She's designing a new kind of contact lens. Lenses that melt. Every morning, the user inserts a fresh pair. They liquefy by night, coating the corneas in a refracting serum. Gradually the melting lenses bend the user's vision to 20/20.

She got the idea from her favorite nurse in the ward. He brings her oatmeal and fentanyl. He stays bedside until she's done, ignoring the arrhythmic chirping of his beeper. He's addicted to mouthwash strips. A hit to his tongue whenever she asks for a sip of water. The burn is healing, he explains, dropping an emerald tile into her mouth.

He believes in her invention even though she's dying. He always asks to see her new sketches, her new notes. Handwritten. Faint.

She's a sophomore majoring in architecture. But she tells him she comes from a family of ophthalmologists. Her last name, Snellen, comes from Herman Snellen, creator of the eye chart:


                     E

                    F P

                  T O Z


The first three lines are tattooed on her right tricep. A ceremonial mark to remember the third Friday in March, when her older sister matched into her top residency.

He wheeled her older sister out of this room the day after they arrived, crushed and ruddy from the car wreck.

She says, my sister had the next five lines tattooed on the back of her left arm:


                  L P E D

                P  E  C  F  D

              E  D  F  C  Z  P

            F  E  L  O  P  Z  D

          D  E  F  P  O  T  E  C


She says, when I get back to school I'm gonna take an entrepreneurship class.

The prescription name for the lenses is gonna be Defpotec.

Defpotec means 20/20, that's what the commercials will say. 

Can you look up and see if a drug with that name already exists?

He pacifies her with a mouthwash strip.

What if my idea dies with me?

Your idea will live.

When ideas are born, there's no umbilical cord. Your idea is a kind of fire.

He touches his tongue.

But ideas don't burn. Ideas dissolve.


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