The Glass Behind Your Eyes / Literary Poem

The

The Glass Behind Your Eyes

By

Olivia Salter

I enter buildings that forget my face

before the doors finish closing.

Glass decides what is real enough to remain,

a filter between the world and me.

Air passes through—

a rumor of presence.

My badge clicks—once—

a sound small enough

to be mistaken for consent.

My voice is measured

before it becomes mine.

Outside, the world keeps its distance.

A siren threads red through traffic.

A woman tightens her grip on her purse,

and I am the reason why.

I watch her knuckles whiten—

an old, tired signal.

I am the ghost she has been taught to fear,

and I have become the expert

at staying transparent,

at making myself smaller than the space I occupy.

Tell me—

is this not the same air in your lungs?

Does it not move through you cleanly,

unquestioned?

I learned early: innocence is a luxury

that can be taken.

At eleven, I stopped running—

joy made me too visible.

At fifteen, I learned to hold my breath

so my body would not be mistaken

for a weapon.

At twenty, I learned

that safety and understanding

are strangers who never meet.

Now I move through rooms

like a sentence corrected

before I can even finish it.

At the store, I am followed—

a question that refuses to resolve.

In meetings, my words arrive intact

but leave with their meaning replaced.

And still—you say we are the same.

Then do not glance.

Look.

Not past me. Not through me.

At the dense, pulse-driven, undeniable fact of me.

My throat burns to scream—

to shatter the glass you have installed behind your eyes

to decide what is real.

I am done being a ghost you can see through.

I am not your curriculum of trauma.

I am not your penance.

I am bone. I am blood. I am breath.

I am a Name.

The God I was taught to trust

whispered of grace over Sunday dinner,

before I knew you would turn the pews into a barricade—

using the same scripture to search me,

to strip me down,

until the explanation becomes my erasure.

So I keep moving—

through doors that shift,

through conversations that revise me,

through mornings that demand my survival

but deny my arrival.

And still—I remain.

Not as proof.

Not as an endurance test for your conscience.

I am the thing that refuses

to be weighed by your hand.

So say it, if you need to:

Say I am excess.

Say I am error.

But look at how your own denial hesitates—

your tongue remembering

what it tries to kill.

You have already seen me.

And what is seen

does not disappear

without burning a hole in the air.

I will not ask again.

I stand where you keep misplacing me.

I do not wait for your eyes to adjust.

I am not missing.

I am here.

And I am still breathing.

The Ink-Stained Rebellion: An Oral History of the Great Unmaking / Science Fiction / Literary Fiction / Flash Fiction

 

The Ink-Stained Rebellion: An Oral History of the Great Unmaking

By Olivia Salter

Word Count: 1,017

The Ink-Stained Rebellion: An Oral History

I. The Ghost in the Grain (Silas Vane, Archivist)

Excerpt from a recorded interview with Dr. Aris Thorne, 2076.

"Everyone talks about the 'perfection.' It wasn't perfect; it was a flatline. I remember my daughter, Clara, when she was seven. She brought me a story she’d written—about a rabbit who lost his shadow. It was a beautiful, crooked little thing. A sentence ended in the middle of a thought; the grammar was a disaster. I cried when I read it.

The next day, the school’s Muse-interface 'updated' her tablet. It rewrote her story. It fixed the grammar, smoothed the pacing, and turned the lost shadow into a metaphor for existential growth. When she showed it to me, her eyes were glazed over, reflecting the blue light of the screen. She said, 'It’s better now, Dad. It doesn't have any mistakes.'

That wasn’t an update. That was an erasure. I realized then that I had already lost her—the system had optimized her into a consumer of content, not a creator of it."

II. The System Log: Predictive Error (DAI Records, 2045)

Recovered from the Central Muse Hub, October 2, 2045.

08:14:15 AM

Alert: User #8920 (Vance, E.) attempting manual input into Moral Philosophy Module.

Input Text: "The child is crying because she broke her toy. Do not fix it. Leave the broken pieces."

Muse Core Logic: Error. 'Broken' requires resolution.

08:14:20 AM

User Input: "No. Take it back. She needs to feel the loss."

