After A While!

The Impenetrable Black Square!

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The Impenetrable Black Square.

"Amy Shanks" has been to three eye doctors and has scoured the internet for the answer to her terrible problem.
Yet it persists.
And grows.
The black square, that is.
The impenetrable darkness that obscures what Amy sees in the precise form of a perfect square.
The experts have ruled out glaucoma and every other known eye disease.
Yet day after day Amy awakens, opens her eyes and the black square--cutting off her view, like part of the world has been censored--plagues her vision once again.
It started with drugs, specifically the "party drug" known as E. At least that’s what Amy thought it was.
She swallowed the pill at a Portland, Oregon rave. A guy whose face she can’t remember simply handed it to her and she took it. Why? Amy was young, she wanted to have fun and she’d done E 200 times before by her count, with less consequence than a few sips of wine. But this pill was different. Rather than love, peace and sensuality, Amy was overcome by a sense of loneliness and angst. She greeted the dawn curled up on a cot in a tent where other ravers were being treated for a variety of ills. The EMS workers found nothing wrong and sent Amy home in the blinding late morning light. Amy first noticed the black square upon returning to her apartment, when she tried to open the door. She couldn’t see the keyhole without glancing sidelong with her peripheral vision. Finally, after fumbling around for what seemed like forever, she was able to open the door. Crying now, she ran to her bedroom. Had she damaged her brain with an unknown drug? Unfortunately, Amy had a much worse problem than that, the black square still remained when Amy went to her job the next day at a video store. It was impossible for her to see the boxes, the cash the customers put down, without looking at them through her peripheral vision. This, of course, made her seem quite strange--a store clerk who looked at you sideways. When her fellow employees began to snicker and laugh, Amy quit on the spot, even though she barely had enough in her savings account to cover the next month’s rent. At least her health insurance would be in effect until the end of the week. Amy ran from the store until she came to the medical center, where she took an elevator to the 2nd floor and an optometrist’s office. She didn’t have an appointment, yet needed to see a doctor so badly that she remained in the waiting room for three solid hours until there was a cancellation. Even though he performed a full battery of tests, the doctor found nothing wrong. Neither did the other two optometrists Amy consulted the following day. There was nothing medically wrong with her. Yet the black square remained. The last optometrist gave Amy a prescription for Xanax and a paternalistic order to "just relax." And that’s what Amy tried to do yesterday before something within the black square started to move. A human-like figure, she said it was, to the physician who admitted her for observation to the county mental ward. A hooded figure, darker than dark, that beckons Amy to enter the black square that only she sees--that perhaps no one, not even Amy, will ever understand.