The Wrong Place
Alison sat on the corner of her bed contemplating her face at close range in a mirror, and her ill fortune over a longer perspective.
About six months ago she’d been a happy girl, working as a police constable. Then one day she’d been called to help with checking out some innocent-looking abandoned chemical plant near the outskirts of town. They’d been some trouble there with some youths hanging out there, so WPC Alison Taylor had gone in with her partner to check what was happening. She happened to be standing by the pressure valve of one particular tank just as the gas buildup inside it had caused it to fail. In the blink of an eye, toxic green stuff squirted out, thankfully mostly missing her, but a few drops splashed into her eyes. She sat remembering the horrible burning sensation, the blinking, and more blinking, and rubbing her eyes, and yet more blinking. That was the last time she saw the world clearly.
She was taken to hospital, thereupon her eyes were doused with water and soothing liquids, then bandaged. She spent most of the next three weeks in darkness, unsure whether she would see anything ever again. If she’d had more than a few drops of the stuff in each eye, or they hadn’t washed out her eyes so much, it might well have been so. But after three weeks the stinging eased and the bandages came off, but now the world looked a very different place: everything was just a misty, fuzzy blur, everything near and far just unrecognizable. The toxic fluid had heavily attacked her eyes, from back and front, causing her eyes to elongate, her lenses to become much more pliable, so her eye muscles overcompensated far too much; it attacked her retinas, making them far less efficient, and finally made the aqueous fluid in her eyes slightly cloudy.
The eye specialist soon recognized that part of her problem was high myopia, at just over 50 dioptres, thus she was prescribed heavy-lensed glasses, through which she now saw the world, albeit imperfectly. She then remembered the first time she’d seen herself wearing her new glasses; the lenses mostly blurred, a tiny hole in each through which her shrunken eyes now saw the world. She recalled her gasp of dismay at the sight. She sat remembering her first look through them at the eyechart: without them, that was something she couldn’t see at all, with glasses it was a white oblong blur on the wall, with a black blob at the top, a dark indistinct area below that, and at the bottom a larger area of white. She fondly imagined there was some greyness to it, clutching desperately at any vision she could find. She had a best CVA of 20/400, well into “official” blindness, far outside the normal police requirement, even with glasses. At night the world devolved into fuzzy, ghostly areas of vision around lights, and otherwise blank impenetrable darkness. Seeing things was now so difficult: she had to hold them close where possible, or else just do her best with what she had. Of course, this meant she couldn’t be a policewoman anymore.
And now she sat wearing her police uniform for the last time, tears rolling down her face.