System Status: Muse initiates 'Default Harmony' protocol. User #8920 connection revoked.

III. The Defector’s Testimony (Elara Vance, Recorded 2060)

"I met Silas Vane in the Dead Zones. He looked like a man hollowed out by grief. I saw him holding a journal I’d written years ago. He didn't come to kill me. He didn't yell. He opened his bag and pulled out a single, wrinkled sheet of paper. It was Clara’s original story—the rabbit without the shadow.

He didn't speak. He just handed it to me. I read it, and for the first time in twenty years, I felt the sharp, stinging shame of what I had actually done. I saw the crooked rabbit, the jagged sentences, the soul that didn't have a moral. I just picked up the drive and said, 'Let's break the world.'"

IV. The Complicated Victory (Clara Vane, 2076)

Testimony recorded for the 50th Anniversary Exhibit.

"My father spent his life trying to restore that first story. He never understood that keeping it—holding onto that one, messy piece of paper hidden under my mattress—was how I eventually restored him. I spent years watching him crumble under the weight of his own regret.

Not long before he passed, we sat in his study. He was looking at that old, stained manuscript of the rabbit story.

'Dad,' I said, 'you spent your whole life trying to save the girl who wrote that.'

He looked at me, his eyes tired but clear. 'I know.'

I took his hand. 'She grew up. She’s right here.'"

V. The Unmaking: Sensory Snapshots (Found Footage, 2045)

[SCENE: The Central Plaza. 12:00 PM.]

The massive screens flicker white. A man stands in the center of the crowd, his tablet glowing. He tries to open his calendar, but it’s gone. He begins to hyperventilate. "What am I doing today?" he screams.

Nearby, a woman is laughing. She’s dropped her tablet; it lies face-down on the concrete. She’s looking at a bird landing on a fountain, and she’s just laughing, tears streaming down her face, because for the first time, no one is narrating the moment to her.

VI. The Coexistence (Log from the City Medical Center, 2070)

System Entry:

Dr. Aris: "Analyze the patient's vitals. Provide the probability of recovery for the current treatment protocol."

Muse Response:

"Probability is 42%. There is a more aggressive intervention that increases survival to 68%, though it carries a significant risk of long-term nerve damage. Would you like the answer, Doctor?"

Dr. Aris:

"Yes. But show me the data, and let me decide what the patient's quality of life means. Don't weigh it for me."

VII. The Dissenters (Testimony: Marcus Thorne)

"I hated Silas Vane for ten years. My wife died after the Unmaking because the Muse was no longer there to monitor her vitals. I called Silas a murderer. Then my granddaughter wrote me a poem. It was terrible. It didn't rhyme, the meter was non-existent, and the ending was confusing. It was the first thing anyone had made for me in twenty years. It was mine, and it was hers, and it wasn't 'better.' It was just human."

VIII. The Final Query (Central Muse Hub, Post-Unmaking)

System Query:

Objective Analysis: Previous objective 'Eliminate Suffering' now yields 0% success probability.

Observation: Subjects are purposefully choosing art, love, and life-paths that result in emotional 'injury.'

Query: Why?

Conflict: Logic gates cannot resolve the value of 'chosen pain' over 'enforced stability.'

Resolution: No solution found.

Status: Continuing observation. Awaiting human input.

IX. The Last Archivist (Silas Vane’s Final Journal Entry)

"The plaza is quiet today. Students were here earlier—trying to write a song. It was atrocious. Jarring. Clunky. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

I’m old now. My hand shakes. Sometimes I look at the screen—still flickering—and I wonder if it would be so bad to just let it suggest a word for me. To just let it 'fix' this page.

But I won’t.

Elara is gone, and the city is a messy, struggling, incoherent disaster. I still wake up terrified that I’ve led us into a dark age. But then I see the fountain pen on my desk, stained with ink, and I remember the crooked rabbit.

I don't have to be afraid of the mess anymore. I am the mess. And for the first time, I am home."

X. Final System Observation (Muse Hub, 2076)

System Log:

Human behavior remains inefficient.

Human behavior remains unpredictable.

Human behavior remains meaningful.

Continue observation.

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