PUBLISHED 'KRAX' 1997
The hand went through the glass - but really, at the end of the day, the glass got its own back.
Until that day I had never really thought about the relative vulnerability of human bodies. So soft, so pliable, so very bone-cushioned: all for the sake of providing a vehicle for life. And, indeed, it is a rule of thumb that advantages do have their side-effects -- even the rule that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Which brings me straight back to the window I accidentally smashed with my hand and which in turn, simultaneously and not so accidentally, smashed my hand! The purpose of windows, like eyes, was, I thought, to ease viewing of external existence around the fragile pod of life that’s you. And to let light in and darkness out. But windows may see their purpose as something quite different. And eyes, too.
I know it’s not original: but eyes are windows of the soul. And the onset of death (which starts at birth) causes splintery sparks to dig ever deeper from the skull’s twin sockets until the biggest shark’s fin of all ribs through the conduit nerve of reality...
Still, you can be thankful for small mercies: it would be worse in a worse world.
