Gaspar did, apprehensively: he knew that box could hold nothing good. He felt a painful throbbing in his temple. Inside the box, his fingers touched what at first he thought were dried bugs: they had a fragile texture and made that pearly sound; hundreds of small things that had once been alive. When he picked up one of the bugs to see what it was—less afraid now, the thing seemed inoffensive, maybe kind of gross—he saw it was much more compact than an insect. They were all the same size, and he put three in the palm of his hand and crouched down to see them better in the light from the TV. Then he realized that what at first touch he’d thought were legs were actually hairs. It couldn’t be. He looked more closely at what he had in his hand. They were hairs, yes. Eyelashes. In the palm of his hand, he was holding three dried eyelids with their corresponding eyelashes.

The whole box was filled with eyelids. Gaspar threw the severed lids to the floor and threw up in front of the TV; a little vomit spattered on to his father’s legs. He’s crazy, he thought. I have to get away. I also have to know. And I also have to take another aspirin before it hurts so much I can’t walk.

“Where did you get them? Where did you get the eyes?”

“They’re not eyes and they’re not mine, they’re a gift.”

“Who gave them to you?”

His father sank one of his enormous hands into the box of eyelids and toyed with the almost translucent scraps of skin as if they were coins.

“Did you cut them off? Are they from dead people?”

“Some of them. People can live a lot of ways. Your friend can live without an arm, for example. I live practically without a heart. Some people can live without eyes. Or without eyelids. Some let them be cut off.”

His father stood up with the box in his hands. For a moment Gaspar thought he was going to dump the eyelids on to him, a rain of dead lashes, and then he would scream and scream until he went crazy too. But no: his father was going upstairs, to his room, probably.

“Clean that up.”

“You clean it up.”

“I’m leaving for a few days.”

Gaspar took in that information with relief, even joy. When his father started up the stairs, he ran to the kitchen and took two aspirins with a lot of water, straight from the tap. He thought he was going to vomit again, but he held it back until his eyes started watering. And once the tears came he let himself go, lay down on the kitchen floor and cried until his headache became unbearable and he felt like his head was burning on the inside, as if someone had hidden a knife within his brain and it was stabbing him.