This is a reworked redux of one I posted a couple of years back for a Daily Prompt. It fits right in with today’s Daily Prompt. Hope you enjoy it.
“Wadda ya mean you can’t see me? I’m right here in fronta yer face!”
“I said I can’t see you! My ears tell me where you should be, but you’re not there. You’re not here! You’re not anywhere! There’s nothing where my ears tell me the sound of your voice is coming from.”
“Aw, come on, quit foolin’ around. Look. I’m wavin’ my arms around.”
“Yeah, maybe you are, but I’m not seein’ it because you’re not in the room.”
“What, have ya gone blind? I told you that you needed to go to the eye doctor. Now maybe you’ll listen to me.”
“I’m listening to you right now and I can see just fine! I’m in the living room of our house, but you’re not! There’s a ceiling fan in the center of the room with an oiled bronze finish and dark oak blades. It’s turning on low speed right now. It has two chains extending down with oiled bronze finials, one for the light, which by the way is on, and one for the fan. The couch is a muted floral print in tan, green and rose, with rolled arms and three green accent cushions. The chairs are upholstered in a solid rose color and pick up the rose in the couch pattern …“
“Oh come on, you could do that from memory. You bought all this stuff anyway. You really need to go to the eye doctor if you can’t see me here!”
“…and the cat just walked into the room carrying her favorite stuffed mouse toy. There, how’s that?”
“Ah, that cat always carries around that mouse around. It’s like a security blanket. That’s true any day at any time … oh, sorry kitty. Didn’t mean to step on you.”
“Yeah, you see her, and it looked like something spooked her, but there’s nothing there to spook her! Because she can’t see you either! And now she’s really spooked!”
“Mrreeooow! Hsssss”
“Oh come on. You’re going crazy here. There I just touched your hand.”
“Yeah, I felt you touch me, but I didn’t see you touch me because you’re not there!”
“Ok, I’ll prove it to you, come on with me and let’s stand in front of the hallway mirror. Jeez, you’ve really got to make that eye appointment.”
“There you go smart ass, I see me, but there’s no one else in the mirror!”
“Oh, holy crap. The WP people gave me a superpower today. I could disappear and reappear at will. But they didn’t say how long it would last, and I forgot to ask. I must have disappeared and forgot to reappear before the power wore off.”
“See, I told you that you weren’t here! What are you doin’ messin’ around with superpowers anyway? And especially superpowers from the WP people! Serves ya right.”
“Yeah, I guess it does. But there’s a bit of a problem here.”
“Oh, and what would that be, Mr. Invisible Man?”
“Well, they won’t repeat the prompt for another couple years, so I won’t get the superpower back till, sheez, 2018?”
“Ha! Guess I won’t be ‘seein’ ya around’ then, eh?”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
“Now you see what I’m talkin’ about!”
“Yeah. Invisible“
Rudy's Ruminations 
Ralph Ellison wrote a novel by this name in 1952. Critics such as Orville Prescott of The New York Times called the novel “the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read,” and felt it marked “the appearance of a richly talented writer”. Novelist Saul Bellow in his review found it “a book of the very first order, a superb book…it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence” George Mayberry of The New Republic said Ellison “is a master at catching the shape, flavor and sound of the common vagaries of human character and experience.” In The Paris Review, literary critic Harold Bloom referred to Invisible Man, along with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, as “the only full scale works of fiction I have read by American blacks in this century that have survival possibilities at all.”
Now today we have many famous authors of color. They just needed a chance to become visible and Ellison gave them that chance.
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I’ve heard of Ellison’s “Invisible Man” but I’ve never read it. I think it should go on this summer’s list. Thank you for reading, and for commenting.
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It is tough reading for many reasons–an initiation of sorts. My first encounter with the book was while I was a young student at WTAUM in Canyon, Texas. My eyes were opened to a world I never knew existed.
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