It was Saturday, six days after my twelfth birthday. Six days after I’d gotten the magic glasses from my fairy godmother—er, fairy great-aunt. By marriage.

Only on that day had I put them on in the daytime. I dared not do so today, not even though there was no school and the other kids wouldn’t see me looking like an old lady.

It was because of what the king of the sun had said: that these glasses and their power were not for my human like. That only a dispensation from on high allowed me to wear them at all—that otherwise I must never put them on again, and hand them over to an appropriate authority to destroy them.

But I knew, somehow just knew, that I was to put on the glasses tonight before I could do that.

I was afraid, not of what I would see, but of what would see me.

What was already seeing me.

After lights out, I put on the magic glasses and looked out my window.

********

I wanted to take off the glasses immediately and never put them on again. I wanted to destroy them. Why did THAT horror have to be the last thing I saw with them?! I’d rather have seen the lady who was so beautiful that it made me jealous!

At a slug’s pace they came: dim, dull gray things creeping through the sky. It was like seeing rotted corpses come out of their graves and slowly walk toward oblivion.

They moved with full purpose.

They saw me.

I didn’t want to know where they came from. I didn’t!

But I had to.

I looked past them, and if I hadn’t been wearing the glasses, I never would have seen the dim star that didn’t twinkle.

Saturn.

And at Saturn I saw him.

I wanted so much to take off my glasses, but it was like they were glued to my face, and my arms hung limp at my sides.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

The oldest man I had ever imagined possible. Had he ever been young? Like, EVER? His wrinkled, spotted skin hung off his bones. He was balding, and his long thin white beard fell to his knees. What was holding him together?

He held a telescope.

Please don’t look at me, lease don’t look at me! I’ll die if—

Too late.

I froze.

I felt like I was made of ice. So cold, so stiff. Was I breathing? Was my heart beating?

His jaw creaked open and ideas entered my head. Ideas of old age, of hair turning gray and falling out, of skin wrinkling and spots appearing, of joints stiffening, of slowing down; ideas of sickness, of germs spreading to every cell in my body, of never getting healthy again; ideas of death, doom, the tomb.

Ideas of the flesh rotting off my bones. Of flies laying their eggs in my rotting, stinking flesh. Of maggots hatching and gnawing away at my decaying, foul-smelling flesh! Of my bones being exposed until there was nothing left of me but a dried skeleton.

Ideas so horrifying I wanted to wake up from this nightmare—but I was awake.

…Ideas of something beyond.

Ideas of time, of the movement of the stars and planets. Ideas of contemplation.

Of rest.

Final, eternal rest.

My eyelids drooped.

I kept nodding off.

Sleep.

Would I ever wake up?

Did it matter?

********

My great-aunt, the fairy, wouldn’t hear of my destroying the glasses, but I was resolved never to put them on again. They must be destroyed, like the One Ring.

Without telling Great-Aunt Morgan, I left the house at dawn with the glasses.

I went to the graveyard, and buried them deep.

I haven’t seen them since, and if I never see them again it’ll be too soon.

********

When Great-Aunt Morgan found out, she shrieked like chalk scraping on a blackboard, and ground her teeth until there was nothing left in her mouth.

She stamped her foot so hard, she drove it right through the floor! She yanked on her leg as hard as she could, and she split herself in half—right up the middle!

The two halves of her burst into green flame, and exploded. The sparks buried themselves under the floor.

I don’t know how I got any sleep that night. But sleep I did, more peacefully than ever before.