| Joined: | 19 Jun 2006 |
| Posts: | 35552 |
| Location: | Between the thumb and the wrist. |
|
This one's a bit longer than the previous stories. Still very short, though. 
Sunset
I was a terror for my mother. I figured out pretty early that the best way to get her attention was with a well-timed sniffle, or a cough with just enough behind it to stop her in her tracks. I was her worry from early on, with my father dying in the war before he ever got a look at me. I worried my mother to her last day, but by then she had good reason, I suppose.
What with all the exaggerated and fictitious maladies I inflicted upon the doctors and my mother, it’s not too surprising they missed the real one. I was slightly autistic, see. Seemed normal enough, but I’d get fascinated by the oddest things. First, it was birds. I’d sit in my room staring out the window at this one particular finch for hours, not even hearing my mother calling me for lunch or supper. Then it was worms for a bit, which I suppose was the natural progression. Anyhow, just all kinds of things would catch my eye. Mother just figured I was, well, sensitive would be the word. Not that it was an all the time thing. It’d come on some days, and then I’d spend the next week doing the usual kid stuff without a second thought for that finch or the worms crawling around underfoot.
It was the last one that scared her to death, or near enough. The first time, she found me after about ten minutes. Aside from some dancing spots for awhile, no harm was done. But my mother was a smart woman, and she could see what was coming better than I. Sure enough, a week later I got a jump on the day and it was more than an hour before she saw what I was doing. After a week in the hospital with bandages over my eyes, a week my mother spent reading to me from a book of poetry she purchased on a whim in the gift shop, they sent us home.
I suppose my mother fretted for a bit but, looking back, I’m sure she did what she felt she needed to do. She left the bandages on.
Now, I was ten years old, and ten year olds are nothing if not adaptable. I got used to getting around, to the home-schooling by my mother, to changing my bandages in the early morning darkness, so as not to aggravate my condition. In five years, you get used to more than you’d expect.
Then one day my mother didn’t wake me. For the first time since my accident I awoke before she did. You might think curiosity would have gotten the better of me then. Maybe I yanked off my bandages with the rash, rebellious, impulsiveness of youth, and that’s how I got the way I am today. You’d be wrong, but not far wrong. I knew my eyes were sensitive, you see. That too much light could do permanent damage. After five years of my mother worrying and fretting over me for just that reason, not a thing in the world could have gotten me to take off those bandages. Nothing but the deathly chill and stiffness of my mother’s skin, when I went in to check on her. I won’t bother describing the smell. If you’ve been around a dead body, you think you have some idea of what I mean. You don’t know at all. For a third of my life, I knew my mother 1/5th less than I had. Every remaining sense of her was precious. I won’t bother describing the smell.
I took my bandages off. The dim pre-dawn light stung a bit, but I didn’t notice it. I looked at my mother’s face for the first time in five years. I saw on that face every hardship she’d endured for those five years. She was still a beautiful woman, as mother’s always are, but I saw those five years.
I started crying, my eyes overflowing with tears. So, I looked at my mother’s face for one last time. I closed my eyes and walked to the front door, and through it, and laid down on the grass. I opened my eyes and waited for the sun to dry my tears. That old fascination kicked in, and I stared, lost in the fiery beauty of the ever-shifting patterns of the sun.
People have asked more times than I can count, what it’s like to be blind. Asked how I can write heartbreaking poetry about places that they’ve never been, but now feel homesick for. I never tell them the truth, or never did, anyway. The truth is, it’s wonderful. Every day, I wake to a perfect sunrise, and fall asleep looking at my mother’s face. The writing? Just something to pass the time in between.
The End.
Feedback is welcome.
_________________
Daily art blog Very Short Drawings
Pay a visit to The Writers' Block, where writers, uh...write stuff!
Read my comic strip A Boy Called Monk
Read my comic book Town of Shadows
|
|
