Sunflowers

I saw a person with blank eyes today.

At first I thought it was the light, or maybe I’d just glimpsed something wrong out of the corner of my eye. I looked again. I looked closer.

Empty eyes. The baker had empty eyes. Blank like her irises weren’t really a color, and that colorlessness had spread out into her eye sockets until they were caverns of nothing. Eyes I’d seen only in my nightmares. Many, many nightmares.

She was shelving loaves of bread, wiping down counters. She turned toward me and I couldn’t help but look away.

I blinked tight. My brain had to be playing tricks. I gulped, then looked back a third time.

She was still looking at me.

With blank, white, nothing in her eyes.

I felt like someone was blowing arctic, icy wind through a straw down my spine, one shivering vertebra at a time.

Mom, do you see it? I asked. Do you see her eyes?

I wanted to run.

What about them, sweetie? Mom said, looking at the baker’s face, then back at me.

You don’t see it? I said.

See what? She seemed confused at my question. What’s wrong? she said.

Mom paid for the red-velvet cupcakes, the ones we sometimes bring with us when we visit Grandma, and we left and went on our way as if nothing scary had happened, nothing strange at all.

Grandma gave me this spiral-bound notebook before she moved out of our house and into Olympus Assisted Living two months ago. She was the one I always talked to about the things I saw in my nightmares. The tall man. The growing house. The blank-eyed people.

I asked her what I was going to do after she left. Who was I going to talk to about what I saw in the night? She bought me this new, fresh notebook and told me to write about my fears. Put my nightmares and monsters in words and poems, because then, she said, at least some of them would be outside my head.

Now I’m seeing those blank eyes in real life. This couldn’t have been what she meant.

Maybe it would have been easier to convince myself I was making a mistake, that my brain was playing tricks on me, if I hadn’t seen blank, soulless eyes just like the baker’s so, so many times since the nightmares started years ago.

Grandma said to write down my nightmares. Grandma, a poet, says words have power. She taught me about meter and enjambment and painting with words. I’ve been writing my nightmares in lines and verse like Grandma said, and maybe if I keep putting down the words, my notebook will help me make sense of whatever dreadful thing is going on. Mom didn’t see the blank eyes. We were the only ones in the bakery: me, Mom, and the baker who kept staring at me through white emptiness. I think Grandma was right, and writing down my nightmares will help me work out whether or not I’m just an eleven-year-old girl who’s slowly losing her grip on reality. If nobody else sees the blank-eyed people, at least my notebook will know. My notebook with Van Gogh sunflowers on the cover will carry the nightmares.

And maybe they will finally, finally go away.

So it’s up to you, sunflowers.

My name is Penny Hope. I am eleven years old and today I saw a person with blank, colorless eyes like a vacuum. And this time I wasn’t dreaming.

Please help.


Text copyright © 2023 by Sarah Allen

Illustrations copyright © 2023 by Angie Hewitt