Here is another new story by me:
What Sally Saw
The alarm clock beeped furiously, causing its victim, Sally, to wake. Her blue myopic eyes saw little upon opening, not enough to see the clock or her glasses: fortunately she had a system derived from years of experience in the myope trade: it involved being careful where the glasses were left the night before, and some feeling around in the general area on top of the bedside unit, which led her fingers to a spidery, metallic thing, smooth in parts - her glasses. She picked them up and brought them close to her face in order to inspect them. They were squarish, but had a more rounded top and the outer sides were angled outwards a little towards the top. The lenses were thick, and had been for a long time, being necessary for her level of myopia. She put them on her face, giving her some relief from the blur. She turned to the clock, and thanks to her enhanced vision, was able to easily slap the button on top to stop its beeping without knocking the thing flying. Blessed silence reigned, so she lay back in her bed and shut her eyes. Then she remembered: today was Saturday, not a work day, but she had to get up and get going - she was due to go visit her younger brother and his family.
She sighed, and opened her eyes, accepting the view of the world that she had long accepted. Her glasses corrected around 85% of her uncorrected vision. For someone with little myopia, that was not much to be concerned about, probably the amount that could be safely left uncorrected between changes of glasses, perhaps meaning something way off in the distance couldn’t be seen so well. The amount of times she had wished she’d had little myopia, or none at all, instead of a lot. Her lenses, made of a reasonably high index material, crammed into suitable frames designed to hold such a lens without being overly small or clumsy-looking, corrected the not inconsiderable sum of 21 dioptres of myopia. Like this, she could look relatively normal - so she fondly thought - without resorting to the use of myodisks. She loathed them, the thought of them made her shudder, viewing them as far too obvious signs of poor vision. Over 20 years ago she’d made a decision, upon being idly and innocently told by her then optician ‘your next glasses will definitely need a little line in the lenses, to help with the thickness.’ He did not seem to register her virulent dislike of such things. But that didn’t matter, she had already pretty much made up her mind up what to do: her glasses would stay as they were, correcting 21 dioptres of myopia, and anything else that came along, well, she’d learn to deal with it as best she could, working her way through headaches and fuzzy vision as she went along.
She got to her feet and went over to the mirror, and sat down before it. Her eyes were small behind her strong lenses, the flat plano fronts flashing eagerly. For the millionth time, she thought, she told herself she’d made the right decision back then. She thought to herself ‘how much myopia did I miss out on? Mmm, I’m not missing those extra dioptres, all that ugly extra correction.’ That missing correction was over 4 dioptres in her right eye, and over 5.5 in her left - she’d been well aware of the difference for many years. To see her eyes and face reasonably well, she had to sit within a couple of feet of the mirror. Glancing up at the view behind her revealed her poor vision: the pattern on the wallpaper was a blur. The wardrobe was a brown shape. She turned to look at the view directly, but it didn’t seem that much better: anything beyond 10-12 feet was lost in a blur. It was a good thing she knew where everything was, otherwise life would be difficult at home. It was outside the real fun began. She tried not to think so much about that: planning helped, but plans could be thrown off. Oh, the world could be such a pain, expecting her to wear ugly glasses and see perfectly, then punishing her by making things small and hard to see because she didn’t play along.
Sally got out of bed and checked downstairs for the day’s post. This necessitated her going most of the way down, and turning the light on. There was no way she could be sure simply standing at the top, there were always letters of size, shape and colour that could evade her poor vision from the top of the stairs. Next was breakfast, something that could be done without too much trouble or fuss.Watching TV whilst eating was no huge problem, sitting 4-5 feet away it didn’t really matter that much that faces were a bit fuzzy and indistinct. She could hear what they were saying perfectly well. She didn’t really watch that much TV these days, most of it was a knockoff of something done last year on another channel, or a soap recycling a story from two decades ago, hoping everyone had forgotten in the meantime. It was the program guide that was the real problem, why couldn’t they make the damn thing bigger? She just had to muddle through with this, not often having visitors who could see twenty times better than her helped keep her secret. When those pesky visitors weren’t around, she just resorted to leaning closer and a bit of old fashioned squinting.
