Good Morning Everybody! I have the first sketch for you. I wanted to put one up that was sweet or funny, but what to do? All my sketches seem to have suddenly sprouted dark humor like some kind of fungus. Maybe I’ll post one of those for you next time. Until then I did find this oddity. Tell me what you think of it, particularly the ending. I hate ending things and I’m curious to see if this one feels complete to others.

Enjoy!

The Doctor came out with a long face – about eight inches long, which was .5 inches longer than he had went in with. But then, his mouth had been closed before and now it was partly open to speak.

“There seems to have been a loss of her Optic Presence.”

“You mean she can’t see, Doctor?” I knew that wasn’t her problem.

“No,” he bent his relatively short neck and turned his attention to his charts, “I mean she has lost her vision.”

“Isn’t vision just sight?” I tried to keep the acid out of my voice – it’s a daily struggle.

“Vision is to sight as feeling is to touch. You can have one without the other, but it is more important to feel than to touch.”

I knew it. I told her I didn’t want to take her to a quack, but she insisted a PH.D in Literature was just the kind of doctor she needed. We had read his thesis on the way over. Its title was “The Universality of Fictional Philosophies and the Singularity of Society: How Generalizations Help form Cultural Individuality.” That alone was enough for me to want to get off at the next exit and try homeopathy first. But: “I’ve been self medicating on ice cream and english muffins for weeks.” she said. And so into the office we went, and I let them take her away into an room that seemed to double as a second hand bookshop. And now I was being quite literally talked down to by a man who could only tell me she had lost her motivation. I knew that, that’s why I bought her in!

“How,” I replied cautiously, “can we help her regain her Optic Presence?” And I was careful to capitalize as he had.

“Usually the Presence fades when it is overtired. Tell me, has she recently experienced something that she has been looking forward to for a while? A parade, perhaps, or a book signing?”

“There was a performance by the choir a few weeks ago, and she was responsible for the headdresses. But everything went well, even if she didn’t finish until the morning of.”

“Ah. And did she enjoy this event immensely?”

I wanted to ask him what he had been talking about with her for so long that he hadn’t gotten around to asking her these questions. How was I supposed to know what degree of enjoyment she attained?

“I wouldn’t say immensely – it was a nice event. Everything went smoothly and they liked the flowers.”

“Ah.” His face finally came up out of his notes. It’s length horribly abbreviated by a surprisingly wide, yet thin, smile. It looked like a a fresh paper cut on the tip of an index finger.

“The best thing you can do for her is help her see.” The doctor made the word “see” seem vast, inflated beyond the bounds of normalcy. “See and do. When the hands are busy the mind sleeps. When the eyes are busy it dreams. And what are dreams but – ” He paused expectantly, as if waiting for his off-screen audience to shout out “visions!” I staunchly held my silence, taking a step back to make sure I didn’t catch whatever madness he had. As if deciding that one of us must have said it allowed and he was just too preoccupied to hear it, the doctor looked back down at his notes and tore off a small purple square. “Here, I’m prescribing her some books. Don’t let her into them until she as had three full days of looking and doing, and make sure she’s doodling at least twice a day. If her Optic Presence doesn’t come back to her in a fortnight then I’m nothing than a bookworm.”

I resisted the urge to agree with him and just smiled and accepted the paper. It said “Library: YA, SCFI, FTSY”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

I gathered her up and rushed us to the metro and onto our returning train. If there were no delays, I decided, we could start the “Doctor’s” orders right away by making those pies I promised for the prayer meeting. She seemed awfully bubbly already, I had to admit, and finally I gave in and asked “How was it?”

“Oh!” Since she was normally in raptures this “oh” was a little flat. Still, there was certainly an exclamation point behind it  “Oh!, he had the most wonderful office. Just books, books, books. And you know, I realized that I’d been trying to do, do, do so much lately I forgot to just be, be, be. He had one in particular I’d like to read, because the font was the same color as the marigolds outside our house.”

“We can got to the library Thursday,” I offered, casually.

“Oh thank you! I don’t know what I’ll do with myself until then.”

“Bake pies,” I offered, and then threw away caution as if it were the wrapper on a good idea, keeping it safe until I was ready to use it, and added “Clean your room, organize your bookshelves, take apart the seams of that pillow and try again. And sweep.”

She wrinkled her nose and stared out the window with suddenly greedy eyes. “I don’t know about the sweeping.” She said. “But pies sound wonderful. I wonder – if we added turmeric to banana cream would the pie come out properly yellow instead of that awful beige-brown?”

She was lost in her own thoughts now and I gladly left her to them. The trip had done it’s job and offered her a change of pace. In a few days she would be as full of spark as ever and then I’d never get any rest. A small smile escaped with the thought and I settled down farther in my seat. Might as well get a little extra shut-eye now.