Dan’s eyes felt weird, it was the only way he could easily describe it at first. The feeling had progressed to a pushing feeling behind his eyes, like the nerves and muscles behind his eyes where inflamed. He instinctively shut and covered his eyes when the pain suddenly spiked. Those stopped when he felt his eye lids against his own hands, they were pushing up against them. In a panic, he raced off his bed and to the sibling’s shared bathroom and looked into the mirror.
It was hard to determine what was happening as the pushing feeling had distorted his vision but moving up close to the mirror had helped. His reflection looked normal from the front, but turning to the side revealed what was going on to him, his eyes were moving forward, and not just like they were moving forward slightly like some peoples’ eyes would be, or how other peoples’ eyes were more sunken in than his. His eyes were almost distended and were already much further out than he recalled his eyes being before.
Dan backed away from the mirror in shock, by now his vision had recovered and no longer needed to be so close to see what was happening. His eyes were stretching past his head, growing out, it was the oddest sight, it almost reminded him of a snail, or a slug… wait a minute.
Wait.
Is this what Kat meant when she said she had cursed him to turn into an animal. Was his inner animal really mollusk, an invertebrate?! As he contemplated this, his eyes stretched several inches beyond his head, and the weight of them being pulled down brought him back into focus for the moment. He was shocked to find how easy it was to control the muscles that once controlled the direction his eyes went, as they now controlled the direction his eyestalks, for that was what they were now, went.
Now that his eyes weren’t drooping towards the floor and he was looking towards the mirror again, he started wondering just what this meant for him. What did him being a snail say about him, was he slow, well he wasn’t mentally slow, he knew that he wasn’t the greatest at school, but he still understood what they were saying. Maybe it was that he was literally slow, that he was lazy, well, maybe but he didn’t really see it, he went to school on time, he hung out with friends, and he helped at home where he was needed, usually with dad when something broke. But he wasn’t thinking like Kat was thinking, so surely, she saw him as lazy in some aspect that he didn’t.
This mental conundrum overshadowed the finishing of his new eyestalks growing. While he didn’t have any way to measure how long they had grown, he had to guess they were about a foot and a half long. But what was most disorienting was that his eyes could now move freely from each other, so it was odd to see in front of him into the mirror with one eye, and the other to turn around 180 degrees and see the door to leave the bathroom behind him. He spent a little while just moving his eyestalks around getting used to the new movements that his eyes were capable of before stepping out of the bathroom. He remembered Kat saying that their mother was also a witch, so surely, she could stop what Kat was doing to him.