"Good Lord; the thing's finally done," she said, closing the laptop lid with three finger pads and lowering the sleek, black machine to the floor.
A black-brown kitten, nearly a cat, purred gracefully by, her head slightly smaller than her growing body demanded. Her brother, King Solomon, reached his curved mittens toward the edge of the sunlit desk he’d just cleared of all contents; they lay scattered on the carpet, along with a half-dozen, half-chewed dog toys, this week’s shoes, an overturned cat condo, and a laptop.
She snatched back the laptop, its fan whirring in protest, and opened the cover, it’s wide mouth revealing her link to the outside world. She got out; sure, everyone gets out. It was the week before midterm, which was the week before Spring Break, and she was six-weeks’ weary and ready to close her eyes for a while. Two years of graduate school brought it’s share of eye strain, but if you ask her, she’ll claim she “has vision loss” in her right eye, which is true, but so little loss had occurred; it didn’t warrant the drama.
Still, she bought all the eyeglasses paraphernalia: the tiny, tiny screwdriver that you lose if you lay down and can’t find without your glasses, which are dirty, so you clean them sixteen times a day, with a special cloth and spray that looks and smells like water but bubbles, so you pay $2.50 for a tiny, tiny bottle of it, warned each visit by the eye doctor that rubbing them dry will cause scratches. It’s ridiculous, but one pays a high price for vision; and she paid $100 for frames that made her look and feel like a hot schoolteacher.
