One leg—the one he had shattered during the accident—was perched on the suede ottoman in front of him. A beer, already warming to room temperature, was in one hand. He absently scratched at his beard with the edge of his remote, careful not to touch his eye patch and the sensitive tissue underneath it. When a commercial came on the screen, he raised the remote to flip to another channel and gazed at an action movie where the leather-clad hero ran across jungle terrain on two legs. Two healthy legs, Terrence noted bitterly. The hero also had two working eyes, rather than one that had been mutilated and blinded during a car crash. Terrence had always been vain about his eyes. “They’re like drops of liquid caramel,” one of his girlfriends had told him back in college, before bestowing his eyelids with a sultry kiss. But they didn’t look like “drops of liquid caramel” anymore. Now the damaged eye beneath his black patch made him shudder with disgust whenever he looked at it.