After breakfast, she got out clothes for the day, a sleek knee-length dress, a sort of nondescript beige-brown colour. It wasn’t as if she wanted to draw attention to herself, and certainly didn’t want inspire any awkward questions. She spent a couple of minutes checking and examining it closely for marks or creases that’s missed previously or had unexpectedly appeared, this being the sort of task she could not do at a distance. Then it was the final preparation for the trip: for anyone else, they had the normal experience of just going to the train station, getting a ticket, seeing what was going on, and then hopping on the right train when it came. Not for her this luxury: she used her computer to check the internet for information at the station, train times, travel information, searching for anything unusual. The situation was as it had been yesterday and the day before - nothing to worry about. Those times she had been caught out had been horrid awkward experiences, such as when a train had been cancelled, the information written on a sheet of paper posted somewhere unexpected, where she wouldn’t know to look for. Ahh, how she envied those who could just look and see, without all this preparation. But such was her life.
Some minutes later she was about a third of the way to the train station, looking at the world around her. She’d lived around here for a long time, being able to get used to landmarks that she depended on to steer herself around. It wasn’t as if she could read the street signs: some of them she had to be told, or overhear, rather than read, and if she wanted to go somewhere unfamilar, she would often check out streetscan to get an idea of the landmarks to look out for - they had to be obvious, and unlikely to change. She carried on towards the railway station, looking at the trees, gardens, etc, wondering casually what they really looked like. The price she needed to pay to know wasn’t worth it as far as she was concerned. She thought to herself haughtily ‘let the gardens stay fuzzy. I don’t care what they look like.’
She rounded the last corner onto the road leading up to the railway station. As she did, a car started to back out of the drive, and another came whizzing round the corner. There was a crash, and she could see the two cars had collided, but the one being driven along the road carried on almost unabated. The driver of the car who had been hit got out, and Sally could hear him swearing and cursing the other driver. He turned to her and said ‘did you see that? Crazy, lunatic drivers charging around without stopping to look, causing mayhem! They should be taken off the road for driving like that!’ Sally smiled noncommittally. She’d seen and heard what had happened, at least enough to know what had happened in broad outline. Then he asked ‘did you catch the number plate?’ Sally was just about the last person to ask that sort of question, being as beyond 8 feet or so reading numberplates became strictly guesswork for her, and at the distance she should have been able to read it in order to get a driving license, she would not know there was a license plate there to be read. Not that she had ever as much as considered learning to drive for more than a moment. She shrugged and said ‘erm… not really. I think it was an 08 reg. It all happened so fast.’ ‘Ah, well… anyway, could you give me your name and address, as a witness?’ ‘I didn’t really see that much, and really, I have to get to the station to catch a train.’ She was forced to give a false name and address: she just didn’t want the awkward questions about her eyesight. After that, she scampered up the road to the railway station, fervently hoping she’d never bump into him again.
A minute or two later she arrived at the station. The ticket machine was there, ready and waiting to take her carefully hoarded coins. Looking up at the price list was a waste of time, but what it said was something she had learnt from the website and experience. She then stopped at the ticket office, acting rather dumbly, to ask the man if the train she wanted was platform three as usual. He confirmed this, and told her it was a minute late. Like many railways, that was pretty meaningless, since the clocks and timetables were often just a guide, even perhaps just decoration, giving passengers something to look at while they waited. She didn’t need the signs to find her way over the footbridge to platform three - besides for her, they were difficult or impossible to read, like everything else beyond her arm’s reach.
She stood under the extended roof of the shelter and looked towards the direction that the train would come from. The rails, sleepers and gravel soon dissolved into an indistinct grey-brown blur not many feet away. She could tell that a train was coming quite a distance away, and anyway the funny buzzing noise the rails made gave it away. It was just that there was always the chance she could get the wrong train. She spent time and trouble trying to avoid that sort of thing without having to ask at the platform what the train was and feel silly. The destinations often defeated her, coming past too fast to read. This time, the train came, she couldn’t read the destination, but got on anyway, there was a helpful voice announcement after a few moments telling her this was the right train. Relieved, she sat down and watched the world whizz by, at least what she could see of it. Despite the lack of visual detail, she had to pay attention to the journey, counting stops rather than reading the written signs, which were designed for people with way better vision than her. The other thing she had to pay heed to was the toilet engaged light, which to her was a bit useless: she didn’t to get up just to go look at it, only to have to return to her seat, so she’d made sure she’d been just before leaving, to avoid any inconvenience and embarrassment later on.
