Gem of My Eye
By Heather Pegas
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
A man lurched out at me on the street. I had been making my way down the busy sidewalk between the gym and the post office, almost late for a doctor’s appointment. In my haste and in that crowd, the man should not have stood out to me, but he did, even before he stepped into my path.
The man was skinny. He had a Roman nose, a head of black curly hair, and he’d been scanning passersby with an agitated air, as if he might jump out of his skin. He seemed young to me, perhaps thirty, not much more.
Naturally, I recoiled to find him right in front of me, but quickly recovered. In my city, in broad daylight, no one ever stopped you but for two reasons—cash or directions. I felt unwell, my money was for my doctor, and I didn’t have time for any lost soul. But I noticed the man had pressed trousers, a good dress shirt. He probably didn’t need my money, so I put his agitation down to being lost.
I cocked my head to convey discomfort and hurry, working to keep my expression neutral. The afternoon had been challenging, and I didn’t want to spoil it further by lashing out at a stranger.
“Excuse me, but I need to ask you something,” the man began in a faint accent that I couldn’t place. “I need an unbiased opinion.” I do not know why I nodded. Perhaps it was the something like despair in his face.
He began to speak, telling me that at home he had a wife, and a son who was some nine years of age. His son was a good son, the man said, quiet and dutiful, perhaps not as sharp as some, but a good, very good, boy. And as it happened, due to the man’s own mother’s unexpected mid-life pregnancy, he also had a younger brother, virtually the same age as his son.
We were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, and people were breaking and flowing around us. It felt otherworldly, to be still in the middle of so much motion.
All the family lived in the same neighborhood, the man went on. His son and brother went to the same school and frequently played together afterwards. In fact, the man’s aging parents had recently asked for a break from the high-energy boy, so that his brother now spent almost all his free time at my narrator’s house, with his own wife and son.
Never before had a stranger stopped me to talk about his family, and I wondered where all this was taking us. I began to squirm. My appointment was important, and the time for it was rapidly approaching. Then the man’s face changed with a deep emotion.
“My brother,” he said, “is a brilliant boy. He is the smartest and cleverest student in his class. When you question him, he always has the quickest, most original responses…Also, he is beautiful.” His eyes met mine as he continued.
“I think that my wife loves my brother more than our son.” His were large brown eyes, drooping and desolate. “I believe I may also prefer my brother to my son, and I think my son knows this.”
He looked at me hard then. I realized he wanted a response, but I had none. Also, I found myself needing to hear more.
“Every day,” the man pressed on, as if detail would help me form a reply, “my wife is spending more time with my brother, making his favorite foods, taking the boys out to do the things my brother likes, while she has become distant to our own son. My son is quiet, you see, he doesn’t say much. But I can see in his eyes that he knows.”
In that moment, with the sun sinking lower and office workers rushing to catch a nearby stopping bus, I forgot my own bothers. This story had taken me outside of myself, out of my own head, for the first time in many days. And his confidence in me must have grown because the man had more to say.
“What I want to ask you, an objective stranger, is what I should do. I have been wondering if I must tell my wife to send my brother home to my parents after school, if I should limit the time my son is placed in direct contrast to my brother. I do not want to do this, but I need to know if it should be done.”
A feeling came over me, as if I were outside and above the scene on the street, witnessing myself being chosen and tested in some way. The stakes felt high, and I was involved now. I did not want to lead this man astray.
“I think so,” I began hesitantly, but a moment later the words began to flow as if I really did have the answer. “Every individual has a unique light or spark,” I said, “something that makes him special. The daily comparison to your brother might prevent your wife, you, from noticing, or discovering, what this thing is about your son. Because surely, there is something.”
I could see the man searching inside himself, for something. “He is a good son,” he concluded. “But my wife will resist this. My brother has become the center of her world. The gem of her eye, she says.”
This exotic incantation and the man’s lilting, rhythmic patterns of speech distracted me momentarily, but then I sensed that the thing the man most feared was the confrontation with his wife. The airing of this secret-that-was-no-secret: that both father and mother loved another boy more than their own. I suddenly felt sick. I felt his sadness as if it were my own.
I hastily suggested, just as it sprang to my mind, that the man could get a pet for his son, one that the other boy would not be allowed to care for or play with. It could not be a dog, I was thinking to myself, because they will go with anyone, but maybe a kitten or a bird. I was cheering myself with the image of a sad, lonely boy with a kitten when the man said, “I thank you for listening,” and turned, and walked away.
