A glassy day dawned when, in the unsuspecting city, down the streets, sidewalks, stoops and avenues, pedestrian walkways and squares, glass marbles began to roll, like the marbles in the old-time game, played from antiquity until recent times when there were still patios and neighborhoods and carefree children playing outside, when little boys in short pants in cities and towns wandered about with their pockets stuffed to bursting with them so they could play at any given moment, in any given place.
The clear marbles, seemingly filled in their centers with colored irises, a Japanese invention employing internal fractures, – known as cat’s eyes – seemed to fall from the sky rattling down in a glassen rain, others cascading in their thousands down the side of the mountain that rose from the city limits, producing an extraordinary and unprecedented din, to pedestrians and every variety of vehicle, stalled in place by the glass hail that pelted them horizontally and vertically and filled in every space between the high buildings and the houses with those little round balls, smooth and glittering, and inexplicably gushing down from everywhere and piling up in little glassy hills.
The panicked residents who at first rushed to hide, slipping, tripping, falling one on top of the other, searching blind for a refuge, trying to pull themselves together from the unexpected calamity of the glassy day that had dawned, when the glass rain and the glass hail began to relent, and the marbles stopped pouring down, came out with their arms akimbo for balance, scrambling to grab in their hands as many marbles as they could hold.
They fought to shove whatever they found into those two empty sockets in their faces, the cat’s eyes with blue irises, or green, black, or brown, in whatever random combination it might be, as long as they might not stay forever blind in their eyes that, over long horizontal and vertical scrolling of their phone screens, had come unmoored and started rolling on their own, until eventually they fell out from their sockets, rolled away, and were lost like glass marbles.
They had no concept of how they had lost their eyes, how they had rolled and fallen out and how they had searched to find them, but they did recall that a long time ago, glances, full of meaning, had ceased to be exchanged, no one looked in on his neighbor, physical flirtation was gone, and anymore they wandered in their minds, everyone with lowered gaze, fixed to a screen, the only thing that could move them at all. They recalled that it was then when, scrolling with their eyes alone, they scaled steep digital slopes and descended into fertile digital vales, constantly exercising a gaze that rose and fell, up and down, with rolling, scrolling eyes that learned to roll successfully in digital valleys.
photo miezekieze / https://pixabay.com
