By JD Clapp
When Titus tired of seeing his life, he plucked his left eyeball from his head with a grapefruit spoon and put it in a mason jar filled with moonshine. He put the jar in a burlap sack he carried everywhere. When he needed escape from the struggles of life, he’d pull the jar from its sack and close his right eye to view his life through a drunken haze.
He began to favor this drunkard’s view, and one day plucked his right eye out and added it to the jar. For a while, Titus carried his eye jar of ‘shine around, happily seeing the world through drunken, pickled, martini olive eyes.
With time his eyes became tolerant to the ‘shine. It was then that Titus came to understand the world was as he’d seen it before, made worse from being hungover. So, Titus ventured to the edge of the sea and opened his jar and drank the ‘shine, leaving his eyes at the bottom, staring dully up at him. He filled the jar with sand and put it in his sack and tossed it into the waves.
Unable to see and stone sober, a good man came by, took Titus by the hand, and led him to his home, where he fed and cared for him. And together knowing the joy of friendship and compassion, they ventured out each morning and spread the good word, and the inherent kindness untapped in all people, Titus not seeing their words held little sway on the drunken, deaf masses.
JD Clapp lives in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Bristol Noir, Roi Fainéant Press, Trampset, Punk Noir and numerous others. In 2023, he was a Pushcart nominee in nonfiction, and had a fictional story selected as a finalist in the Hemingway Shorts, Short Story competition. He is a regular contributor to Poverty House.