Frank might as well have been looking through a glass darkly. Staring out the kitchen window that Saturday morning, he could barely make out the birds in the tree above his car in the driveway. Were they singing to their hearts’ content? He needed batteries for his hearing aids. The flowers in his small backyard were crowded out by weeds. Could he distinguish colors? Did they have a pleasant scent? If he had instilled his eye drops, would it have helped? Never mind used his inhaler.
Finished splattering over his car, the birds flew off. Was it a pleasant sight? The flight, that is?
His flat screen was on. Now came advertisements for decongestants and hearing aids. Someone instilled eye drops. Could she – it was a woman younger than Frank on the flatscreen – see her car through her advertisement window? And was it, too, splattered with bird crap?
David Sydney is a physician from Pennsylvania. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).