The Eyes

It was his eyes. Nothing else. He had nothing. Not good looks. No. Eyes that pierced. That saw through. Understood. He didn’t know he had the power until it didn’t matter. Old. Which was just as well.

Margaret noticed first at the grocery store. Aisle seven, frozen foods. She was reaching for peas when he looked at her—really looked—and she felt naked. Not physically. Deeper. Like he could see the loneliness she carried, the way she talked to her cat because no one else would listen, the dreams she’d buried under decades of disappointment.

“Beautiful day,” he said, his voice ordinary as morning coffee.

She nodded, clutching the frozen peas, and hurried away. But something had shifted. That night she called her sister for the first time in three years.

The checker at the hardware store. The bus driver on Route 12. The teenager bagging groceries who always looked angry. One by one, they felt it—that moment of being truly seen. Not judged. Just witnessed. Acknowledged. The way a lighthouse acknowledges ships in the dark.

He never meant to do anything. Never tried. Just looked at people the way he’d learned to look at the world after seventy-eight years of living in it. With acceptance. With the understanding that everyone was carrying something heavy, something that mattered to them even if it looked small from the outside.

The power grew stronger as he grew weaker. Arthritis in his joints, but clarity in his vision. As if all the years of looking without really seeing had been practice for this—for becoming a mirror that reflected people back to themselves, not as they feared they were, but as they actually were. Complicated. Struggling. Human. Worthy.

When the cancer took him, the funeral was standing room only. People he’d spoken to for maybe thirty seconds. The grocery store clerk. The postal worker. The woman from the bus stop who never knew his name but felt changed by thirty seconds of being seen.

They couldn’t explain what he’d done for them. Only that he had.

His eyes, they said. Something about his eyes.