The Wishing Well
1: Desire
Katie was just a normal woman: she was 25 years old, of average height, quite slim and fit, as befitted a delivery driver. Quite obviously her vision was perfect, and she’d never needed glasses at any time in her life. Her job was to deliver medicines and related items to various chemists’ shops around town. All the guys at the depot desired her in some way, including the older ones; however she wasn’t very keen on any of them, certainly not interested enough to go beyond minor bouts of flirting. Then, at one of the places she regularly dropped off supplies to, there came to be employed a particular man: handsome, intelligent, gentle and friendly. Katie relished every chance to meet him there, and tried her best to make it plain to him that she fancied him: but he did not seem remotely interested beyond silly banter and friendship. Katie tried her best to find out if he was married, or gay, or whatever else might cause him not to be interested, and it turned out that he was none of these things. What was the problem? Maybe he just didn’t fancy her? She was mystified.
2: Wish
One of Katie’s favourite things was to drive: she felt so free, yet so in control. She liked to visit a castle near her home: it was an old, grey, grimy thing, much of it in ruin. Beside one rampart stood a small wishing well. It had a placard beside it stating that this was the presumed site of a medieval well: it also suggested throwing a coin in and making a wish. Katie still had no idea what this man really wanted. Maybe if she’d known the consequences, she’d have never done what she did, but there was no way for her to know, thus she went ahead and did it anyway. She took a coin from her purse and threw it into the well. It clanged around as it fell, then she heard a splash. Then she wished. It could be easily guessed what her desire was: the answer to her puzzle. She wished that she could be that which would attract the handsome stranger. And then she returned home, doubting that the wishing well had any power at all.
3: Correction
The next morning Katie awoke to a terrifying blur: to those who have experienced nothing but clear, pin-sharp vision throughout their lives, such a meaningless, detail-less blur could provoke nothing other than stupefaction and terror. Katie groped around in her personal fog, found the telephone, told her employers she could not work. She then phoned the optician: he was exceptionally helpful, offering her an appointment that day. He even offered to fetch her and bring her to his office.
Once at the optician, he started to test her vision, eye by eye. It took him little time to determine the symptoms of her problem: very high myopia. He told her: she was shocked by this news. She asked, ‘what could be done?’ The answer was obvious, even to her, ‘you will have to wear very strong glasses.’
He determined her RX accurately as possible for each eye: theoretically she needed minus 34 for each, but the poor acuity she achieved with such a lens made complete correction impossible. She was forced to accept the best possible correction: that being minus 30. The optician was remarkably, happily efficient and all the more so being as he was equipped with the means to produce suitable lenses on the premises. Such lenses were ground and put into metal frames: rounded black metal ones, the rims wide bands of metal rather than the dainty slivers that are commonly used to support much weaker and thinner lenses.
He put them onto her face and she looked around: instantly she noted that she was forced to move her head rather than her eyes, since the area outside the bowl was useless to look through. And through the bowl, everything was clearer than before, much clearer. But nowhere near as clear as her previous vision, and with the minification, things far away were much harder to see. She strained to see the man’s face clearly. She found that she couldn’t, and he was only a few feet away.
He asked her, ‘what is your job?’ ‘I am a delivery driver for a drugs company.’ ‘I’ll need to test you for a driving licence, I don’t think you’ll pass.’ She turned her head to the mostly-ignored eyechart. He told her as gently as he could, ‘you need to be able to read the third line up to pass the vision requirement, either with one or both eyes.’ Katie sat there and screwed her eyes up behind her new lenses. Then she tried covering one eye then the other with one or other palm of her hand: despite her best efforts, she sighed and said ‘I can barely see the third line up, let alone read it. I can just read the top two lines easily, the next one is pretty much guesswork.’ He gave her the much-expected news ‘I’m afraid you cannot drive anymore.’ ‘What will I do? I need to drive. I like it, I find it so relaxing.’ ‘You need VA of 20/40 or better, your VA is something like 20/80’ Katie staggered and tripped her way home. She sat on her sofa with a coffee, wondering why she should have been singled out for such a catastrophe. Then she started to wonder: could it be? Could this have been the result of her wish? She considered that it would be very strange if that was indeed the case!
4: Beloved
Katie had to be relegated to helping deliver goods, rather than doing so alone. One day she and a driver went to the firm where the handsome stranger worked. Sure enough he was there: quite hard for Katie to recognise visually, but she knew his voice. She went right up to him, and said hello. She had to squint a little to see his face, but thought she could see much more interest in it than before. A spark of pleasure lit within her. So it was true! This, the high myopia and the thick glasses were the answer she had striven in vain to find for weeks and weeks! She barely stopped to consider the situation, and again did nothing to prevent him finding her unattractive or unavailable. Before she knew it, he’d asked her to dinner that very night!
Before very long, the handsome stranger gained a name: Steve. Katie wasn’t much bothered by the way he always wanted to gaze into her bespectacled, heavily corrected gaze. If this was what he wanted, it was fine, despite the problems she had with her vision. It wasn’t just dinner they were having every night they met, it was sex: of a kind and a potency Katie had never previously conceived was possible.
A few months passed, and Katie excitedly announced to the world she and Steve were to be married. It all seemed so perfect - apart from her eyesight: that didn’t get worse, but it did bother her that this, apparently, was exactly what Steve was looking for in a woman. It seemed to her quite bizarre, but she wasn’t prepared to spoil things by asking odd-seeming or uncomfortable questions. Katie busied herself with wedding preparations. She even went up north to meet her future parents-in-law: they regarded her and Steve with a mixture of affection and bemusement, the latter due wholly to Katie’s eyewear!
