Floaters
Unpublished?
As ever, floating in my eyes were thousands of little particles that most people were never able to see. That I had the knack of pin-pointing them was once discovered almost by accident when my eyelids were closed in a room darkened except for a TV screen on strobe mode. And, then, I saw the floaters, wobbling up and down like a cross between ballroom dancers and cells under a microscope. Most normal people, when they shut their eyes tight, either in direct sunlight or in complete darkness, they can conjure forth variations on psychedelia: kaleidoscopic patterns and darting pointilliste dream-paintings. And all manner of self-imaginings. Like faces never seen before: utter strangers who sometimes smiled, sometimes cried and, even, sometimes, grew plug ugly, thin-lipped and squeeze-eyed. Yet, all in the mind. All in an era which was too new to count.
*My* strobe-induced floaters were a different kettle of fish, however. They were not in the mind nor in some unreachable epoch. They really did live in my eyes. Now. Feeding off the optic juices, no doubt. Playing Tag with the odd corrosions that come off the retina. A game of Hide-and-Seek amid the rods and cones. Pinning-a-tail-on-the-donkey's-beady-eye. A Scaletrix of squint-eyed toboggans. And I could watch them. Watch the floaters play all sorts of games. Until I stopped. Because, as I bathed in the strobes, a floater bore an actual human face. A speck wading through the glaucomal ooze came into full view, sporting a moustache, a full head of hair and a double-chin that concealed where the neck ended. I could not believe my eyes. The face was microscopic, but the curve of my eyeball seemed to magnify it sufficiently to discern features. It spoke. Or appeared to do so. My ears were, of course, not acute enough to catch what was going on in the eye-sockets. But I tried to lip-read the mouth, with my own mouth beating time with it. The face seemed to be asking for help -- or was it offering help? I did not recognise the face. The moustache caused me to assume the male gender. It was definitely nobody I knew. Perhaps not a moustache at all, but a blindfold that had slipped down leaving its eyes about to sag out like breasts.
But now the face had gone. And, having gone, I could no longer refer to it, since I did not want to give credence to a interstellar reality that I was convinced could never exist. I shut my eyes tightly, as I switched off the screen strobe. I very rarely had the sound on. But there was only the dropping of a pin ... or a pricking out of an enlightenment, one that came from the direction of the optic fuse itself, rather than from any external source. I was much happier now, since I could play mental Tag with my own specks of inner imaginings, rather than with *real* specks in the eyesight. Better to visualise horror, than actually to see it. But, still, I strained my ears to catch any sound from the corner of my eye.
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