Seven stops and just over half an hour later, she got off, reading the sign when she got near enough to do so, in order to confirm her count. She could see well enough to steer herself around, but signs and directions were often awkwardly placed and a bit too small to be easily readable: often she found in unfamiliar places, she had to go look and find out, waste time and trouble finding out she was going the wrong way, unable to read a sign that would have saved that time. She’d spent some time online looking for pictures of the station to help find the right exit. Then it was a walk to her brother’s house, a little further than the one to get to the station, again making use of the journey memorized and landmarks to help. Oh, how she preferred familiarity! Anyway, she walked along the road having checked online for the layout of the road and which house number was which. House numbers could get very awkward for her: finding them could be hard work, they could be on the front gate, or on the front wall, or the door, or nowhere. Sometimes there was a nearby house with a big enough number to read from the street without having to go into their garden, and she could infer the required house by counting a few extra doors, once she’d worked out which way they were running. Some fifteen minutes later, she was walking casually up her brother’s driveway and ringing his doorbell: those pesky little things were hard to find too.
Her brother came to the door. He happened to be wearing glasses too, much weaker than his, and for Sally, pretty much invisible at most sensible distances. They embraced, and then he took her inside, where she met his wife, where they had a brief chat. Then little four year old Molly came in to see what the fuss was, and who the visitor was. Sally crouched down a little to see Molly and give her a kiss, then let herself be led off to her playroom by her. The playroom was decorated with examples of her paintings and drawings, nothing remarkable, the sort of thing you’d expect a young child to produce. Sally had to get pretty close to see what they were, after looking at a few, she sat down on a sofa whilst Molly started to draw something else. Ahh, it was tough pretending to be interested in something when you could barely see something was happening, leaving aside the guesswork needed to tell what it actually was. Sally could see the paper Molly was carefully drawing on with crayons about a couple of feet away from her feet, but whatever she was drawing, it was as invisible as was the dark side of the moon to her. She held it up to show her Aunt Sally, who smiled and said it was great, without having the faintest idea of what it was: it looked to her like a blank oblong blur, with some mysterious indistinct darker areas on it.
At that, her sister-in-law came into the room to offer a drink: her face was just a pink blob, her rather tired but hopeful expression invisible to her, but Sally had gotten well used to that sort of thing. She didn’t recognize by facial features, but on size and shape, and by memorizing what they were wearing. Not as good as the ordinary way, but it worked okay. Generally people didn’t realise because they weren’t thinking “can she see?” - they were usually many more important things to think about, and if they started to sense something was up, she could always distract them, or make some excuse. After she brought it to her, she told Molly that dinner time was soon, and then they’d all go out to the park. The next picture that Molly drew and briefly showed to Sally was decidedly odd: it was like a picture of two aeroplanes, one larger than the other, flying in formation, perhaps, no, one seemed to be bombing or shooting at the other. Then Sally realised that the aeroplanes might be people. Or was that her vision tricking her? Molly took the picture from her, and gave her Aunt a curious look that she couldn’t see well enough to comprehend. Puzzlement, perhaps? Then it was dinner time, Molly put the picture away somewhere where Sally couldn’t see it - not that hard to do, really, and they both went into the dining room.
Sally complimented them on the dining room, although for her it was just another detail-less fuzzy blur: there were pictures up on the walls that she couldn’t hope to recognize unless she stood alarmingly close. One of them was of her, and although she wore different frames, her lenses were of identical strength to those she now wore, even though the picture was taken at least a decade ago. Sally wasn’t so keen on getting her picture taken, but that was nothing that much to do with vision. During dinner someone managed to drop a pea on the floor: Sally pretended to help look for it, knowing that her chances of seeing it were zero. It remained unfound until someone else trod on it and spread squished pea on the carpet, all invisible to Sally. While her sister-in-law was clearing things away, Sally sat with Molly again as she watched TV. As usual, Sally saw little of what was going on, but wasn’t interested enough to sit three feet away and watch it avidly. Instead she heard her brother talking on his mobile ‘okay, okay, I promise to see you this afternoon. In the park, by the toilet’ Sally didn’t think anything of that, and forgot about it as they prepared to go out.
They all piled into her brother’s car, and for a few minutes, Sally watched the world go by in its normal non-detailed manner that she’d long become accustomed to. Then Molly started talking to her and did a bit of “look at that, what’s that” etc. Sally cringed inside: there was no way she could be sure what the things were. It was a really good thing, as far as she was concerned, that the park wasn’t far. Her brother parked the car and they walked down a sandy path to the park proper. To Sally, all it appeared to be was an expanse of green of varying hues and shapes. But then Molly tugged at her hand, and insisted on taking her to feed the ducks. A bag of bread appeared from somewhere - such mysterious appearances were not unusual in Sally’s world - and she let herself be tugged down to a bend in the river by the ever-enthusiastic Molly.
