233 The Phosphene People

Phosphene:

A ring or spot of light produced by pressure on the eyeball or direct stimulation of the visual system other than by light.

I greatly respect my mind's eye. The other way I see things, it gestalts up all the input and parses it through my intellect, passion, and even my inner reptile of a limbic system.

Lately I've recognized another visual system at work. I began suffering with eyestrain lately, and when I would rub the globes of my closed eyes, a moire pattern of shapes would enter my inner world. I can't focus on them directly, but if I discipline my attention to what would be my peripheral visions were my eyelids open, I can catch them out of the corner of this new "eye."

Initially, I imagined hands reaching out for me.

The better I got, the more discrete these shapes, until I realized they were faces focusing on me. What irony!

Or was this some type of circus mirror reflecting what I look like to myself?

No, that wasn't it. I was in a good place at the time; I was happy with my partner, happy in my work, and just finished becoming debt-free. I was happy with life. I didn't want these misanthropic doomsters.

The visions behind my lids materialized more faithfully: these were ominous, threatening, and exclusively mine.

There were at least seven. I began to recognize them. They'd appear singly or together in varying numbers. I devised a focusing exercise that was more mental than visual: I began to stare back.

That's when I began hearing them in my mind's ear.

Their voices were raspy, as if they had been choked. They were heavily accented in a strange guttural way. They were discordant. And they were not happy voices.

"Come all the way in," one said, with a creepy wink.

"You're ours, after all," another croaked.

No! I am not!

"We'll just see, won't we?"

Their constant barrage exhausted me. Finally I couldn't even open my eyes to the world I knew before.

"Centrally blind," a male voice said, very professionally.

"And catatonic," added a woman.

But I didn't hear them, trapped forever in my new terrifying world.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Tuesday, August 20, Day 233 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge

366 WORDS (without A/N)

Accompaniment photos were AI-generated but the mind's eye was not.

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THIS CHALLENGE GRINDS ON, 366 WORDS AT A TIME...

There are currently three surviving prolific, miopic, meiopic, mitotic, and apoplectic Vocal scribbling scribes still participating in the insane, inane, post-eyelid 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:

• L.C. Schäfer, (challenge blinker)

• Rachel Deeming (blind challenger)

• Gerard DiLeo (Eyelid denier)

Read them. Support them. And don't blnk—you might miss it.