Sunset Dropped Her Contact Lens

by Majin Syeekoh

A completely understandable situation.

Sunset dashed down the halls of Canterlot High School, offering a half-hearted apology to some dude she accidentally shoulder-checked because she hadn’t put her contacts in yet. Because she woke up late. She wasn’t sure if it was because she closed at the sushi shop last night or due to the ever-present exhaustion that follows teenagers around like Yersinia pestis on a flea that also follows a rat, but she missed her alarm and was not too happy about it.

She finally made it to her locker, luckily locked with a key lock because past-her was smarter than present-her, and opened it, seeing the rough shapes of stuff and thankfully the mirror she put on the back of the door. The mirror was there as part of her self-affirmation routine, but right now she needed it to shove her eyes into her eyes. Sunset dropped her bag on the floor, pulled out her contact case, and proceeded with the delicate maneuver of poking her eyes with a thin piece of corrective vision gel.

Everything was going to plan. One contact, then the other, and she should be able to see again.

But if things went to plan we wouldn’t be here right now, which is why at this point she herself got accidentally body-checked and offered a half-hearted apology… and her contact lens was forced off of her finger and onto the floor.

Sunset’s heart dropped into her stomach. She didn’t think to bring an extra pair because that would be sensible, and if anything her life had not proved sensible up to this point.

She took a breath. She then placed her contact case in her locker. She took another breath. She mentally flipped through her courses of action until deciding one one.

“Listen,” she said, speaking from her gut which luckily put a lot of heart into her next utterance, “everyone stay the fuck still so I can find my contact.”

Everyone froze as she got on her hands and knees and felt around on the floor for what could be a contact lens. Sunset felt the peace she had created as everyone recognized the severity of the situation at hand. If she couldn’t find her contact lens, she’d be walking around school half-blind, and what if a… um… tea strainer got a spark of Equestrian magic and started trying to strain the students. Especially from her blurry eye, because of course it would attack from that angle. It would be a lot messier than that toaster robot debacle, which Micro Chips keeps insisting on calling “The Liberation and Sacrifice of Jean Valjeanny Five.”

Idiot didn’t understand that her and her friends were the only thing preventing an innocent business from filing a liability lawsuit against the school.

Man, this floor was dirty. Not like dirty-dirty, but like thin-film-of-granules-and-particulates dirty. The kind you don’t notice until you touch it with your—oh she might have found her contact. She picked up the sliver of whatever it was and glanced at it.

She guesstimated that it was a dime.

Sunset uttered an unpronounceable curse and continued feeling around on the floor for her contact.

What she failed to see, however, is that by pronouncing the unpronounceable, the students around her felt a fundamental uneasiness as the very fabric of existence threatened to shred All That Is into a million little pieces.

The discomfort intensified as reality warbled and jostled itself in a hopefully successful attempt to restrain the forbidden soundwave.

Luckily, it succeeded, or else we wouldn’t be here. Reality has a funny way of not wanting to constrain itself to one dimension. But still, everyone was now very uncomfortable and afraid to move, except for that one kid who was super into the sixties and blacklights. He didn’t move though, because no one else was and he didn’t want to be seen as socially nonconforming or else people would start expecting—

I’m going down the wrong story here.

Anyway, Sunset finally found the thin circle of gel that gave her her much needed vision buff. She rinsed it off in her contact solution, then carefully placed it in her eye. She repeated the process with the other eye, without the dropping and the fumbling around and the vibrating reality because if that happened we definitely wouldn’t be here right now.

Sunset tapped her head a bit. Calculus, Ponish, Current Events. She grabbed the corresponding books from her locker, then looked into the mirror and smiled.

“I am important.

I am you.

No one else can do the things you do.”

She looked beautiful. She still had some trouble telling herself that because of society’s self-deprecation fetish, but she read online that it was important to ignore that and bolster her own mental well-being. She was better now, but she remembered that maintenance can prevent any relapses into self-hatred.

Enough people hated her that she couldn’t afford to be one of them.

Damn toaster robot.