I was left standing, stuck and unresolved, before I remembered my doctor’s appointment. It was growing colder, and I was now late. I could see the man’s thin back retreating as he hastily wove his way through the people down the street, past the bank and the sandwich shop, and I fought the urge to call out. Wait! Come back! Tell me how it ends. But those who bring the story can just as easily take it away, you see.
In the hours and days that followed, I found myself thinking about this encounter. I thought about it immediately afterwards, gowned and supine in that sterile, bright exam room, waiting for the doctor to appear. The next day, I thought about it in my dim cubicle, finalizing the stultifying journal article that Walt, my increasingly distant boss, expected me to submit. I found myself re-playing the man’s story instead of returning my mother’s phone calls, even as her messages grew more accusatory. And I thought about it more than one night in bed, lying awake in worry.
I started trying to cut this family’s story into my own, much as you would painting walls in a room with different colors, carefully, so that the surfaces sit together, side by side.
I gave each family member—father, mother, brother, son—a history and a plotline. The father, the storyteller, I imagined rushing to the pet shop immediately after our conversation, bringing home a surprise. And the mother registering shock.
I didn’t know what language they spoke at home, but maybe she would use foreign curses, signaling dismay about the inevitable mess in her clean home, or might say that her hapless son would not be able to care for a pet.
This mother I blamed cruelly, knowing that she was sharp with her son, never praising him for academic improvements, maybe criticizing his appearance. And I imagined that maybe the father had stopped her one evening to imply, or to tell her outright, that she was a bad mother. And did she explode? Had she said worse back to him?
I wondered why they had only the one child. Were there fertility issues? The man looked still to be young—much younger, in fact, than I was. Perhaps it was an issue between them, the elephant in the room, or perhaps the mother had fallen out of love with her husband, or rather fallen more in love with the youthful version of him she saw every day, her brother-in-law.
Or had she, possibly, never wanted a child at all?
This young brother always dazzled in my mind. He was just as beautiful as the man had said, with huge gleaming eyes, impish, with dark hair artfully tousled. But he was thoughtless, always happy to soak up the light, uncaring of his nephew’s feelings. Maybe he had taken the kitten for himself!
More than anyone, I thought of the boy, the son. I felt I knew him best because I remembered how it was trying to make oneself appear bigger, or failing that, not to be seen at all.
This boy, he might be a bit overweight. Or was his skin dull? Maybe he had a cast in an eye, maybe he had a limp. I imagined his feelings, I knew them. Sadness, confusion, and surely an anger he knew better than to express. But also, I knew there was something special about him, and I thought about what it was.
The son was not quick or funny, and he was not vocal. But did he listen well, did he observe? Perhaps he was at home in the natural world, perhaps he was whispering secrets with his new pet even now. Maybe he heard music in his head and didn’t have the tools to put it down. Maybe he was an empath. Maybe he saw the future.
But this poor boy, he had failed. I had failed. My abrupt and thoughtless advice—a pet to fix it all!—had caused his father to turn from me, to take his story on to a wiser listener. I knew well enough now that not all problems were so easily solved.
As entertainment, as a distraction, I told this family’s story myself the next week at lunch with Jan, my friend. I began jokily, saying that a man and his troubles had made me late for the gynecologist. That the receptionist had admonished me, which was only halfway true (she had merely frowned).
I knew I’d chosen my audience wisely when Jan began to ask probing questions. What ethnicity or culture was the man? Did you suggest family therapy? How can you find him again and find out what happened? And why? Why stop a stranger?
Why pick you?
I told her I’d been replaying the episode in my head, how I’d been trying to answer these very questions. I found myself, over unaffordable salmon and between the waiter’s visits, trying to explain just how much it had affected me and why. How for years, in my own family, I’d understood myself to be the least desired, the dingiest, grandchild.
“You?” Jan said, surprised. “Weren’t you some sort of prodigy?”
Not then, I thought. And not really since. In fact, now, I felt remarkable only for my crushing underachievement.
