Eyes
“What can I do for you?” The doctor rolled his chair so that he sat facing me.
“My eyes,” I said. “They hurt.”
“Let’s have a look.” He leaned in close. He put a light up to my eyes. He looked through a lens. He put the light down. He put the lens away. He rolled back a little. He rubbed his own eyes, appearing to push them even deeper into their sockets.
“It is common,” he said. “For eyes to hurt.”
“There’s no medicine?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It helps to close them,” he offered.
I thought a moment. “Close my eyes? That’s your prescription?”
“We could do it together.” The doctor rolled his chair closer. He faced me.
I hesitated. “Really?” This was shaping up to be a strange doctor visit.
I looked into his brown eyes. He looked into my green ones.
“Ready?” he asked.
I waited for him to go first. I didn’t want to sit there closed while he sat there open. His lids slid down, and when they did, I closed my own.
“See that?” he said.
But I did not see anything.
“Keep looking,” the doctor prompted.
I wasn’t sure how to look at anything through closed eyes. But he was the expert. So I tried to see something. Anything. And then—there it was: the tiniest speck of light. I waited. And then that tiny light exploded into more tiny lights.
I liked what I saw.
I heard the doctor’s chair roll.
I opened my eyes and saw him sitting at a desk. He wrote something on a pad of paper. He ripped off a piece and handed it to me.
“Close eyes. Wait for light. Then re-open eyes. As needed up to ten times a day,” the piece of paper said.
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