Eternally Blind

I sat down across the low-slung table from her.
Her blind eyes snapped at attention, but gazed heavenward.
Her clothes had once been fine silks of the Orient, but over years of abuse, they hung threadbare from her thin body.
Her face was that of terrible beauty, even beneath layers of dirt. Curiously gray hair outlined her otherwise young face.

She spoke softly.
Softly, as though not to startle the silence.
She spoke of many things.
Things of past, of present, of future.
But she knew that these were not for which I came.

“These things of which you wish to know, are you entirely sure?”
“Yes, Lady, I wish to know.”
“These things will trouble you greatly.”
“I do not care.”

And then she spoke of her past.
She was born blind, never knowing the light.
Her household was a humble one, neither rich nor poor.

She spent her days simply.
Since she was without sight, her days were always inside the walls.

Her hands were her sight.
Pale fingertips would glance over everything inside.
A wall, a trunk, a pillow.
Texture was the only real thing she knew.
And it was from that texture that she began to see the world around her.

The walls told of every dealing within the household.
The trunk spoke numbers of the people who passed.
And the pillow told of secret plots.

She was alarmed at the words from the pillow.
Surely, this could not be true?
Surely, they could not mean to murder the king?

But as walls and trunks and pillows cannot lie, she took this matter to the king.
That was her first day in the outside world.
She was laughed out of the court.

That night, the King was murdered within his own chambers.

She was dragged to the palace.
How had she known?
So she told them of the words of the pillow.

What sorcery was this?
What witch was she?

And with that, they took a mallet to her hands…to her sight.
She was banished.

I sat in utter horror.
How could my father allow such a thing?

She lays her hands silently on the table for the first time.
I feel my heart break.
Had they not been attached to her wrists, I would have no idea what they were.
Black and purple and blue.
Flesh at angles incomprehensible.
A mass really, limp and lifeless.

She speaks.
“People fear what they do not understand.
And they destroy what they fear.”

Sam Uttecht