"Mr Harmly Moe or: How He Learned To Stop Worrying and Get the Optical Surgery" by Charles P

     Mr. Harmly Moe sat on a doctor’s exam table, uncomfortably shifting from buttock to buttock to avoid coaxing the wax paper beneath him to crinkle. He failed, and at each halted breath the paper made him that much more self-conscious. Staring at Dr. Rose’s back, he stroked his overweight albatross mustache and tapped his nondescript knee. While both men were miles apart spiritually, they shared a sort of universal adult disappointment, enforced by the piling on of years too short and/or too long.

            “So... how are you feeling, Harmly?” the doctor muttered. In a blandly offended voice, the patient retorted. “Please, please. Call me Mr. Harmly Moe. And I’m afraid it’s rather serious, Dr. Rose. This health issue is drastically hurting my work. As you know, I’m a high school principal.” The paper on the bench ignited Jiffy Pop as he awkwardly adjusted. Rose ogled his clipboard, which shot a glance back at him, as effortlessly disinterested as he. Harmly wished for justification in the form of a medical doctor guessing the problem by himself, but Rose was mentally perfecting his putter technique in his head. The Harmly Moe would have to take charge.

            “Doc, here is my blunder. I’m afraid it’s with my eyes, it’s… when I look at the students at the school I work at, I see kids.” Rose dropped his stunned clipboard onto the slate tiles. The ball in his head sheathed itself in the sand bunker. The doctor bared the pearls in his mouth and cried, “We need to take you to the ER right away!”

Below countless flickering fluorescents, Harmly sat on a cold table inside an operating theater, waiting for the surgeon to arrive. Metallic doors blasted open, and a man in a paper mask materialized before him. The sound of students scribbling elasticized between the walls. The surgeon rubbed his latex hand against Harmly’s cheek while dictating in an almost missable Strangelove accent. “You should have had this done long before! But don’t worry. You’re safe with me.” He retrieved a syringe with one hand and a scalpel with the other, and held them above Harmly’s cornea. “This won’t hurt a bit, just hold still.” The needle brazenly elbowed into his eye, expecting to catch someone in the act of viewing pornographic material.

The next day, Mr. Harmly Moe stood proudly at the front of his office with hands on his hips, watching every figure chase by. It was lunchtime now, and the usual inane tasks carried on accordingly. Each zoomed past his peripheral, running, shouting, cursing. “Not too fast,” he chuckled, in a Beverly Hillbillies y’all come back now ya’ hear style of corny bucktooth hospitality. In the voids that the students occupied, he could see the fruits of the procedure. The school’s pupils were now distorted in Mr. Harmly Moe’s. Five digit numbers drifting in midair were all that he could register. Rubbing his palms together, Harmly exclaimed, “Now I can finally work.”