Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Short Fiction

The caption told readers to cover their left eye, stare at the moon with their right eye, and slowly lean toward the page. It said the little girl would disappear, and that’s exactly what happened: she disappeared behind a dark veil, only to reappear as soon as you backed off. The book went on to say that, if you stood twenty-some yards away from someone, you could make the entire person disappear, even a grown-up, and that it was due to the optic nerve head. This spot—the optic disc—can’t detect light. At first I thought the magic of this exercise lay entirely in the possibility of making things and people disappear (an astronaut, I thought, could make the entire Earth disappear). But then I realized that the really inexplicable part was that these objects and people—especially the girl in the black rectangle, on whom I’d developed a bit of a crush—reappeared or simply appeared to the viewer’s sense of sight, complete in their own recognizable forms. The “seeing spots” struck me as even more remarkable than the “blind spots.” When I thought about animals that had no eyes, I felt sorry for them, and then I also felt sorry for trees and stones.

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