The Eye in the Pill Bottle

"You take it steady, now. Steady as she goes." That's what Jonas Petrauskas said every time Angela turned him in the bed, like the turning itself might tip him over an edge. He'd said it for six weeks. He said it again that night, the last night, with his breath coming in thin stacked wheezes, and then he nodded at the drawer of his bedside cabinet and told her to take the pill bottle out from under the spare catheter bags. Not pills. An eye. Glass, pale blue, a hairline crack through the iris, rattling against the plastic when she tipped the bottle. "One wish," he said. "It gives you what you ask. It takes the same back from your own sight. Not his. Not hers. Yours." He laughed, or tried to, which turned into coughing that took four minutes to settle. "My wife asked it to save our boy's hearing when he had the fever. She went half deaf in a week. Fair trade, she said. She