The Blind Man

I really should be editing my stories more before I actually publish them, but it's four in the morning, I'm tired, but I can't get to sleep, and I'm freaking out because there's school today and it looks as if I'll be going on three hours of sleep.........
terribly sorry! >.<

He looks up into sky—it’s still filled with these blackened storms of dwindling ashes, like every other day from some time now. This hurricane wiped out everything so long ago, he hardly remembers what everything was before shadows. For he doesn’t count his being in the minutes of hours of days of weeks anymore. His life is made up of two ages; two lifetimes and nothing else—the age of Seeing and the age of Eternal Blackness. He misses the sky, he misses the birds, he misses the color, but he goes on in a world where all of these things left to never return. He can looks back down from the inky sky to where most watch cities of unknown streets and strangers, but there is nothing else. Only endless darkness for miles and miles. he visits his shadowy sky and streets everyday—listening; imagining what it is under his blanket of darkness—only to return back into his blackened home hidden in the sky’s same ash. There a woman will sit down next to him and they talk of so many things for so many hours. They talk of what she has seen; she is his eyes and talking to her is the only glimpse he gets out from under his blindfold.

                “Tell me, what does the sky look like today, Elsa?”” he will ask.

                She smiles and replies “oh, the sun is smiling and the sky is so blue without a cloud to shadow it. But, you already knew that, didn’t you?”

                He can sense her grinning, remembering how beautiful her smile was before the ash erased it “of course I did, I could feel the heat against my shoulders this morning and the birds told me through their happy melodies. But I wanted to make sure I was seeing it right.”

                “You always are,” she sighs.

                The man chuckles “I know. But I only glimpse it from memory, where when you speak it’s as if my eyes just barely open as they once did.” he says matter-of-factly. “now tell me, what do you see out the window?”

                She silences for a second, as she absorbs everything through her eyes—they’re blue, he recalls, like an icy river in January—before she starts talking again, “Next door our neighbors are squabbling again—gosh, Kristine is more flushed than my tomatoes—oh and there Fred goes marching back inside. I wish they wouldn’t, it is awfully pointless. Ignoring the neighbors though, it really is a delightful day. The birds are out, and the children play. Our garden is blooming. The daffodils are lovely and yellow, and my tomato plants are sprouting… Do you see it now?”

                He smiles sadly “almost Elsa, yes, I almost do.” And again he looks blankly out their kitchen window, imagining what the world was once like without his shadows.

 

Kristin :)