Purple Eyes

The girl with the purple eyes did not like having her picture taken. She scowled into the camera with alarming intensity.

“Smile,” the photographer said, flashing his own toothy grin.

Her face remained unchanged. No one had asked how she felt being cornered by a stranger, or if she wanted to smile, and scowling was her only means of protest.

The girl with the purple eyes didn’t actually have purple eyes—that’s just how they looked to her classmates. Really they were deep-blue. The purple came from them being sunken, dark underneath, like a smudged plum or bruises: the combination of inherited memory—generations and generations of purple-eyed women—and many sleepless nights spent coughing, small lungs gasping for air.