Alex Bing and the Golden Spyglass

The village of Knowere is quaint while its residents are quarrelsome. It is a cynical land of anger and resentments where neighbours relentlessly bicker with each other, where families revel in picking sides, and where they all believe that the success of one is the loss of another.

The town is evenly bisected by Enywere Lane and all one hundred of the small houses are lined up on the right side while all the other fifty-seven buildings reserved for businesses and such are lined up on the left. Near the edge of town, inside the house on 97 Enywere Lane, Zany Bing stands beside the stove, fuming in the direction of her husband for a myriad of reasons: his lack of appreciation for her work around the house, his apathetic mood as he sat by and watched her cook dinner for the umpteenth time in a row, his good fortune that he merely works while she bears the burden of the house. Zelet Bing sits upon his sagging sofa in a foul mood, contemplating why his wife never lets him help her, why she is making a meal that she knows he hates, and why she does not appreciate all he does for the family while she simply tends to some dust and the occasional meal. One room over, their young daughter, Alex Bing, lays on the freshly cleaned floor and stares at the ceiling with none of the resentment that seems to consume the rest of them.

“There’s nothing to do,” Alex groans to her ageing cat, Eko.

“Nothing to do,” says the cat in return.

Outside her window, there is a sharp squeal of frustration from one of the Tetchees next door. A few screeching words make it through (“gnome”, “again”, and “just you wait!”) but the point is clear: the Gravators had done something.

Knowerians fight for any reason they can find: for accidentally drinking from someone else’s cup, for shopping at a different store than the one their friend owned, or even for merely being asleep when someone stopped by needing to borrow sugar. To undermine those that they consider their enemies, Knowerians use techniques ranging from theatrical (like when Mr Harro stood outside the book shop and prevented anyone entering because the owner had suggested a book that he hadn’t enjoyed and he believed it to be an intentionally malicious recommendation) to sneaky (like when Ms Sauer spent hours outside in the dead of winter to move her fence a few inches further into the yard of her neighbours’ while they were at work in retaliation for a forgotten slight).

Grudges are stored and relished like precious water in a drought and the spark of anger from one person is all it takes to spark the anger of the other. Alex simply cannot grasp why the hostilities do nothing but build.

Then, another angry voice (likely a Gravator) joins the cacophony outside.

“I don’t think I can bear another second of this tedium!” Alex almost screams.

“This tedium,” repeats Eko in a knowing voice.

The smells from the kitchen begin to waft in through the open doorway and she knows supper must be nearly ready. She stands up and barely begins to make her way out of the room when she spots something foreign on her bed. She stares at it for an extended moment; it is a long, thin box wrapped in a simple, nondescript brown paper and she is certain that it hadn’t been there before, nor had anybody come in the room to put it there. Her heart is pounding in her chest and her stomach feels like it could fall right out of her but she takes one, two, three steps toward it until she can read the scrawled writing on top of the box: Alec Bings, who sees through things.

She furrows her eyebrows and looks at Eko. “Is this for me?” she asks because it’s the only thing she can think to say. Eko stays silent and simply blinks his eyes at her slowly so Alex turns back to the package and, with a spurt of courage she can’t remember summoning, grasps the box by both ends and gives it a little shake. There is a muffled thunk-thunk from within but otherwise, nothing happens. She hesitates to open it because the slight misspelling of her name puts a vague pit in her stomach.

Then again, if it wasn’t for her, why would it be in her room with such a close approximation of her name?

Her fingernails slide carefully under the glued edges of the paper protecting the mysterious contents. Her hands shake slightly as she withdraws the box from the paper and then extracts another wrapped item from the inside, this one a thin cylinder-like shape. The patience and caution she had started with are already gone and instead, there is only unheeding eagerness. When the last layer of wrapping is pulled off and the object within is revealed, even Eko moves closer to inspect it.

“A spyglass,” she says, surprise dripping off the words.

“A spyglass,” repeats Eko, though without the surprise. It was a confirmation.

Alex turns the thing over in her hands several times to admire the smooth, golden surface ordained with engravings in a language she can’t read. There are only eleven letters she recognises, but they don’t form any word that she has ever seen: P E R S P E C T I V E. Besides the stunning design, its most impressive quality was its sheer weightlessness.

