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In response to Vinitha’s Fiction Monday #298
Word Prompt – DAZZLE
Once upon a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, a man decided he needed to dazzle. It began, as these catastrophes often do, at a school reunion.
He stood before his bathroom mirror, an unforgiving historian, practicing a smile that suggested success but not smugness, wealth but not tax evasion, wisdom but not podcast host.
He then tried on watches like medals. He sprayed cologne that smelled like a forest filing a lawsuit. He rehearsed sentences containing the words “venture,” “portfolio,” and “accidentally viral.”
He decided that he would not simply attend. He would dazzle.
And so he arrived wrapped in the glow of ambition, teeth polished to a small sunrise. He laughed half a second too loudly. He told stories that inflated gently like parade balloons. He glittered conversationally. He shimmered. He also sparkled.
He left exhausted. Because, the secret no one tells you about dazzle is that it is heavy.
Dazzle, as a concept, was originally developed by peacocks and marketing teams.
Peacocks do it honestly. They erupt into color as if joy has feathers. Marketing teams do it with bullet points.
Humans, however, attempt dazzle with a mixture of anxiety and Wi-Fi.
We curate, filter and we angle our faces toward light like sunflowers with LinkedIn accounts. We measure worth in applause emojis. We polish ourselves into performances.
And yet…have you ever noticed how fireworks, for all their drama, end in smoke?
Permit me now to shift the spotlight. Years later, after the reunion, after the watch stopped working, after the cologne settled its lawsuit, the same man found himself in a hospital corridor.
The fluorescent lights did not care about portfolios.
His daughter lay inside a room filled with machines that blinked like timid constellations. There was no audience here, no reunion buffet, and no applause. Only the steady metronome of something fragile and beloved.
He sat beside her bed. He did not sparkle or shimmer. He just held her hand. And in the quiet, something astonishing happened.
She opened her eyes.
“Dad,” she whispered, voice thin as tissue paper, “you stayed.”
He had nothing clever to say. No dazzling anecdote. No impressive statistics.
He stayed. If fireworks are spectacle, this was starlight – distant, steady, ancient.
Hold your sequins readers…Dazzle insists on speaking for itself.
I am Dazzle. Yes, the very thing. I have been misrepresented.
People think I live in sequins and spotlights. They believe I reside in chandeliers, in acceptance speeches, in the top shelf of charisma. They summon me with glitter and exaggeration.
But that is my cheaper cousin – Flash. Flash is loud. Flash burns quickly and smells faintly of ego.
I prefer subtler habitats.
I live in the gasp when a baby wraps its hand around a finger.
I live in the courage it takes to apologize first.
I live in the quiet competence of a nurse at 3 a.m.
I live in the sentence, “I was wrong.”
I dazzle most fiercely in the dark.
Humans misunderstand me because they assume brightness requires volume. I was never noise. I was nerve.
Back to the man who thought dazzle meant applause. Let’s borrow our proof from the ocean to the contrary. Consider the cuttlefish.
When threatened, it performs something called a “dazzle display.” It explodes into patterns – stripes racing across its skin, colors flickering like underwater lightning. Predators pause, confused. In that hesitation, the cuttlefish escapes.
Dazzle, you see, is not always about attraction. Sometimes it is about survival. Sometimes it is about buying one sacred second.
The man’s daughter recovered gradually. At the next reunion, because life insists on sequels, he wore a simpler watch.
He did not rehearse. When someone asked what he’d been up to, he paused.
“I’ve been learning how to stay,” he said.
It did not trend. It did not sparkle.
But something in the room shifted softly, perceptibly like a lens adjusting focus. Conversations slowed. Laughter warmed. Someone admitted they were tired. Someone else confessed they were afraid.
No one glittered. Everyone glowed.
We have confused dazzle with domination. We think to dazzle is to blind, but perhaps to dazzle is to illuminate. Not the kind that makes others squint, but the kind that lets them see.
And now, the final shift in the story arrives, not with fanfare, but with clarity. The bathroom mirror from that first Tuesday? It was never judging him. Mirrors do not critique; they reflect. It was he who brought the harshness.
When he stands before it now, older, gentler, he sees crow’s feet like delicate etchings. He sees the faint scar on his wrist from when his daughter gripped too tightly. He sees a face less polished, more porous.
He smiles, unrehearsed. And the mirror dazzles. Not with brilliance, but with truth.
So if you must dazzle, do it like this:
Dazzle by listening longer than necessary.
Dazzle by laughing at yourself first.
Dazzle by staying when it would be easier to exit.
Dazzle by being incandescently, inconveniently sincere.
The world has enough fireworks. Be starlight. It lasts and don’t dazzle for a moment, illuminate for a lifetime.
© Rohini 2009–2025.
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