5: Crush
Then finally came the day of the wedding. Katie’s friend at work, Sandra helped her into her wedding dress: she looked lovely in it, as it flattered her skin tone and body shape perfectly, and of course her glasses, vital to her vision, stayed on and glittered enticingly as she moved. She eventually got driven to the church, and was the requisite short time late. Then her wedding car swept up into the church car park: there she found one of her brothers, who had agreed to give her away. He gave her the disconcerting news that Steve had not been heard from: he had gone up north to collect his parents yesterday. He thought they might be held up in traffic. Katie had no choice but to have herself driven around the block a few times, as is the custom when the groom is late. They came back about half an hour later with Katie beginning to wonder what had happened to Steve. Surely he must be here by now? No? She sat back in the car and wrestled with her disquiet. Another twenty minutes of seemingly pointless driving around was interrupted by Katie declaring that she could stand it no more and wished to go to the church, and to hell with convention.
Thus, Katie sat near the altar waiting for Steve to arrive. There was considerable talk from those behind her, and on the faces she could see, she saw concern and confusion: those were her thoughts too. She had to sit for an uncomfortable hour waiting for news of her beloved Steve. Then a figure came into the church and stood near the doorway; a hush went around the church. Katie stood, holding her flowers, squinting at whoever it was. Was it Steve? She couldn’t tell, so started to walk uncertainly toward him so as to see him better. Something about him seemed very un-Steve like. Then he spoke, and thus her image was broken, ‘is there a Katie Taylor here?’ Katie replied, breathless and expectantly ‘I am Katie Taylor!’ Katie walked up to him, and with a shock of recognition realised it was a policeman.
He took her aside and spoke quietly. After a few moments, the carefully arranged bouquet slipped from her fingers, immediately followed by a wail of horror and despair. The news the policeman brought to her was the consummation of all the worries and concerns that had built up in her over the last two hours: Steve had been involved in a car crash. His parents were in hospital with severe injuries, and Steve, driving, he’d died at the scene of the crash. Katie was inconsolable and had to be taken home. Thus the day Katie had dreamed of being the happiest day of her life became her worst nightmare. She went to see Steve’s parents in hospital several times: they were much too ill to attend Steve’s funeral, so Katie represented them. That was the saddest day of her life and she cried buckets, tears running down behind her thick glasses onto her cheeks and black mourning dress.
6: Rejection
It took several weeks before Katie went back to work, and then only reluctantly. The worst thing was going to the place where Steve had worked and half expecting him to be there. The people were kindly and friendly, but that was no substitute for what she’d lost. Months passed before she accepted that Steve wasn’t coming back and she would like to try again with someone else. She sat in the office one day gazing out at one of the lads there, he was a year younger than her but she didn’t mind that. Although her view of him was distorted, shrunken and slightly fuzzy, she thought that she liked what she saw well enough to ask him out.
She went out with him one day on a delivery, and after a bit of chitchat, steered the conversation toward what she wanted. She asked ‘Danny, do you want to go out for a drink tonight?’ He looked at her in surprise. She squinted at him, trying to read his face: it didn’t look good. He was trying to be nice to her, but said, ‘maybe another night.’ Katie realised he was giving her the brush-off, and she didn’t like it.
Katie asked several of the single guys at work that had previously found her attractive over the next few weeks, but they all turned her down, if not immediately then pretty much soon after. It slowly dawned on her that she was nowhere near as attractive, generally speaking, than she had been before she’d met Steve. Keeping her ear to the ground she soon found out why: “those awful glasses she wears” came to her - it was a shocking, appalling thought. How had it come to this, that Steve had wanted her like this, and no one else did?
She had exhausted the possibilities at the depot, and then started trying elsewhere with no better success. Adverts in newspapers and magazines were the next thing; she wasted a lot of time and money getting nowhere. Nobody remotely worth having seemed to want to know her: as soon as the glasses appeared the men vanished.
7: Despair
In desperation Katie went back to the wishing well near the castle, that thing which she believed had saddled her with all this. She hoped to recant the wish that she had uttered, so she went to the rampart where the wishing well had been, seemingly a lifetime ago. She squinted up at the ragged shape of the rampart. Did it seem different to her? She thought it was: smaller and lower. At its base she saw a pile of rocks and stones, and as she got closer to them, to where she thought the wishing well was, there was no sign of it. The area was just a huge pile of tumbled rock and stones from the ramparts of the castle.
She started tugging at the rocks, but she was still only a normal woman and there was only one of her: thick glasses had not made any difference to that fact. She quickly found that she couldn’t shift any of them. For a while she walked around the castle, wondering if she had got the wrong wall. But she had made no mistake, at least on this visit to the castle. Thus Katie was forced to go home disappointed. A few days later she found a reference in a newspaper to the collapse of the wall and the covering of the well. There was some talk about whether the well was genuine or not, and because of that, there were no plans at present to uncover it.
Things got no better for Katie: she found no love anywhere she looked. Finally, one bright day she caught a bus to the coast, about twenty miles away: another place she liked to visit in former times when she could still drive. She nearly caught the wrong bus, being as she couldn’t see the numbers clearly. Some time later the bus stopped, and the driver helpfully told her which number bus to catch for the journey home as she disembarked. Katie shrugged: it hardly mattered now. Nothing mattered anymore. She walked along the cliffs, hearing the waves crashing below her: she saw them too, although much shrunken and blurred. She stopped to consider what she saw, looking down from her position at the cliff’s edge: the desolation of the windswept cliffs matched her mood perfectly. She stood for a few minutes, leafing though her miserable experiences. Then she put her left foot forward…