Member-only story
And Then It’s Gone
Three very short stories
The Vision
He was looking out at the rainbow, what little there was of it. It appeared to emerge from the horizon and break up as the arc began to develop. Staring at it for more than a second, you could see that it did extend further but just got too feint to make out with any clarity and he wondered if he were simply completing the circle like you would an optical illusion. And that was the point of his question: “Is it real”?
“A rainbow must be real if you can photograph it”, I said.
“Its still in the eye of the beholder though”, he returned. “You wouldn’t see it from the other side. Isn’t it a bit like a film set where they’ve built a façade representing shops and restaurants. The façade is obviously there but what it represents isn’t”.
“Yet the rainbow doesn’t represent anything”, I replied. “A representation and an illusion are quite different things. An illusion is, in effect, a misrepresentation. It either persuades you to complete a picture that is uncomfortably incomplete or creates a distraction throwing you off balance”.
Pretty quickly the rainbow disappeared and that was that. The focus of the conversation was gone and took with it, the discussion.
