The grey mottled rags, eaten away by years of fidgeting fingers, the thick matted hair clinging to her neck like a species of woolly leeches. His eyes were enamoured and he gave up his agency to their innate demands to saccade her figure. She was beautiful.

She looked just like everybody else on the street. In fact the reason this man was lodged in a mind-loop focused on this uneventful creature was because his glasses were broken. He had perfect eyesight. So did everybody else on the street. Everybody else on the street wore glasses. He wore glasses aswell. His glasses wrapped around his eyes like thick licorice rolls, imitating the bold look of a forgotten era of fashion. Everybody else on the street had the same glasses.

His glasses didn't let him see his glasses, so he didn't even know they were there – didn't get to see spirals of licorice border his vision like a dynamic painting of Candyland. His glasses also didn't let him see red, blue, green, groomed dogs, street lamp light-cones of more than 50 lumens, enamouring embroidery, lilly pads, the sunrise, hidden passageways, orange and yellow ice lollies, the sunset, and all the exhaust fumes that the cars and factories coughed and spat into the air. If anyone could see their glasses they would probably call them Gloom Glasses because they replaced all the bright beautiful color blooms with ragged, dull, colorless glooms. But just like everybody else on the street, nobody could see their Gloom Glasses. The glasses didn't let you see them.

Morg had slipped in the street on a puddle that had frozen over. It was one of those frosted mornings where the early sun cut all its rays against all the sharp edges of snow fall. The sunlight made frozen puddles look beautiful. His glasses didn't let him see frozen puddles. When Morg put himself together again after the fall, he noticed his eyes weren't their usual self. Anomalies – in words he didn't have to describe – were appearing before him. Here he looked at a hedge in a park that he passed on his way to work each day. Hedges are grey and dry and thorny, as anybody can plainly see. But not this hedge – this hedge sprung out at him, filled with an appearance that his brain reeled to put a symbol to, its relational algorithm thrown out of whack. The roulette wheel whirring in his head tried “gree”, “red”, “bread”, and finally rested on “prip.” It was a prip hedge and nobody else on the street could see it. Morg was baffled that people flocked by with heads turned down, torn scarves over their face, moving like liquid clay stuffed with trash, all totally nonplussed by the prip hedge before them. He went to grab at the shoulder of a passer-by wearing a muddy potato sack for garments but a bright oval tickled his peripherals, taking the intent of action from his head.

His eyes traced the path of the oval on their own accord. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. She was a peacock if someone combined a prip hedge and a peacock into a manifestation that would make a visual cortex cry if a visual cortex had tear ducts. Where potato sacks should be were long flowing surfaces of some shiny material that caught sun like water. It looked like it would melt to the touch. He moved towards her, enamoured.

Morg's Gloom Glasses had no ability to hope because they lacked a sense of self. Everybody's glasses lacked a sense of self because everybody had the same glasses. No one had figured out how to put a sense of self in glasses, yet. But if they had been imbued with a sense of self along with all the bloat that comes with it, like lusts, dreams, and a fear of The Almighty Creator, they would be squeezing their glasses's palms together in impassioned prayer. A prayer to be relieved of the the small crack that had shorted its circuit and left it flailing in techno pains. The selfless glasses's prayer was answered. Whatever wire Morg's fall had jostled loose was again jostled into place by Morg's sudden acceleration towards his heavenly color shrine. The prip oval blinked, stuttered, and became a potato sack.