I explained to her that these feelings dated to a time much before I went to university early, before I became thin and prettier. I’d felt mostly invisible to my family, and to be fair, I’d cultivated that invisibility because, even then, things went so poorly when I was noticed. I told her how one Easter, when I was wearing my new pink dress, my grandfather had come up to me in front of everyone, pointing to a pimple on my face, demanding to know, “What is that? What is that?!” And how I could hear my cousins taunting me as I avoided them, hid myself out of sight. How I longed for someone to make them stop, but that my mother always insisted I fight my own battles. This was how things were for me before I, without trying or even knowing how, became more perfect in my family’s eyes.
Jan’s lips compressed in commiseration, and I might have told her more. How when I thought about that man, I wished I could see him again to tell him he had moved me. That I thought he had been brave in his search for an answer. How in the market all that week, I’d searched the faces of people around me, wondering which of them had a secret shame, a problem that seemingly had no solution. Some lurid embroilment.
A desperate choice to make before too much more time passed.
Reaching out to a stranger was a gambit I’d never considered, and I felt how hard it would be. I wondered if it was something I should do myself. Put my trouble out to the world, ask for help with these things I suffer from, things bearing down on me that I don’t know what to do about.
Jan was looking at me with the greatest sympathy, and I read in her eyes how she loved me. How she forgave me, even my worst things. Then I thought that gambit might not be necessary, and finally, I began to talk.
Later that week, I called my mother, and I told her the news. First, she called me prodigal, still angry about the unreturned calls. Then she confessed she had been praying for something like this, and she was, it turned out, eager to help.
I told Walt, my boss, that I would find a new job and that while I understood how concerned he was about his wife and children, I wasn’t. I told him that I’d realized something. I needed to be alone, away from him, to find out what I could do with what I had learned.
Walt could’ve made things difficult for me, of course. I needed his recommendation to move on. He might have, he did, try to change my mind, though I had no intention of troubling him further. Despite my turmoil, something had changed, had unstuck in me, or opened.
I am open even now, many months later, as I work late at night in a city a thousand miles away, while I watch my radiant baby sleep. But...
I still want to know. That man, his wife, the brother, and their son. I want to know what happened to them. I want this even though I have made their story my own.
The man was skinny. He had a Roman nose, a head of black curly hair, and he’d been scanning passersby with an agitated air, as if he might jump out of his skin. He seemed young to me, perhaps thirty, not much more.
Naturally, I recoiled to find him right in front of me, but quickly recovered. In my city, in broad daylight, no one ever stopped you but for two reasons—cash or directions. I felt unwell, my money was for my doctor, and I didn’t have time for any lost soul. But I noticed the man had pressed trousers, a good dress shirt. He probably didn’t need my money, so I put his agitation down to being lost.
I cocked my head to convey discomfort and hurry, working to keep my expression neutral. The afternoon had been challenging, and I didn’t want to spoil it further by lashing out at a stranger.
“Excuse me, but I need to ask you something,” the man began in a faint accent that I couldn’t place. “I need an unbiased opinion.” I do not know why I nodded. Perhaps it was the something like despair in his face.
He began to speak, telling me that at home he had a wife, and a son who was some nine years of age. His son was a good son, the man said, quiet and dutiful, perhaps not as sharp as some, but a good, very good, boy. And as it happened, due to the man’s own mother’s unexpected mid-life pregnancy, he also had a younger brother, virtually the same age as his son.
We were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, and people were breaking and flowing around us. It felt otherworldly, to be still in the middle of so much motion.
All the family lived in the same neighborhood, the man went on. His son and brother went to the same school and frequently played together afterwards. In fact, the man’s aging parents had recently asked for a break from the high-energy boy, so that his brother now spent almost all his free time at my narrator’s house, with his own wife and son.
Never before had a stranger stopped me to talk about his family, and I wondered where all this was taking us. I began to squirm. My appointment was important, and the time for it was rapidly approaching. Then the man’s face changed with a deep emotion.
“My brother,” he said, “is a brilliant boy. He is the smartest and cleverest student in his class. When you question him, he always has the quickest, most original responses…Also, he is beautiful.” His eyes met mine as he continued.
“I think that my wife loves my brother more than our son.” His were large brown eyes, drooping and desolate. “I believe I may also prefer my brother to my son, and I think my son knows this.”
He looked at me hard then. I realized he wanted a response, but I had none. Also, I found myself needing to hear more.
