A giant eyeball opens in Michelle's living room floor. The hardwood peels back to reveal a convex, milky white surface. A black circle rotates into view and gazes at her lazy ceiling fan.
       (What is that? WHAT IS THAT?)
       Her paintbrush falls onto the grey plastic folding table. Her hands rise to flap at the air, and she lets out a monotone moan through sealed lips.
       When she's flapped for several minutes, and the eye has failed to do more than stare upward and occasionally blink the rippled hardwood back over its surface (That's an eyelid! An eyelid! Flap, flap, hyperventilate), she notices some redness in the sclera.
       (A task! Focus, get some control.)
       She voyages to the bathroom and returns with a bottle of EyeRight Moisturizing Droplets. The directions say to apply one to two drops. She hesitates. She pours the whole bottle onto the eye.
       (What side is its forehead on? Where do I look if it doesn't have a forehead?)
       She recycles the eyedrop bottle and decides this probably warrants a call to somebody.
       She hates phones.
       She sends an urgent email to her optometrist.
       The eye keeps staring upward.
       The optometrist doesn't reply.

       "Interesting ... artwork," says Officer Jackson from the Kelly County Police Department.
       "It's an eyeball," she says. "I didn't put it there."
       He glances around at the walls bedecked with posters and prints of famous paintings, at the pile of blank canvases on the prismatic glass coffee table and the half-empty bottles of paint on the windowsill, at the works in progress propped on wobbly wooden chairs and hidden by sheets. "It looks like artwork."
       "It's not. It's real."
       He pauses for a long time. They both watch the eye, which does nothing of note besides exist. It occasionally blinks. Presumably, so do they.
       "Where's the colorful part?" he asks.
       "The iris. It doesn't have one." (The redness is gone. So are three more bottles of moisturizing eyedrops.)
       Officer Jackson finally asks, "What do you want us to do about it?"
       She doesn't know. She says so. (I'm being weird.)
       "Why do you keep looking away?"
       (Yup.) "I avoid everyone's gaze," she says. "Otherwise, I can't really listen properly. Especially when I'm overstimulated. Like right now."
       "Oh."
       "Sometimes, my own voice overstimulates me."
       "That sounds frustrating."
       "It is."
       He can't help her with the eye. He says so. She says she understands. (What else is there to say?) He leaves.

       Michelle doesn't bother talking to the eye. (It's not an ear, after all.) She concludes its forehead is to the right -- something about the under-eye curvature.
       She checks her bedroom, bathroom, and basement for anomalous body parts and finds none.
       She considers covering the eye with a rug, but suspects that will exacerbate the redness, which she controls through liberal applications of EyeRight.
       The pupil doesn't move. Just watches the ceiling fan. (Just like baby Celia. Note to self, email sister and ask how baby Celia is doing.)
       She moves her folding worktable to the other side of the room. She puts her red-leaf philodendron on a metal stand in the eye's periphery. She tapes a square around the eye with blue painter's tape, the same tape she sometimes uses to secure the flapping plastic of her outdoor pop-up tent so it stays silent. (County fair art expo is in three weeks. People will ask questions about my work. Must mentally prepare.) She changes the ceiling fan's speed (slower), just in case it matters.
       It doesn't.

       Her cat walks across the eyeball, provoking a spat of furious blinking and more redness.
       She fishes fur off the sclera with a washcloth and moves the cat's food, climbing tree, and bed to the basement.
       She changes the fan speed again (faster) and moves a couple of posters of her favorite artworks to the wall where the eye might see them if it shifts focus.
       It doesn't.

       The eye starts to cry. Tears spill from its right corner (I was right about the forehead placement) and pool around the base of the philodendron stand.
       She checks; the cat is still in the basement.
       (Maybe it doesn't like cubism. I shouldn't have shown it that print of Popova's Air Man Space.)
       She turns off the fan. She switches Popova for Pollock. She peels up the soaked blue tape from the floor, repealing the eye's isolation from the rest of the room.
       Still, it cries. (Or at least, leaks saline. There's no reason to assume it's sentient.)
       (Still. I think it's crying.)