Anywho, with her sight and peace of mind restored, she was feeling a bunch better, so she kind of skip-walked down the hall, waving and greeting her classmates that she unwittingly paralyzed.

And she skip-walked straight to home room, which was strangely empty except for Mr. Doodle Donkey, who just kind of sat there looking like he had many regrets in his life. You know the look.

Sunset tapped her desk rhythmically, looked at the clock, and her heart skipped a beat.

She was late.

She looked around the empty class.

Everyone else was late, too.

Wonder why that was.

Eventually, kids started filing into class, shooting awkward glances at Sunset except for sixties kid who gave her a double thumbs up. Sunset, being bound by unwritten social contracts, returned the double thumbs up without being aware of the intended purpose of said thumbs up.

Mr. Doodle Donkey eventually noticed that the students were in and started taking attendance.

Microphone feedback emitted from the P.A. system.

“Hello students, Principal Celestia here. There appears to be a wild tea strainer roving around the kitchen and—”

Sunset popped her jaw, slammed her hands on her desk, and stood up.

She glared at Micro Chips.

Then she left class.

Comments

[Jet Cannon]

Uh, you ok fam?

[Majin Syeekoh]

10886666
I’m perfectly fine.

[Vaguely Demented]

Have to wonder how many teachers actually avail themselves of that particular culinary device.

[Majin Syeekoh]

10886671
Probably just the Principal.

[CapNTilfy]

Sunset is Haruhi Suzumiya confirmed.

[Majin Syeekoh]

10886692
At least she’s not melancholy.

[CapNTilfy]

10886695
The cover art begs to differ.

[Majin Syeekoh]

10886702
…so it would.

[FanOfMostEverything]

It would be a lot messier than that toaster robot debacle, which Micro Chips keeps insisting on calling “The Liberation and Sacrifice of Jean Valjeanny Five.”

When you endow a toaster with sapience and designate it "JVJ-24601," you know exactly what you're doing. (Though I maintain that the implacable doom toaster was actually model number J4-V3R7.)

Delightful bit of surreality. I look forward to the sequel where human Twilight convinces Sunset that external lenses are much better than shaking the fabric of reality every time she fumbles with scraps of cornea plastic.

[Ganondorf8]

And this is why I prefer to wear glasses over contacts.

On a different note, I loved all those fourth-wall breaking moments. They were executed so flawlessly that it's given me some inspiration to try it myself in my own stories when next I start writing one.

[Genial Precis]

I damaged my glasses years ago and I'm too cheap to replace them--although people tell me that the US optometry system is a dirty fucking scam and you can get way cheaper glasses in almost any other country, or even in the US if you bypass them. So anyway the lenses can pop out.

One morning I was commuting as usual via an articulating bus when less than two minutes before my stop I brought my hand too close to my face and popped a lens out and listened to it bounce and clatter across the floor in the general direction of the articulating section. The construction of this particular bus is such that the inner accordion is suspended from the roof but not joined at the floor, and as I searched I suspected the lens might well have gone through that gap and ended up either in some inaccessible void space of the accordion or on the street some hundreds of meters behind during rush hour traffic.

I found the lens, but the incident woke me all the way up.

[Shachza]

Despite all that, being able to use my peripheral vision is more important than the risk of occasional partially blind embarrassment. Stairs+glasses is a whole different and very annoying perceptive experience than stairs+contacts.

Also,

Yersinia pestis

Black Death.

[Uknikorn]

🙂🙃*That was a nice story~!*

[Craft Motion]

This was a strange but entertaining story XD

[FloofyCatgirl]

This story gave me a good laugh.

[Mittens of flabbergast]

Equestria girls has so many of these random ass slice of life stories eventually some needs to compile a bunch of them into a book. It'd be amazing.

Great read btw. I love your writing style, it's like the narrator is a character in their own right and the way you excitcuted it was really good.

[Betsy]

I can relate to dropping a contact and just wanting everyone to STOP so I can find the damn thing. Unlike Sunset, no one ever does.

She guesstimated that it was a dime.

How the hell is she that blind

[SparkapocalypseVanguard]

Needing contact lenses is SUFFERING