20/20 Visions

We built glass houses when the loneliness was plaguing.

The widower down the street turned on the tap in his glass daylight basement for two days. When the water reached the first floor and his sills were weeping, he filled the makeshift tank with luminous fish. At night their orange and purple bodies reflect from one glass house onto the next, a show for the whole block.

Some dance more with all the spectators, others dance less. When my neighbor and I use our upstairs toilets at the same time, we wave or at least nod. We’ve all come to accept daylight’s publicity. We have our privacy at night. In the winters we are starved for attention, so few hours in the day to be looked at. Window washers are essential obviously, because birds still shit yet the show must go on.

The priest is quiet behind his stained blues and golds, there’s not much need for him now. Our sins double as our confessions, all committed behind glass.

Mothers no longer tell their children not to touch the glass. Smush your nose against it, leave kisses, force your love through the glass, they now say. When the neighbor lifts a pan of cookies from the oven, I close my eyes to inhale.

Come 6 a.m. I hear the collective woosh of windows closing to seal in the night air. I go back to sleep for now, dreaming of screen houses, or no houses at all.

Cass Bartlett studied creative writing at Western Washington University. Her flash fiction and poetry has been featured in Sweet Tree Review, Jeopardy Magazine, and Anastamos.