Well, Sally could tell it was a river, but ducks were rather harder to be sure about, but it seemed to her they were around somewhere nearby, mostly due to their quacking and splashing about. Molly got her to throw some bread just in case they were hungry. Sally did so, but as usual, things that small vanished as if some ghostly but extremely hungry duck hovering at the extremities of her vision had eaten the whole lot up really fast. Molly started throwing bread herself, but being four years old, there were limits to her range and accuracy. Whatever ducks there were, they had to do some work to get fed. Molly pointed at something Sally couldn’t see and told her excitedly ‘there’s some ducks! Aunt Sally, throw some bread please!” Sally did her best to comply, even though she could see no sign of ducks and her throws weren’t the greatest. Molly giggled, and told her ‘Aunt Sally, you’re really bad at throwing!’ The two of them soon ran out of bread, and Molly wanted to go look at the sheep in the field. Her mother appeared and they walked around for a bit, watching Molly run around ignoring the sheep. Sally ignored them too, but for an entirely different reason. They really did look all the same to her.
Sally went off to find the toilet, after first asking her sister in law where to find them. As normal, finding things could turn out to be a worrisome and awkward chore for her, but despite being unable to read the helpful direction post at a branch in the sandy path, she got lucky and found the toilet block. When she came out, she saw two people together, kissing. At first she ignored them, as she walked past, then she noticed something familiar about the man’s jacket. It was her brother’s. And the woman, well, her face was a blur, but unless she’d suddenly gone and got changed and then somehow gained a couple of inches of height, she wasn’t his wife. Suddenly her brother noticed Sally looking, there was a bit of a commotion, then he rushed over to her and apologized ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Look, I should have told you, things aren’t right between us. But… please don’t tell the wife about this. I need to keep it a secret for a bit longer.’ Sally looked and felt shocked, but then spoke honestly ‘I didn’t see anything.’ She walked off to find Molly and her mother.
After some time, Molly became tired and they needed to head back to home for a rest and bit of tea, so they all piled back in the car. For once Sally wasn’t even bothering to pretend trying to look at things out there in the detail-free fog she saw. She was starting to wonder what was happening in this family. Two of them had something going on that she could see or suspect. What else was to be revealed to her, despite her feeble vision? She caught a brief look at her sister-in-law reflected in the door mirror of the car: as usual, unable to see much, unable see if she was looking at her. She wished, for the first time in years, that she could see her face clearly.
Once home, they made tea and then Molly was taken upstairs by her daddy. Her mother sat down at a table with Sally, and there was a short silence, then she said ‘You know, Sally, you really listen to people, I think you’re the best listener I’ve ever met.’ She picked up a fancy biscuit and bit into it, unfortunately some strawberry jam leaked out and spattered down the front of her dress, particularly over that part that covered her left shoulder and breast and on her lap. She cried out ‘arrgh!’ And started dabbing at her lap with a hastily grabbed cloth, then asked Sally ‘can you help please, I can’t let this soak in!’ Sally found a bit of paper, leaned forward and gently dabbed at her shoulder, trying to help. Honestly, she wasn’t completely sure how far the mark went down, so she stopped just where her breast started. Her sister looked at what she was doing, then up at her, meeting her eyes. Sally stopped and sat back feeling distinctly uncomfortable, and her sister-in-law’s face became unreadable again.
Her sister-in-law smiled at her and thanked her for her help. Sally told her it looked okay, but then she was not the first person to ask for such an opinion. She looked at Sally for a long moment, and then said ‘you know, I hope this doesn’t upset you… but those glasses, you ought to get something done about them. You’re such an attractive woman.’ Sally nearly blurted out that she did, a long time ago, and they could have been worse to look at. ‘You could find yourself someone really nice to be with, if you wanted to.’ Sally replied ‘I can’t see without my glasses, and there’s no other way for me to see. I have too much astigmatism to wear contacts.’ Handily she ignored she couldn’t see that well with them, but as usual, nobody suspected. Her sister-in-law started to apologize ‘umm… I’m sorry if I upset…’ At that moment,Sally’s brother then came in to announce that Molly was asleep.
