This isn’t anything finished. I just thought someone might find it interesting. I wrote it this morning, having my coffee, just to get my hands moving and my brain in gear. Maybe it’ll become a story or something.

He got his first pair of glasses when he was six. Heavy black resin, with silver hinges and screws that glinted in the light. He was in the first grade, and wore them to school. He couldn’t see the blackboard clearly otherwise. And clarity seemed so important to the grownups in his life. They seemed to seek that above anything and everything else, except comfort and relief from the abiding anxiety of the early Cold War. But he had come to accept the world as fuzzy, at least from a distance. A slight gaussian blur had comforts of its own.

Before he got the glasses, two kids fighting across the playground were in a kind of dance, derived from Polynesia, or mimicking the clash of wild mountain rams. He had come to think of girls as dangerous fairies; from a distance soft and flightful, but in the classroom full of blunt intensity.

Now he was faced with all this sudden focus. The fights became what they were, lashing out at the world for all its gravity, spinning indifferently, complicit in every authority of people who had lived too long to know that freedom is the most important thing next to love. Even from halfway down the line of wooden desks and chairs, the teacher’s face was anxious, tired. He saw the impatience and frustration in the set of her eyes, the crease of her brow, and the purse of her lips. He had assumed she was an extension of their mothers’ love for all of them, and he’d been wrong. She was simply trying to be nice.