Vitreous

In mid-July of 1991, when Sam was six years old, he was holding his mother's hand as they walked barefoot across the baking hot asphalt of the neighborhood pool's parking lot. He had his other arm through the hole of his inflatable black inner tube, and was gazing off at an angle tangential to the sun. Something was bothering him, and had been ever since school let out the month prior. Sam refrained from telling his mother about it (and his father was not exactly a prime source of emotional comfort) because he was afraid she would think he was going crazy. The passage of time for the young always seems so much slower than for an adult, even in the happiest of days. With this secret weighing on Sam's heart, the past month had felt like an eternity. Finally he screwed up the courage to speak. 'Mom, I've gotta tell you something.' She looked down at him, a kind but apprehensive smile spreading across her face. She knew he was a good boy, but that was rarely a good way for your child to start the conversation. 'Go ahead, sweetie.' 'Sometimes, I see things. Like some kind of squirmy bugs.' Sam said, 'I don't think they're really there. I can kinda see through them, and they run away when I try to look straight at them, but they're always there. I think they might be inside my eyes.' Her smile widened and she looked off to the side so as to not let him see it, since this seemed to be a serious issue for him. So many nonsensical worries turned into serious issues for Sam, a trait he likely inherited from her. Most of his issues tended toward the 'monster in the closet' category - a battle she had finally won through countless subsequent nights in which he was not eaten by a grue - so she thought something with an actual medical explanation should be easily put right. 'I used to get those sometimes. Lots of people do, actually. I know they look weird, like squiggly little worms or something, but they're really just harmless little specks in your eyes that people call 'floaters'. They're not alive, and they can't hurt you. They come and go, it's no big deal.' She ruffled Sam's hair as they approached the girl guarding the entrance to the pool, and waved their membership cards for entrance. Sam spent the day doing flips underwater, and sometimes just bobbing along the surface of the pool in his black rubber inner tube. He slowly began to put the visions - what his mother had called 'floaters' - out of his mind. She had seen them too, which alone would have taken most of their menace away from them, even if they weren't harmless like she promised they were. He sometimes wondered if his parents understood how much less scary those closet monsters would have been for him if his they had only acknowledged the monsters existence. Knowing you're alone with horrors that only you can see is always the worst part. 'But if mom sees the worms and still says everything's fine, then it must be,' he thought to himself. He found it somewhat odd that she mentioned the worms but not the spiders, or the way they scream when you try to fall asleep - but he supposed it went without saying. Sam stretched out across the tube, and let himself float. - Ten months later, when Sam was seven, his parents took him to an Optometrist - Dr. Howard - for an eye exam. After reading off a series of letters, the doctor asked him to read another - smaller - series of letters. This and other tests went on for what struck his parents as an unusually long duration, before Dr. Howard finally stopped and stared at Sam thoughtfully. He leaned down to get to eye-level with the child, as adults tend to do, and said loud enough to make sure the parents heard as well: 'Do you know what twenty-twenty vision means?' Sam shook his head in negation. 'It means,' Dr. Howard continued, 'That you see things from twenty feet away as well as most people see them from twenty feet away. That's normal. Some people see things worse than most people, and they might see things from twenty feet away as well as most people see them from thirty or forty feet away. We call that twenty-forty visi