“Every day,” the man pressed on, as if detail would help me form a reply, “my wife is spending more time with my brother, making his favorite foods, taking the boys out to do the things my brother likes, while she has become distant to our own son. My son is quiet, you see, he doesn’t say much. But I can see in his eyes that he knows.”
In that moment, with the sun sinking lower and office workers rushing to catch a nearby stopping bus, I forgot my own bothers. This story had taken me outside of myself, out of my own head, for the first time in many days. And his confidence in me must have grown because the man had more to say.
“What I want to ask you, an objective stranger, is what I should do. I have been wondering if I must tell my wife to send my brother home to my parents after school, if I should limit the time my son is placed in direct contrast to my brother. I do not want to do this, but I need to know if it should be done.”
A feeling came over me, as if I were outside and above the scene on the street, witnessing myself being chosen and tested in some way. The stakes felt high, and I was involved now. I did not want to lead this man astray.
“I think so,” I began hesitantly, but a moment later the words began to flow as if I really did have the answer. “Every individual has a unique light or spark,” I said, “something that makes him special. The daily comparison to your brother might prevent your wife, you, from noticing, or discovering, what this thing is about your son. Because surely, there is something.”
I could see the man searching inside himself, for something. “He is a good son,” he concluded. “But my wife will resist this. My brother has become the center of her world. The gem of her eye, she says.”
This exotic incantation and the man’s lilting, rhythmic patterns of speech distracted me momentarily, but then I sensed that the thing the man most feared was the confrontation with his wife. The airing of this secret-that-was-no-secret: that both father and mother loved another boy more than their own. I suddenly felt sick. I felt his sadness as if it were my own.
I hastily suggested, just as it sprang to my mind, that the man could get a pet for his son, one that the other boy would not be allowed to care for or play with. It could not be a dog, I was thinking to myself, because they will go with anyone, but maybe a kitten or a bird. I was cheering myself with the image of a sad, lonely boy with a kitten when the man said, “I thank you for listening,” and turned, and walked away.
I was left standing, stuck and unresolved, before I remembered my doctor’s appointment. It was growing colder, and I was now late. I could see the man’s thin back retreating as he hastily wove his way through the people down the street, past the bank and the sandwich shop, and I fought the urge to call out. Wait! Come back! Tell me how it ends. But those who bring the story can just as easily take it away, you see.
In the hours and days that followed, I found myself thinking about this encounter. I thought about it immediately afterwards, gowned and supine in that sterile, bright exam room, waiting for the doctor to appear. The next day, I thought about it in my dim cubicle, finalizing the stultifying journal article that Walt, my increasingly distant boss, expected me to submit. I found myself re-playing the man’s story instead of returning my mother’s phone calls, even as her messages grew more accusatory. And I thought about it more than one night in bed, lying awake in worry.
I started trying to cut this family’s story into my own, much as you would painting walls in a room with different colors, carefully, so that the surfaces sit together, side by side.
I gave each family member—father, mother, brother, son—a history and a plotline. The father, the storyteller, I imagined rushing to the pet shop immediately after our conversation, bringing home a surprise. And the mother registering shock.
I didn’t know what language they spoke at home, but maybe she would use foreign curses, signaling dismay about the inevitable mess in her clean home, or might say that her hapless son would not be able to care for a pet.
This mother I blamed cruelly, knowing that she was sharp with her son, never praising him for academic improvements, maybe criticizing his appearance. And I imagined that maybe the father had stopped her one evening to imply, or to tell her outright, that she was a bad mother. And did she explode? Had she said worse back to him?
I wondered why they had only the one child. Were there fertility issues? The man looked still to be young—much younger, in fact, than I was. Perhaps it was an issue between them, the elephant in the room, or perhaps the mother had fallen out of love with her husband, or rather fallen more in love with the youthful version of him she saw every day, her brother-in-law.
Or had she, possibly, never wanted a child at all?
This young brother always dazzled in my mind. He was just as beautiful as the man had said, with huge gleaming eyes, impish, with dark hair artfully tousled. But he was thoughtless, always happy to soak up the light, uncaring of his nephew’s feelings. Maybe he had taken the kitten for himself!
More than anyone, I thought of the boy, the son. I felt I knew him best because I remembered how it was trying to make oneself appear bigger, or failing that, not to be seen at all.
