The Jar of Button Eyes

My grandmother’s house stood at the edge of a dying village, where the rice fields turned to salt marsh and the creeks smelled of rotting reeds. I was eleven the summer my parents sent me to stay with her, hoping the country air would cure my sleeplessness. The house was a two-room timber cottage with a tin roof that chattered in the wind. My grandmother, Lola Marta, was a small, silent woman with hands like dried roots. She kept a jar of button eyes on the windowsill of the kitchen, each one a different color and shape, clinking softly when the breeze passed.

I never asked about the jar. It seemed wrong to pry, and Lola Marta rarely spoke more than a few words a day. She cooked me porridge and boiled greens, and at night she would sit by the oil lamp, mending clothes with her back to me. But I couldn’t sleep. Every night, I lay on the straw mattress in the guest room, listening to the rats skitter under the floorboards and the wind moan through the gaps in the walls. At three in the morning, I heard a sound that made my blood run cold: a faint, high-pitched giggle, like a child’s, but it came from the direction of the kitchen—the jar.

I crept to the doorway and peered through the crack. The kitchen was dark except for the moon. The jar was glowing with a sickly, pale light, and the buttons were moving, pressing against the glass, each one now a tiny eye with a black pupil and a slit of a mouth. They were laughing, low and rapid, and they seemed to be looking at me. I stumbled back to bed, my heart pounding. When I finally dozed off, I dreamed of a girl with no face, just a canvas of skin where her features should be, and she was picking buttons from a jar and placing them on her skin.

The next morning, Lola Marta saw the fear in my eyes. She set down her spoon and said, ‘They only come out when they are hungry. You must not stare at them.’ She said no more. I wanted to ask what they were, but the words died in my throat. That afternoon, I wandered to the edge of the village. An old man with a goat stopped me and whispered, ‘You are staying with Lola Marta? Beware the button jar. She collects them from the children who die in the fields, the ones who drown in the creek. Their eyes see things we can’t, and they are always hungry for a new face.’

I returned home as the sun set. Lola Marta was in the kitchen, and the jar was empty. She turned slowly, and her eyes were gone—just black pits, weeping a thick, dark liquid. From her mouth, I heard the tiny voices again, but now they were mine. ‘Here we go, here we go. She sees us now.’ I ran. I ran through the marsh, but the reeds closed over me, and the ground gave way. I woke up in my bed, in the guest room, and the jar was on the nightstand, full of buttons again. But now, one of the buttons was my right eye, and I could see through it.

I do not know how long I stayed after that. I remember sleeping with my hand over my face, and Lola Marta humming the song from my dream. I remember the villagers looking at me with pity and terror. And I remember the night I broke the jar, not to destroy it, but because I saw a button that was my mother’s, and I wanted it back. When the glass shattered, the buttons scattered across the floor, and each one rolled toward me, forming a circle at my feet. They all had mouths now, and they sang in a chorus, ‘We are the ones who were not buried properly. We are the ones who were forgotten. Now you will be our voice.’

I left that place the next morning without saying goodbye. I have never spoken of it until now. But sometimes, in the quiet of my apartment, I hear a faint clinking, and I look at my own reflection. I see a tiny imperfection in my iris, a shape like a button’s hole. And I wonder if the jar has found me again, waiting for me to close my eyes forever.