Different

The morning bus ride went well, without incident. The usual riders were on and had all, at one time or another, stared or mumbled in embarrassed shock or undisguised distaste at Rebecca’s gaping hole for an eye. Such a lovely girl except for that, the women thought; built like a brick shithouse thought the men, but that eye... Now no one so much as looked up. She had realized that familiarity is the lone enemy of rudeness and stuck to a routine as much as she could. She opened “Love Poems of the Hallstatt Culture” and read quietly until her stop at the campus.

Later that day, a fifteen-minute delay in her last class put her on a different-than-usual bus ride back home. The inevitable happened and though she should have expected it, it always came as a fresh bee-sting of pain. The mother pulled the child’s pudgy pointing finger down to his side and half-nodded to her as if expecting that Rebecca would certainly understand the little boy’s fear.

In her bed that night, she prayed and she cried--though from only her one good eye--and wondered if that was enough or would be considered by God as a half-assed attempt at a prayer. It had been a long time since she’d asked for anything though, so her confidence grew in her dreams where she was pretty and whole with two lovely green eyes and long lashes.

When she awoke, Rebecca knew instantly that a miracle had happened. She had a sense of depth and peripheral vision that had never been hers before. Tears poured out of two eyes in joy as she bounded out of her bed, her fingertips lightly poised on her temples as if she feared the new eye would be lost, and dragging the unfamiliar weight of a swollen clubbed foot behind her.

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words: Susan M. Gibb (Spinning / Hypercompendia)
image: 'Color in a Drop' - Smitha Murthy, India (Life Wordsmith)

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another dullachingpull: Pencilled in(digestion) (#4)