writing prompt: eye contact

[iolarah]

Obediently, I sit down at what feels like a futuristic version of my grandmother's vanity and he hands me the little white plastic tray containing two identical concaves, a large bubble on the liquid surface of one of the concaves popping blithely as I set it down on the countertop.

"Don't expect to get it right away," he says consolingly, seeing my worried expression. "It's not an easy thing to do, if you're not used to it. I want you to practice putting them in and taking them out, and I'll be back in about ten minutes. See how many times you can get them in, in that time." He pats me on the shoulder and smiles lightly before leaving me to my assignment.

I regard the little white tray warily. The lenses float guilelessly in their saline-filled concaves, waiting for me to make them useful. Swallowing what feels like the loudest noise in a room silent but for the hum of the rows of fluorescent lights, I look at myself in the mirror before taking off my glasses. After a lifetime of being told not to rub my eyes, I have to now touch them. On purpose. What if I poke myself? What if I hurt my eye? What if I blind myself?

I shake my head. Dummy. Nobody ever blinded themself by poking themself in the eye with a fingertip. A stick, maybe, but you don't put in contacts with a stick.

Even though there's no clock, I can feel the time ticking away, and I remind myself that he'll be back soon, and I better have at least put them in once. Okay, I think. I'm tired of being made fun of, of being called coke-bottle face. I can do this.
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writing prompt: eye contact

[sabotabby]

Oh hey, it's another thingie about magic. :)

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“Isn’t that a bit. Er. Cliché?” Sujay watched Ian’s hands as they shuffled the deck with the bored expertise of a poker dealer, an automatic reflex at a speed that, while slightly faster than was probable, was plausibly possible. He paused, letting the cards slide into one palm with a soft thwick, reached over the desk across from her, and snapped his fingers just beneath her chin.

“You wanna learn somethin’ or not?”

“I’d just figured you were more the tarot type than Solitaire.” She’d decided, after Wabasca and their charming little scene at the airport, that if he hadn’t fired her yet he wasn’t going to do it over a touch of brattiness, if one could even fire an apprentice. Intern. Whatever. He probably even liked her, insofar as he liked anyone. At least he didn’t yell at her nearly as much as he yelled at everyone else, which meant she either hadn’t fucked up, or she’d fucked up too much for it to make a difference.

“You do not want me to read your tarot.” She couldn’t tell if he was joking. For all she knew, he’d already determined every one of her possible futures, had it mapped out like he had the consequences of a minor shift in budget allocation or an unexpected appearance of Patrice Abel in a church basement, wearing jeans and serving up margarine soup to the unwashed masses. For all she knew, the ending of each path she might take was a horrible death, and that was why he was, on the odd, past-normal-working-hours occasion, kind to her.

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