According to a local folklorist, these glasses were left here by a trickster god named John. He’s been doing it since at least the seventeenth century, although many of the older wise ladies say it started long before that. Nevertheless, the locals have learnt the hard way to leave the spectacles alone, and there is a consistent and verifiable corpus of knowledge as to what happens to the unsuspecting wearer of the glasses covering the last four hundred years. To be honest, John is a rapscallion more than anything, but his pranks can still be traumatic, especially to the naive and humourless. Nowadays, some of the younger folk enjoy wearing them on a Saturday night, as youngsters from other villages might trip on ‘shrooms or acid, or get blind drunk. The folklorist said that, in 1962, a twenty-three year old mechanic called Bob figured out that the simple mantra “I see
Martha was from Panama, but she had been living in Kent for 34 years. She had moved there after meeting Peter who had been working on the canal. She followed him back to the country of his birth, far away from her own. It had been hard for her at times, away from her sun and food, but she had never wavered in her decision to come. Peter was quietly solid and full of his own kind of light. He was a reassurance that her gaze rested on over the decades. Peter died last year. Martha had felt herself winding inwards in the days which had passed since. Everything becoming a little bit smaller and more compact. Peter had died and now she was free, and she was trying to understand if that meant she had formerly felt trapped. Working her way to the answer was an exercise in dodging guilt,