       County fair.
       Voices everywhere. Wheels thundering on metal tracks. (There's a slight hitch when the coaster starts to slow down.) Distant animals bleating, braying, barking in the barn.
       She perches on a cushioned metal folding chair at her table. Canvases display themselves and hide discreet price tags. Mostly oil paintings, though she's dabbled in watercolor and acrylic this year.
       Fried dough. Smoking hot dogs. Horse sweat, metal ride grease, flower show arrangements, and the cologne of Ari, the sculptor at the table across the path.
       She fidgets with her keychains to keep from flapping.
       Someone's saying something to her.
       Fidget, fidget, focus.
       "What?"
       "How long have you been painting?"
       "Since I was three." (She probably wants more detail than that.) "It helped me communicate when I couldn't talk yet. I painted when I felt overstimulated, to show how the world looks and feels when there's too much going on."
       "Oh. You're--"
       "Yup."
       "So's my cousin. They're exceptional paintings."
       "Thank you."
       "Where do you get your ideas?"
       "Right now, I'm practicing photorealism, like those ones over there. I want to start doing commissioned portraits."
       "Really? How much?"
       "Depends on the size of the canvas."
       "About the same size as this one."
       She quotes a price. The woman takes a business card.
       Two more women linger at the corner of the table, appraising one of Michelle's surrealist works. "Look at all the eyes," one says. "It makes me think about how we're always being watched, with our phones and devices surveilling us and recording what we do."
       "Mmm," says the other. (That's probably an agreement?) "Or how we upload everything we do to the internet, so we're always putting ourselves under the eyes of others."
       "Actually," Michelle says, "there's a giant eyeball in my floor."
       Pause.
       The two women move on to another table.
       (Probably over-shared a little bit there.)
       She covers her phone's camera with a piece of painter's tape that night.

       The eye keeps crying.

       The woman from the fair sends an email. Her name is Janae. Michelle paints a portrait of her and her wife for their anniversary.
       The shading isn't quite right on the folds of Janae's dress, and the proportions of her hands are off. Michelle apologizes. Janae says it's perfect. (It's not.)
       She tells her friends. Michelle paints more portraits. (Most of them come out better.) At least four people comment on how accurate the foreheads and hairlines look. She buys a set of forty-seven professional brushes she's always wanted and spends some time practicing eyes.
       In her living room, she's gone through her entire collection of posters and reproductions (and every setting on the ceiling fan). From lying on the floor and angling her head, she's pretty sure the eye can see the philodendron and the paintings in its peripheral vision. But nobody from Kahlo to Dali to Munch has so much as tilted the pupil's gaze.
       She hangs her collected pieces back where they usually go. (Ahhh. That's better.)
       Three days later, she puts up a piece of her art. One of the photorealistic landscapes.
       It doesn't look.
       She doesn't care.
       Really.

       She paints portraits. A chain of referrals enters her into the world of wealthy pet owners in search of ways to remember beloved, buried Fido. She paints dogs, babies, families, couples, and once an antique motorcycle. (Capturing the shine of that old metal takes hours.) She shows them to the eye.
       It blinks. It stares at the ceiling. (Took the fan down a month ago.)
       It cries. She changes the wadded towels around the wood floor.

       Another fair.
       More fidgeting with her keychains.
       More customers. Few sales. It's 104 degrees, and her tent angles the wrong way to shade her chair. She's wearing a new shirt from her sister, but it's the wrong blend of polyester-cotton, and the tag scratches her neck and her right sock has a loose thread in the pinkie toe and her water bottle smells weird and she doesn't know why and a group of teenagers keeps screaming on the Whirly Twirly Tilty Tumble right behind the art expo and Kevin burned the hot dogs really badly today and sweat slicks her arms and fairground dust sticks to her skin and she thinks about the eye and she STILL CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHY IT'S CRYING AND
       Someone glances at Michelle's work, shakes his head, and moves on.
       The keychains drop.
       Flapping.
       Moaning. (It's called stimming but most people don't know that.)
       Crying. Her own tears, this time.
       The meltdown lasts about fifteen minutes. She hides behind her table until her breathing gets under control and her thoughts slow enough to figure out what to do next. (Pack up, go home, and be quietly alone for the rest of the day.) The fairground blurs as she makes her exit.
       She gets home and sees the eye. It's still crying.
       She kicks it.
       It blinks. More crying. (Both of us.)
       She paints.
       She goes to bed.
       The next day, she wears a different shirt, better socks, and headphones blasting Metallica.
       Before leaving, she tacks the previous night's painting to the ceiling above the eye. It echoes her earlier work, not the more recent portrait business. Red streaks, too-bright silver sharp things, swirling colors, shapes that flit out of focus when the viewer moves. Echoes of faces on the perimeter, watching, judging. Yesterday, she calls it.
       When she gets home, the eye is still looking up at the painting. (Obviously. It never moves.)
       She thinks the towels are wetter than usual, but it might be her imagination.

