Prose

Work In Progress

written by: trevor

My county is a farm county and so I am the son of a farmer and a child of the deep, rich. soil of Clarendon County. Most mornings, just before sunrise, I stand sleepily outside our back screen door and see the world brighten around me to a maizy yellow, the color of field corn before it fully ripens underneath the husk of a cob growing on a stalk. In the evening, just before sunset, I wonder wearily outside that same door and watch the tomato-y sun hang on the horizon, the color of a goliath the day we pick it off the vine. The long day in between is filled with cow milking, egg gathering, school going, weed hoeing, lesson learning, and cow milking again. The days are good, though, because I have a younger brother named Carver, who, as momma and daddy say, is my twin pea in the pod. We are best friends.

Chapter 1


My little brother stood quietly beside his desk with a magnifying glass in his hand. I looked at him from the splintered pine frame of our kitchen door where I was standing. He turned around slowly, like a person who is in deep thought, and looked at me through the lens of the glass. His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown- as big as the globe in my second grade classroom and as brown as the turned soil of our South Carolina farm.

- Carver, why you up? It's the middle of the night.

- I cain't sleep.

- What you doin'?

- I'm studyin' a tomato.

I walked to him and knelt beside him. I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. I saw clearly the parts of his eye that my teacher taught to me at school- the colored part which is the iris and the black part which is the pupil. But It was Carver, my five-year-old brother, who taught me how those parts work together to give us our sense of sight. It was Carver who helped me understand how we see. His lessons always began and ended with questions and were filled with an amazing assortment of facts that came from God only knows where. Our talk about seeing went something like this -

- Carter, you remember de five senses?

- Yeah. Let me think...seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

- Did 'ya know if we divided our brains into three parts, two o' de parts would be filled up by what our eyes see?

- Naw, I didn't know that. Seein' is that important, huh?

- Yeah. You know what a person who studies de inside parts of de body is called?

- Naw, I don't know nothin' 'bout that.

- Well, dat person is called an anatomist. An anatomist is kind o' like an artist whose art he'ps us know where dose parts are and what dey do. Did 'ya know dere was artists like dat?

- Naw, I didn't.

- Yeah. There was this anatomist in Africa around 100 AD named Rufus. He was from a city called Ephesus. He he'pd us understand de parts of de eye. Do 'ya want me to teach you about de eye?

- Sure.

- Well, de front part of de eye looks like a dome. It's de cornea. De colored part is called de "rainbow." It's de iris. De lens, it looks like a lentil. De vitreous humor is the fluid inside the eyeball.
Dere's a thin layer on de inside o' de eyeball. It's de retina. No one could see into de retina until microscopes were invented. When people looked inside de retina fo de first time dey found millions of rod and cone cells. De rods and cones find rays of light and turn dem into signals for de optic nerves. De optic nerves send de signals to de brain and it turns dem into pictures.
When our eyes look at thangs, light rays shine off dem tru the conjunctiva and are partly focused by de cornea. Dose light rays pass tru de pupil, are focused fully by de lens, pass tru de vitreous humor, and form a picture on de retina. 'Cause of de way lenses work, de picture is upside down, an' de brain turns it "right-side up." Idn' dat amazing?

- Yeah, it is amazing. And so are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I did not understand, the parts that woke my brother to study a tomato while our part of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. But those parts remained hidden to me. I gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.