Imagination Station

Purple Sunglasses

You see the bright purple sunglasses from all the way across the store. Their image shimmers through the shelves to land on your corneas specifically. And as though your very cells are attracted to them, you rush through the store. Squeezing past the huge family that takes up the whole isle, you're too preoccupied of course to notice that all of the children look peculiarly alike and that there are no adults present. You rush past two old ladies nearly knocking them both down. In your ridiculous flight, however, you couldn't see that they only had two eyes between the both of them.

Finally, you make it to the object of your extreme attraction. What happens next isn't your fault, of course it's not. These sunglasses have you under their bidding. There's no way that you could notice the other objects for sale on the old wooden shelves. The dragon skulls and sinister blobby things floating in jars. The floating binoculars that stare into your happiness and back out through your anger. They are of no consequence when you have a pair of purple sunglasses literally calling to you in small whispery voices.

Your hand stretches out to grab them from where you are five feet away. The glasses fly from your hands and onto your face. Your hands are made of infinitesimally small insects forever being repelled, yet attracted, to each other. The room bends around you and appears to be made from indistinct cloth, the different colors of the room blending together. The pieces of cloth stitched together by shimmering golden thread. You notice an unusually bright patch in the cloth from universes away. You wish it closer.

The cloth bends and warps around you in seemingly impossible ways. The bright patch appears in front of you. It's a tear in the thread, a hole in the fabric of reality. As you watch the golden thread is slurped out of the weave. All that you see through the gap is a blinding, blissful light.

For a moment, a small eternity, you forget who you are, where you came from, where that small mole on the back of your neck resides. All that is, is light. It's all that matters, all that ever will matter, the only true thing. The particles of your leg shift, taking a step forward. Then another step and another, till your nose is right up against the light. You feel an invigorating breeze of radiance tickle your nose. Reality shifts.

It feels as though a bright glorious stream were running through your face. Light surrounds you. You look down and see the substantial torso of your body sticking out through the break of reality. Something scrapes across your consciousness like nails on a chalkboard, interrupting your ignorant bliss. It is a being from the night, slithering and sliding, undulating towards you from on high. It's black shapeless nothing balloons towards you in a rhythmic beat. In your very being, you can feel its wrongness. It should not exist, yet it does, and it is coming for you.

Buh, bump, buh, bump. A weird pulsing moves through your body, and suddenly you remember that you have a heart that needs protecting and you'd almost left it behind, to go after the light in the aimless void. Fear strikes you for the first time since entering this crazy store. It knocks your body into solidity and you fall out of the tear in reality. You hit the floor with a thud and the glasses go flying from your face. Your stomach feels like it's full of bees and your eyes just won't focus. But you get unsteadily to your feet and run from the store as fast as you can.

You can feel the many blurry figures of the store staring at you as you stumble outside onto the concrete of the hot sidewalk. You raise your head and see the world with a renewed clarity. You wonder how you ended up laying on the sidewalk in front of an abandoned storefront. For a moment your mind brushes up against a memory of blinding white light. Then it's gone, you get to your feet and with one last look at the abandoned old store, you walk away.