Vision

by Abby Nicole Yee

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

It’s not something you do consciously, but your mind wanders. See, most people will tell you that’s perfectly normal, that your mind can’t naturally laser-focus on any particular thought or subject for long periods of time unless you’re taking amphetamines or you’re a Buddhist monk with absurdly high levels of gamma brain waves—

Come to think of it, you’re not really in control of your own thoughts, either.

The day you saw it was the first time you realized how little you’d been paying attention.

The other teachers aren’t speaking to you, but you hear them whisper about the incident.

“…heard she broke Danny’s arm because she thought she saw something on the window.”

“But you heard what the janitor said. The room reeked of shit because she stepped on some napping kid’s stomach—”

“Why exactly is she not fired yet?”

“Danny’s mom is planning to sue. I heard the poor kid’s traumatized and keeps wetting the bed.”

You keep your eyes on your desk and pretend not to hear them. The truth is that you barely remember the incident.

You remember a shape at the edge of your vision. A flicker. Something impossible crawling across the glass of the classroom window. For a single instant it had seemed more important than the children around you, more important than gravity, language, duty, or common sense. Then there was shouting, then a crash, and somehow, somewhere, a child crying.

Afterward everyone asked what you saw. You never found an answer. Just a color.

Not a real color. Not red or blue or green. Nothing that could be named. A color that seemed to exist in the spaces between colors. Whenever you tried to remember it, your thoughts slipped away like wet soap. Maybe that was why you became obsessed.

Maybe you just need to reinvent yourself, become more present. You practice self-care, and today you go on a nostalgia trip with the family photo albums and see the new color, the color of it.

It is in every picture.

At first you think it is a printing defect. Then you notice the stain appears in photographs taken decades apart. Childhood birthday parties. Family reunions. Hospital visits. Graduation photos. The color is always there. Tiny and faint. Waiting. You flip through more recent albums, and you swear the pictures are coated in blank, stained and preserved and foreign to you but somehow still recognizable, like a hazy dream.

What does this mean?

You spend hours examining the photographs under different lights. In a flurry, you scan them into your computer. You magnify them until the pixels become abstract blocks. The blank remains. It doesn’t belong to the paper, not even to the image. Somehow, it exists beneath both.

So you stop sleeping properly.

At work you catch yourself staring at people instead of listening to them. Parents complain, and students ask questions you don’t hear. And the whispers continue. The administrators are watching you—you know that. Yet none of it feels as important as the blank.

One evening you discover that concentrating on it causes headaches—severe ones. Migraines that pulse behind your eyes. But the headaches bring clarity.

You begin to notice faint traces of the color outside photographs. A shimmer around streetlights and a veil hanging over strangers. And most curiously, a thin coating stretched across walls and trees. And the harder you focus, the more visible it becomes.

Then a flash of insight strikes you, although at first you think it is stupid. But the more you train your attention, the more the color obliges, giving you beautiful visions and patterns in nature you never thought possible.

Leaves become networks of luminous pathways as birds flying above them drag ribbons of blankness through the air like barely visible brushstrokes.

For the first time in your life, the world seems awake. As you mindlessly look at the pictures on your phone, you realize almost all of them are covered in an almost imperceptibly faint blank. You look at the videos and it’s the same thing, the blank glow emanating from yourself and other people. Even inanimate objects.

When you really exert yourself, you have supernatural vision and can actually see the blankness of every single atom in a human body, a gauzy pattern of static particles that don’t interact with anything science has identified.

Yet.

You begin documenting your observations. Hundreds of pages and thousands of notes later, you attempt mathematical models. You compare the density of blank particles in different materials. Steel contains less than flesh. Living tissue contains more than dead tissue for some reason. Children contain astonishing amounts. The discovery disturbs you enough that you stop testing schoolchildren altogether. For nearly a week. But then curiosity wins.

The blank is not merely present in life. It seems responsible for life. The particles cluster around organs, nerves, blood vessels. They accumulate wherever a body regulates itself. Healing wounds glow brighter. People who are asleep generate strange currents, while dreaming people generate storms.

You become increasingly convinced that modern science has overlooked the most fundamental component of reality, and you become too anxious at the thought that it’s for one reason only, and it’s because no one else can see it.

Weeks pass, and your social life evaporates because you stop answering messages. You even become depressed enough to forget meals. At night, you sit motionless before mirrors, studying yourself. Eventually you discover movement, the intentional kind. The blank responds to attention. Tiny shifts at first, some microscopic displacements. Enough to prove interaction, maybe enough to change everything. You concentrate all your mental faculties and come up with a hypothesis: the blank particle is like glue, and the glue can be moved around.

For a whole hour you see every single blank particle in your reflection, the blanks sequined on your arteries and your heart’s valves, homeostatic control mechanisms, pressure points, even the tiniest temperature-sensitive neurons. The things that hold a person together are laid out before you like a blueprint.

You spend days testing the limits. A headache disappears when you shift a handful of particles. A paper cut closes overnight. You remove fatigue from your muscles. You lower your body temperature. Raise it. Slow your pulse. Accelerate it. The possibilities are intoxicating. You could cure diseases. Repair injuries. Rewrite biology itself.

But every experiment reveals another temptation. The blank does not distinguish between healing and harm. It merely obeys. And you have become very good at giving orders.

Meanwhile, your colleagues continue talking. Their voices carry through hallways, through thin walls. You hear your name attached to words like unstable. Or dangerous. Even that most hurtful one—liability. One teacher laughs while describing the lawsuit. Another wonders aloud how long before you snap. You tell yourself you don’t care. You tell yourself they are ignorant. You tell yourself you are standing at the threshold of the greatest discovery in human history.

Yet their words linger, growing sharper each day. It hasn’t made an appearance. You think you aren’t scared of it anymore. The thing you glimpsed on the classroom window. The shape that started all this. Perhaps it was never there. Perhaps the blank itself was looking back at you. But you are more interested to see if your hypothesis is true. But you are cautious enough not to mess with pictures or video because you might tear holes in the fabric of time.

Instead, you concentrate all your attention on a colleague who said all those vile things about you and won’t stop, and she’s just asking for her blanks to be toyed with. You switch only two or three particles in her eye, and she takes the week off, her eye now swollen like a leaky, diseased lanzones with an overgrown seed.

You spend the week waiting and watching. The damage unfolds as you predicted.

When she returns, she’s wearing an eye patch and is complaining of extreme cold, and no one believes her until her fingers fall off, mysteriously frostbitten in minutes. The next day, she is nowhere, and you hear another paranoid colleague mouthing off because you brought this evil to them, and people believe her, and now you’re out of a job.

You should feel angry. Instead, you feel triumphant. Your theory works. Not perfectly, but well enough. The blank can alter reality through flesh. A proof of concept. A successful experiment.

Humanity’s greatest breakthrough achieved in a primary school by a woman everyone thinks is crazy.

You show up the next day and meld together a cluster of discrete blanks in her brain until her skin sloughs off in large, wet chunks, and you’re pleased at figuring out what that specific blank can do: a localized brain-induced radiation fallout. Of course, you make sure she is alone in the bathroom, flick away the blanks in her throat so she can’t scream for help.

You walk to the blue gate, a smile on your face, satisfied with today’s exercise.

Want more spellbinding work from Abby Nicole Yee? Read the poem “Before I Grew Nettled Skin” in Horrific Scribes September 2025.