This boy, he might be a bit overweight. Or was his skin dull? Maybe he had a cast in an eye, maybe he had a limp. I imagined his feelings, I knew them. Sadness, confusion, and surely an anger he knew better than to express. But also, I knew there was something special about him, and I thought about what it was.
The son was not quick or funny, and he was not vocal. But did he listen well, did he observe? Perhaps he was at home in the natural world, perhaps he was whispering secrets with his new pet even now. Maybe he heard music in his head and didn’t have the tools to put it down. Maybe he was an empath. Maybe he saw the future.
But this poor boy, he had failed. I had failed. My abrupt and thoughtless advice—a pet to fix it all!—had caused his father to turn from me, to take his story on to a wiser listener. I knew well enough now that not all problems were so easily solved.
As entertainment, as a distraction, I told this family’s story myself the next week at lunch with Jan, my friend. I began jokily, saying that a man and his troubles had made me late for the gynecologist. That the receptionist had admonished me, which was only halfway true (she had merely frowned).
I knew I’d chosen my audience wisely when Jan began to ask probing questions. What ethnicity or culture was the man? Did you suggest family therapy? How can you find him again and find out what happened? And why? Why stop a stranger?
Why pick you?
I told her I’d been replaying the episode in my head, how I’d been trying to answer these very questions. I found myself, over unaffordable salmon and between the waiter’s visits, trying to explain just how much it had affected me and why. How for years, in my own family, I’d understood myself to be the least desired, the dingiest, grandchild.
“You?” Jan said, surprised. “Weren’t you some sort of prodigy?”
Not then, I thought. And not really since. In fact, now, I felt remarkable only for my crushing underachievement.
I explained to her that these feelings dated to a time much before I went to university early, before I became thin and prettier. I’d felt mostly invisible to my family, and to be fair, I’d cultivated that invisibility because, even then, things went so poorly when I was noticed. I told her how one Easter, when I was wearing my new pink dress, my grandfather had come up to me in front of everyone, pointing to a pimple on my face, demanding to know, “What is that? What is that?!” And how I could hear my cousins taunting me as I avoided them, hid myself out of sight. How I longed for someone to make them stop, but that my mother always insisted I fight my own battles. This was how things were for me before I, without trying or even knowing how, became more perfect in my family’s eyes.
Jan’s lips compressed in commiseration, and I might have told her more. How when I thought about that man, I wished I could see him again to tell him he had moved me. That I thought he had been brave in his search for an answer. How in the market all that week, I’d searched the faces of people around me, wondering which of them had a secret shame, a problem that seemingly had no solution. Some lurid embroilment.
A desperate choice to make before too much more time passed.
Reaching out to a stranger was a gambit I’d never considered, and I felt how hard it would be. I wondered if it was something I should do myself. Put my trouble out to the world, ask for help with these things I suffer from, things bearing down on me that I don’t know what to do about.
Jan was looking at me with the greatest sympathy, and I read in her eyes how she loved me. How she forgave me, even my worst things. Then I thought that gambit might not be necessary, and finally, I began to talk.
Later that week, I called my mother, and I told her the news. First, she called me prodigal, still angry about the unreturned calls. Then she confessed she had been praying for something like this, and she was, it turned out, eager to help.
I told Walt, my boss, that I would find a new job and that while I understood how concerned he was about his wife and children, I wasn’t. I told him that I’d realized something. I needed to be alone, away from him, to find out what I could do with what I had learned.
Walt could’ve made things difficult for me, of course. I needed his recommendation to move on. He might have, he did, try to change my mind, though I had no intention of troubling him further. Despite my turmoil, something had changed, had unstuck in me, or opened.
I am open even now, many months later, as I work late at night in a city a thousand miles away, while I watch my radiant baby sleep. But...
I still want to know. That man, his wife, the brother, and their son. I want to know what happened to them. I want this even though I have made their story my own.
Heather Pegas lives in Los Angeles where she writes grant proposals, essays, short stories and flash. Her work has been Pushcart nominated, and is featured or forthcoming in journals such as Heavy Feather Review, Does It Have Pockets, Tahoma Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and Weird Lit Magazine. You can reach her at www.heatherpegas.com.
Author’s Note:
The lives of others... A source of endless fascination, and a great German-language movie to boot! Like my protagonist, I was once approached on the street by a stranger seeking an unbiased opinion about his family life. His bravery inspired this story, as did the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk.