Each day came by with a bang or two of sorts. The girl who always sat in the corner of the school yard where all the dead moths gathered for some reason, never seemed to mind the constant humming of the principal’s ventilator near the window. She sat there all throughout recess listening to the children playing in the distance. She would close her eyes and listen to the colorful sounds of the chain on the swing and the thump, thump of the children’s sneakers on the metal slide.

Little sounds she liked. The whispering between little girls and their quiet giggles afterwards; the screams of little boys catapulting themselves on the monkey bars and their landing on the sand, of the courageous kid flying away from the swing in full thrust, in full swing.

All those sounds kept the balance of the world. That’s why Mr. Coupe’s ventilator never bothered her.

Neither did the thought of the whispering and giggling being about her, which was the case most of the time. Sometimes, it was about Gustav and his missing eye. Gustav had a tendency to lose his glass eye. His real eye he lost when he was three in a Karaoke incident which he doesn’t recall. Often, the nuns had to help him look for his blue glass eye in the sand but Ritchie and his friends would find it first and play with it after school. The nuns usually gave up and escorted Gustav to the nurse's office where he would wait for a replacement.

Over the years, Ritchie and his friends collected a large amount of Gustav's eyes. They carried them around in their pockets and used them as marbles in the playground. The clicking sound of the glass eyes in Ritchie’s pocket in particular fascinated the girl, who called herself Carrie even though her real name was Sandy Deen.

In her corner of the playground, she waited patiently for Gustav to lose another eye and for Ritchie to collect it. She couldn’t wait to hear the wonderful and exquisite melodies that would be born into existence when yet another blue sphere would join the countless others in Ritchie’s pocket. In secret, she loved Gustav and Ritchie equally and deeply for giving her this unique and everlasting gift.

Over the years, Carrie tried in vain to replicate that glorious sound. She even went so far as to bribe a doctor into selling her a pair of glass eyes, but it just wasn’t the same. To this day, Carrie still closes her eyes and remembers the indistinguishable, unexplainable sound of glass colliding against glass, like a small, colorful creature living inside Ritchie’s pocket.

Every so often, she would walk by the ol’ playground and dig in the sand gently with her fingers just to see, just to see.