It’s time for another blog post generated by an online writing prompt. This picture and prompt popped up on Facebook. My writing reflex was triggered. I hope you like it.
Mila’s apartment was located right in the center of the lacrimal caruncle. Specifically, it was in the left lacrimal caruncle of eight-year-old Toby Felix. Toby was human. Mila was always astounded by the sheer scale of humans. How something that massive could be alive was something she was never able to fathom. To be fair, she didn’t have a lot of time to think about such things. She had a job to do.
Mila’s job was to watch out for foreign objects that might pose a threat to Toby’s left eye. The one with her caruncle. The one where she lived. She gazed out her apartment’s lone window during all the hours of every day that Toby was awake. Risk was pretty small when his eyes were closed, so Mila could rest when Toby rested.
Below Mila’s window was her communications console. Any time a dust mote, eyelash, or any other object fell into Toby’s eye, Mila sprang into action. First, she pressed the button labeled “Blink Reflex” at least four or five times. Sometimes, that was enough to dislodge the invader. If not, she would spin the dial under a gauge labeled “Tear Duct Flowmeter.” Each rotation of the dial increased the flow of salty fluid specially formulated to loosen and rinse objects away.
It was never as straightforward as it sounds. Personnel in the Autonomic Nervous System Department (ANSD) were always flicking switches to activate Toby’s reflexes tied to his arms, hands, and fingers, driving him to grind his fist into his eye. That was always a bad idea. Mila had sent countless emails to Central Nervous Management complaining that this kind of thing could be harmful, especially if the foreign object was something hard or something that had sharp edges.
Toby wasn’t Mila’s first assignment. She’d been working in caruncles for thousands of years, protecting the left eyes of hundreds of humans. She was smart. She forged a friendship with Alma, a worker in the ANSD. They devised a system. While activating the blink reflex with her left hand, Mila would pull a string with her right, actually a nerve fiber salvaged from Toby’s eyelid, that would light up a synapse right next to Alma’s communications console at her workstation. Alma would quickly unplug a cable responsible for alerting Toby’s motor systems to the irritant in his eye.
This was an effective strategy. It confused Toby immensely because he could swear he was trying to rub his eye, but nothing happened. In the best of cases, Mila’s efforts to dislodge the invasive object would succeed before Toby took things into his own hands via conscious motor controls and rubbed his eye anyway. In the worst of cases, well, he rubbed his eye and Mila hoped for the best.
Sometimes, Mila struggled with the depression associated with having her efforts unrecognized. Every day, she worked and worked to keep Toby’s left eye safe. He had no idea how many times she had spared him from a scratched cornea, or even worse. Such was the fate of the millions of workers assigned to this eight-year-old boy. “Work for the honor of doing the job,” Mila reminded herself each day. “It’s just what I do.”