There was a little more chit-chat and smiles about old times, nothing particularly in-depth or serious. Sally started making noises about it being time to go: she wasn’t keen on going home in the dark, not for the more obvious reasons, but because her feeble vision declined to an even worse state, apart from where it was well-lit. Her brother offered to run her down to the station, but no, Sally didn’t want to bother him. She went to put her shoes on at the door, and then brother and sister embraced. Then her sister-in-law hugged her, and Sally swore she could feel her bra strap being gently and quickly explored. The woman looked softly into her bespectacled gaze. Sally had gone so long doing without being able to read facial expressions easily she’d almost forgotten how to do it, so she felt a little confused. Her sister in law backed away a little, and told her ‘you must come visit again soon!’ Sally agreed, inside not entirely certain she wanted to rush back. Things were not quite as they appeared, a regular occurance for her admittedly, but beyond that, she was wondering what to think about it all. Was she imagining all this?
She said her goodbyes and went out, and tried to forget about some of the puzzling aspects of her visit and focus on the fun she’d had. As the sun went down, her thoughts turned to the journey, she really wanted to be in familiar territory by the time darkness fell, reducing her feeble vision still further. Some fifteen minutes later she was sitting on her train, having memorized the relevant section of the train timetable, and which platform some weeks before. She sat on the seat and looked at the train station sign, large-lettered but for her barely readable. She brushed aside her hair with her hand, and in doing so happened to obscure her good eye, insofar as it was good. Her other eye saw an even worse blur, at least 5.5 dioptres, and she couldn’t begin to read the sign. Then the train started and pulled away, so she went back to her usual better but still poor “good” eye, with which she saw that it might rain.
About ten minutes into the journey, Sally was distracted by a smell: it was smoke. For a moment she thought nothing more of it, still thinking of her day with her relatives. Wasn’t it someone smoking onboard? But wasn’t that illegal these days? She looked around, but nobody seemed to be smoking, not that anyone was near enough for her to be sure. Despite the steadily darkening sky, and her own poor vision, she thought she could see smoke drifting from the bottom of the carriage and past the window. The train stopped at an old, disused station, then there was an announcement from the driver telling everyone to get out because the train was on fire! There weren’t so many people aboard this train, so no need for great panic, but the only door nearby that would open was the wrong side, that is onto the track, rather than the disused platform. Sally wasn’t so keen on getting roasted alive, so went that way. Someone saw her - perhaps the driver, she didn’t know - and shouted to her ‘hey lady! Get off the track!’ She scampered off it as fast as she could, but was now the other side of the station to everyone else. This side seemed even more dilapidated and unused than the other side. She started to walk along the line, looking for a safe place to cross. She didn’t really see anything like a level crossing, but what she did see was more smoke and flames issuing from the train.
Abruptly the fire took hold, and thus she was forced to scramble away from the train, more concerned with avoiding being made toast for the moment rather than meeting up with her fellow passengers. She made it up to the end of the old platform, intending to shelter behind the old waiting room, but the now heavily ablaze train exploded, causing her to look in alarm the wrong way at the wrong time, she put a foot out and fell off the back of the platform, straight down into an open storm drain, which some workmen had been scheduled to block up & make safe the following Monday. She heard and felt a sharp crack of one of her lower legbones snapping, and she cried out in pain, her agony drowned out by the noise of the nearby fire. Everything went black, and she knew nothing for a while.
When she woke, she was sitting in a hospital bed, her leg throbbing dully, strapped and immobile. Around her stood or sat her family. She couldn’t understand, because she was seeing clearly! There was her brother, his wife, Molly. And her mother, and an old man she’d never seen before - but she knew somehow that he was her long-lost father. He spoke first ‘Sally, I see you got your glasses sorted out at last. How on earth did you cope?’ Her sister in law then piped up, saying excitedly ‘those myodisks look lovely on you my darling!’ She blew a kiss. Molly then came up to her, with an accusatory look to her little face. She said unhappily ‘I knew you couldn’t see, you lunatic! Waste of time showing you that picture, wasn’t it? Now nobody will know what’s happening to me!’ Then her brother spoke ‘I’m sorry Sally, I meant to say something about all this…’ Everything went black again, and then Sally awoke, her leg throbbing with pain. She started to yell for help, between anguished sobs. Now she really really wished she’d got her glasses sorted out. Her cries went unnoticed, drowned out by the loud fire engine sirens, as they had just arrived to deal with the blaze. The pouring rain helped them, but it did nothing for Sally stuck in the storm drain: she realised her good leg was wedged into something below, trapping her, and she could not begin to push herself up with just her broken leg. She felt water starting to ooze around her ankles, and the trickles of water coming down the open storm drain steadily increased in volume…