self-administered eye appointment made her three minutes late for the second part of her shift. Shoving her phone into the back pocket of her denim skirt, Dani ignored her growling stomach. The one day she remembered to bring a lunch she forgot to eat it. Before exiting the bathroom, the thin, bloody claw that reached towards the center of her eye drew her in for a final look.

It’s probably nothing, you dumb bitch.

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