In the corner of her vision, she sees Eko walk away to the edge of her peripheral vision but she pays him no mind (the peculiar gift is much too mesmerizing) until he lets out a loud, irritated “MEOW”

“What?” she says, perhaps a little more harshly than the cat deserves. Eko is giving her a cranky look and pawing intentionally at a small, white card that had fallen out of the wrapping without Alex noticing.

“Oh!”

She doesn’t even notice when the cat mirrors her exclamation. She picks up the card and reads it five times over, trying harder each time to grasp some sense of meaning:

Alec,

I no longer need this to see things as they really are. Thank you- for everything.

-Milo

Alex did not know of any “Milo.” If there had been any doubt before as to whether this gift was truly intended for her, it was certainly gone now. Still, it had ended up in her room…

She lifts the thing to her eyes and is surprised to find that nothing appears any further or closer to her than it does with her bare eyes. In fact, nothing seems different at all! She scans her room through the golden spyglass and it isn’t until she catches sight of the discarded wrapping paper that she spots something interesting. Where before the paper had read “Alec Bings, who sees things,” it now reads “Alex Bing, to see things.”

She raises and lowers the spyglass to and from her eye a few times before concluding that she is not imagining the change.

What could it mean? Alex thinks to herself before remembering the note she’d found. She quickly locates it and looks at the words through the eyepiece in hopes of discerning new meaning but is disappointed to find that no different words appear.

Her mother’s voice breaks through her many thoughts and she deliberates for just a moment on whether or not it would be a good idea to show her intriguing new toy to her parents before admitting to herself that she would never be able to keep it to herself anyway. With it firmly in hand, she skips to the kitchen and patiently for her mother’s attention to turn away from the food.

As she waits, Alex peers through the spyglass again and looks directly at her mother without giving the action much thought. In an instant, Alex is not herself. She sees the world as though she is double her own size, the counters dwarfed by her new height. She is tired, she is sad, she longs for something akin to love or appreciation, she is frustrated. She wants help and support and thinks both are a lost cause. She is a mother, working tirelessly to love and care and protect and defend. She is her mother and Alex understands without knowing how she understands: through the spyglass, she is seeing the world the way her mother sees it. It is more than seeing, it is as though she comprehends the why of her resentment and anger at last. Every single thing that she’d ever held against her mother is wholly dissipated in an instant.

The words from the wrapping run through her mind: “To see things.”

She knows instinctively what to do next. Refusing to answer her parents' confused questions of motive, she simply insists that they take turns looking at one another through the astonishing artefact. When they have each taken a long, silent turn, supper is forgotten and they embrace one another to give endless, frantic, now-unneeded explanations.

“I would love to cook dinner a couple of nights a week!” her father says.

“I am so thankful that you work so hard for this family!” replies her mother.

The strength of the experience seems to shake them to their core. For so many years, they’d been on opposite teams, each pursuing victory for themselves. But now they were on the same team, fighting to win together. They hadn’t been seeing things properly. But now that they have, it seems impossible they could ever have been so foolish as to see the world from only their limited viewpoint.

***

Over the course of the next few days, Alex goes to each and every single resident on Enywere Lane and does not let them rest until they use her spyglass- which she has taken to calling "Perspective"- to view those with whom they had outstanding conflicts. The speed at which things begin to change is a testament to the staggering power of Perspective.

The baker and the delivery boy amend their relationship, the baker understanding now that the bike accident that had cost him a day’s worth of baking had truly been an accident, and the delivery boy understanding that the baker had only reacted so poorly because he’d been relying on that day’s money to pay for medicine for his sick daughter.

The tailor and the weaver reconcile too, their dispute seeming silly in light of the fact that neither of them was actually guilty of the crime they’d accused one another of. And although neither knows who the real culprit was, it didn’t seem to matter- it hadn’t been the one whom they’d begrudged for years.

Mr Gree Vance and Mrs Annie Mossity realise upon looking through the spyglass at one another that their generations-long grudge for the feud of their great-great-grandparents is utterly pointless. Neither had one single thing to do with it.

Indeed, in less than one week, the once-boisterous town that had been so full of resentments and hatred manages to undo years and decades and generations of enmity.

The village of Knowere is quaint while its residents are quiet. It is a quintessential land of wonder where neighbours help one another, where families stand together, where they understand that the success of one is the success of all, and where Perspective brought peace at last.