Growing at Odd Angles

I wore my eyeglasses out for the first time in a while, walking the gravel service road to the stormwater basin.

My breath caught in my chest—everything in my vision was a disturbingly vertical line. I didn’t realise, at first, that things looked odd simply because I was seeing them in sharper detail than I had in some time.

Suddenly, I was deeply unsettled by the idea of everything growing upwards, outwards from the earth: all the grass and shrubs and trees—and even me.

If I hadn’t seen someone approaching from the opposite direction, hadn’t been jolted out of that strange spiral by the sudden awareness of how I might appear, I think I would have melted into the earth right there on the gravel path.