Sarah stared at the bottle of contact lens solution sitting on her bathroom counter. The same bottle that had been there for… how long now? Six months? Eight? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bothered to replace it.

“Just get a new one,” her roommate Amy had nagged yesterday. “That thing’s probably growing bacteria.”

But Sarah was tired. Bone-tired from sixty-hour weeks at the investment firm. The thought of stopping at the pharmacy felt overwhelming.

“It’s fine,” she muttered, unscrewing the grimy cap. Her contacts felt a bit gritty as she put them in, but what else was new in Manhattan? The city itself was gritty.

The first sign something was wrong came during her morning commute. The subway fluorescents seemed to pulse and writhe, sending shooting pains through her skull.

“You okay?” asked the woman next to her. “Your eyes look really red.”

Sarah blinked rapidly. “Fine. Just… allergies.”

By lunch, the pain had become unbearable. She locked herself in the office bathroom, hunched over the sink.

“Sarah?” Her colleague Jessica’s voice echoed off the tiles. “The client meeting starts in five.”

“I’ll be right there,” Sarah choked out. When she looked in the mirror, she barely recognized herself. Her eyes were crimson, shot through with dark threading veins. And were those… spots? Little black dots swimming across her vision?

The spots multiplied throughout the afternoon meeting. Sarah struggled to focus on the PowerPoint slides as darkness crept in from the edges of her vision.

“The Q3 projections show—” Her boss’s voice cut off abruptly. “Jesus Christ, Sarah, your eyes!”

She felt something wet on her cheeks. Reaching up to wipe away tears, her fingers came away red.

“I need to go home,” she whispered.

But by the time she made it to her apartment, she couldn’t see at all. She fumbled with her keys, hands shaking.

“Amy?” she called out. “Amy, I need help!”

The apartment was silent. Sarah stumbled forward, knocking into the coffee table. Her eyes burned like they were filled with acid.

When she finally reached the bathroom, she clawed at her contacts. They wouldn’t budge. It felt like they had fused to her eyes.

“No, no, no…”

The pain peaked, and Sarah screamed. She could feel something moving, writhing beneath her eyelids. In the mirror, through the haze of red, she watched in horror as tiny dark shapes began to emerge from her tear ducts.

They looked like tadpoles. Hundreds of them, squirming out of her eyes and down her cheeks.

The last thing Sarah saw, before the creatures burrowed back into her skull through her optic nerves, was the expired bottle of contact solution. The label had mostly worn away, but she could just make out the warning she’d never bothered to read:

“Replace solution every 30 days. Contaminated solution may result in severe infection or parasitic growth.”

She should have listened to Amy.

When they found her three days later, her eye sockets were empty. The coroner would later report finding no traces of her eyes—just hundreds of dried-up black tadpole-like creatures, and an old bottle of contact solution.