       She puts more paintings on the ceiling, nailing them alongside the first. When she runs out of room, she takes them down and starts again.
       Then, one day, she starts to paint on the ceiling.
       She paints feelings, vibrant color intermingling with drab grey. She paints landscapes and portraits and dead puppies and shiny antique vehicles, photorealistic and impressions and both and neither. She paints hot dogs covered in farm manure and children screaming as they ride a horse around a roller coaster track. She paints a woman standing alone beside a crowd so dense no faces can be discerned. She loses herself in the project, painting, painting, painting for hours. Then days. She remembers to eat and use the bathroom, but just barely. She feels vivid. (Glorious hyperfocus.)
       She paints the eye.
       Right above itself, she starts with the browns and golds of the rippled wooden floor. Bright, glossy white for the sclera. Rich night black for the pupil. Greywashed tears spreading from the corner. Impressions, realism, both, neither.
       Colorful droplets fall on the eye. It blinks.
       She's caught up in the ride, the ecstasy of following her mind in one pursuit, the release of her entirety channeling to one purpose for who even knows how long now. She paints. Liquid drips onto the faster-blinking eye.
       When she finally comes up for air, emerging from hyperfocus to remember the rest of the world, her entire ceiling is a maze of art centered on the portrait of the eye.
       She inspects it. It's nearly flawless.
       Only then does she look down from her perch on the wooden chair and see what she's done to the eye.
       The sclera is white no longer; color drip-drops its surface. In one corner, masses a stormcloud of greys and blacks. In another, joyous rainbows dance. Somehow, she's missed the pupil; it stares up at the ceiling still, unmoving as the day it opened. But the tears leaking from it are a river, soaking through her towels and spreading past the philodendron, sheening her entire floor.
       She curses. Scoots down from her wobbly chair and grabs a bottle of eyedrops from the box that arrived yesterday. Squirts the whole thing on, rubbing at the paint with her palms. All she does is smear color around. She looks wildly around for something helpful, and her gaze lands on the white sheets sheltering her works in progress. She snatches the fabrics and dabs them, one after another, at the sclera. The paint just streaks, but at least it's no longer clumped in thick globs. The stained sheets form a pile beside the eye, absorbing moisture from the floor.
       She abandons the clean-up attempt but looks up to make sure no more paint drops are falling. She notices a tiny spot on the eye portrait that's missing a slight shadow, the suggestion of one of the ripples in the folded wood. She starts to climb up to fix it, then hesitates.
       She pulls her prismatic glass coffee table across the floor, its metal feet scuffing on the wood. She positions it over the eye and climbs onto the wobbly chair.
       The eye blinks.
       And its saturated shape focuses.
       The pupil stares upward, but micromovements betray the onset of sight. It gazes at the portrait of itself, wide. Then it darts side to side, taking in the canvas that is the ceiling, the figures and impressions, the story and emotion and emptiness and fullness sprayed across its field of vision in a vibrancy of greys and colors that it, too, bears.
       It flits to the right. It stares at Michelle.
       She stares back.
       They watch each other.
       Tears leak from the eye, continuing to soak the floor. But the corner of the eye crinkles in its allotment of a smile.
       Then the wood ripples and unfolds. It slides over the paint-streaked sclera, covers the pupil still watching Michelle, and closes, sated.
       It's a flat, wood floor again, covered with dripping paint.
       Michelle looks up at the ceiling, at the spot she had been about to fix.
       She climbs back down and cleans her brushes.