Fairytale Eyes

The certificate I got for working five years in BOOK’s was blah, printed on a computer, so I added fairytale flora and fauna—only happy ones though.

Much improved. I’ll put it up in my area at work.

If I go out & about with my fairytale glasses on, life makes more sense. “Oh, of course—he’s a goblin!” Or, “I see now, there’s a magic rope encircling her ankle.” Or, “ I better take the nutritional advice of my doll here.”

I took the bus to the downtown library this warm Sunday afternoon, with PennyCooper in my bag. Downtown has emptied out since Covid, and Sundays are practically apocalyptic, with mostly the walking wounded on the streets. I checked with Penny—how did she see them?

I don’t know how the girlettes register humans—we are irrelevant to them for the most part, I sense. But PennyCooper is alert to me (unless she’s busy), and she started giving me readings on the people we saw—it was like infrared readings. “Very low battery”of one person, “high inventiveness factor” of another.

Soon she got bored—“this game is not interesting to a doll”—and started discussing snack options at the Starbucks near the library. You’d think having a doll along would mean that I’d get a gloopy  Frappuccino or something. 

But no. According to PennyCooper, “A paleo lunch box is the best choice,” and that’s what I had to accept. “You should eat chicken because it’s descended from dinosaurs.” She also approves of eating fungi and ferns, but this Starbucks doesn’t carry them. 

At the library, I asked a librarian for help checking out audiobooks on my iPhone—that’s what I’d gone to the library for, in fact, because it’s much easier for me to learn from a person in person. 

The librarian was nice and patient and even happy, it seemed, to walk me through every step. Now I’ve got the Libby app and have checked out the audiobook of Matrix by Lauren Groff—someone had told me it’s good (the book not specifically the audiobook).

I told the librarian I wanted to start to learn about non-visual options because when I got an eye floater a couple months ago I was wondering what I’d do if I went blind. The librarian was all excited to tell me about services you can access—free—if your eyes can’t read text. Through my fairytale glasses, I saw a sort of Glinda the Good Witch. Penny registered “the dusty surface of mini-marshmallows, the ones that come in different colors”.

On the bus ride home, from inside my bag PennyCooper said, “all these plants need to be watered”. There weren’t any plants, but that reminded me to stop at the store for apple cider vinegar—I like it in water, especially in summer, or kombucha, and it’s much cheaper than kombucha unless you make kombucha yourself, which only costs a few teabags (but I don’t). PennyCooper approves of fermented food. “It’s alive!”