Sight

It lies on the end of my index finger: a tiny jellyfish which has been eviscerated, possibly by a miniature melon baller made specifically for the purpose.
I look closer, and now its membrane is amplifying the tiny tremors running through my hand, which I hadn’t noticed before. They tell a predictable story of lack of sleep, bad diet, anxiety. The wobble of the membrane atip my finger seems so finely-tuned that I wonder if it is translatable, somehow – as a stylus extracts information from plastic, this plastic extracts it from my skin. The flexible disc amplifies my hands’ hidden signals extravagantly. It will need decoding now, from physical signals into sound waves. It's written in the language of stress.

Now the invertebrate’s border spreads outward, coating my visual field in plastic, soaked sheen. Closer to the surface, the shape loses its pristine appearance: no longer an animal that man has not touched, as I look closer at the spreading circle I see the encrustations on its concave arc. This is “protein” – an inappropriately positive name for hardened eye sludge, congealed blindness. The positive connotations of the word are sucked down under its newfound halo of contaminants. This beige silt gilds the rim like a dirty margarita, speckled blotchily along the semisphere’s central point. As I notice them, I feel slightly less calm, and the tremor-music spikes suddenly, flinging the disc off my finger. It flattens out as it spins laterally through the air, before its flight is broken by the table. The jellyfish lies there, prone and ridiculous and defeated, dented and lopsided. Its juice – a mixture of eyegum and saline cleaning solution, forms a sticky pool on its dimpled underside.
Squeezing the creature gently to pick it up, I notice that when the two sides of the disc are pressed together, they slip so eagerly as to crease the membrane. This is not a problem, as it springs quickly back into shape, a perfect eye-cast.

The first day I wear them, something changes. Students no longer have muted white borders, as if they had been shot through a diffusion lens. Now their sharp outlines prickle the retina, the diluted sunlight flaring their cheekbones. Before, their intelligence was hidden under a haze, which allowed me to associate them together in a homogenous mass. The carefully-stacked youths stare. Now, as my eyes pan jerkily across the room, I am forced to take each of their characters into account. The period of adjusting my gaze from one to the other is strange, because one’s gaze must change according to the new knowledge imparted by the stark detail of the face. If I fix an appropriate expression on the first student, I find that it is usually inappropriate for the next.
Soon the lenses rub and itch. A dirt particle edges its way into the sealed section on the iris. The gladwrap clinging feeling on my eyes ends the comfortable feeling of leadership. I am no longer the powerful, impermeable presence I was before; instead, I look shallow-focus at the students, their forms now utterly indistinct. Savage tweaks of pain cry through me, squaredancing in stilettos across the cornea.

They sense that I need to be helped. I know that this has to be concealed if I am to maintain control.
“I can’t get these fucking things out of my eyes.”
Usually, swearing in class would raise titters or eyebrows, but now the students understand that something has changed. Usually edgy or irritable, this early in the morning, they are suddenly receptive to my words. I need their help – not in a bureaucratic sense, but in a human one.
“Can someone please help me get them out?”
My voice shudders between hysteria and shyness. I look - or feel, at least - like a blotchy blind mongrel pup. The students are poised and impermeable, and my streaming face makes me seem cornered and wounded.
“Does anyone here wear contacts?”
This third appeal is gentler, as I try hard to modulate the noises in my throat, breathing flecks of warmth into jagged clumsy words. I think of protein: dark mud trodden into the silky white lens.
A student from the back of the class stands, stares briefly, and walks towards me. He is African-American, about 6’ 7”. His open face looks down into my gormlessly scrunched one.
“Ok, Professor Roberts.”

He walks out the door, slowing his pace so that I can follow. I look over at them, apologetically. I lose them the moment I'm led out out the door by a student. For the rest of semester, they are no longer my class.