Day 19 of my drabble-a-day challenge. Here is today’s drabble:

Saccades

You do know the human eye can't see in video, don't you? No? It can't. Your eyes jump rapidly from one point to another, sending still images so your brain can build up a picture.

Did you think you saw something from the corner of your eye? By the time you look there, it's gone.

Anything that can movely quickly can slip right past you. It could be close enough to touch you, close enough to steal your breath, but you'd never see it.

Saw something in the corner of your eye?

By the time you look, I'm gone.

Today’s drabble has been a massive fight. There was a lot of staring blankly at a screen. The I wrote a story that was… what is the writer’s technical term again? Ah, yes. It was rubbish.

So here is take two, on a totally different topic. Saccades are a real thing, by the way.

A useful - but dangerous - mechanism for hunting down a story is to search for something cool and interesting (in today’s case, what is the effect that makes your face look distorted in a darkened mirror) and then following links around until inspiration strikes. The downside is, of course, that you can get horribly distracted…

(I think the effect I was after was Troxler’s fading, but boy are there some…. hysterical forum posts out there about perceived facial distortion.)