Carrot Ranch September 21 flash fiction prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story using a lens.
Jane is looking idly around the Metro stop when she sees it.
Here she stands with everyone else, scrolling on her phone, her second-hand boots and Patagonia windbreaker and messy updo indistinguishable from anyone else’s. No way to tell that the thirty-eight dollars in her wallet is her very last, that her bus card is low-income, that the tall Americano she’s sipping is her first such splurge in a month.
Amazing. She’s pulling it off, looking like everyone else, with their Starbucks apps and credit card bills.
How many of these people are, secretly, no different from her?
99 Monkeys 
Nice use of the prompt, the way we bring our own internal lenses to bear on how we see people. I was touched by the flash. So many brave young souls out there, my two among them, steering clear of the precipice, making their way. Maybe we do get to control, sometimes, what the world may see of us.
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Thank you! I suspect we put a lot more energy than we realize into helping the world see us as we want to be seen.
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We not only apply certain lenses, but we can fool the lens by which others look. Sometimes I think our sense of self gets connected to a lens and when broken we aren’t so sure who we are. Jane has gone through a full process of losing and regaining her “look.”
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We spend an awful lot of energy readying ourselved for lenses that may not even be there, I think. How can we really know what others see?
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A strong write well done, thoroughly captured in the lense
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Thank you!
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