To See Again

Dorothy Ann remembers the day she could finally see again, although she didn’t really remember ever seeing to begin with. She’d been four when she stared at the sun and fried her retinas, and apparently her memory hadn’t been recording much before that.

The small town had gathered on the rugged creek bank with blankets, coolers of beer, and these strange, square, black sunglasses. Everyone huddled close and gasped as, for one hiccup in time, the sun went black day became dusk. Dorothy’s mom had warned her not to look directly at the sun and to keep her protective goggles on. But the goggles were too big, and Dorothy was too curious. She had to see why.

She did remember the way the sun looked. And felt. At least that. If you’re going to burn out your eyeballs, it’s only fair that you get to keep the memory of doing so.

Her blue eyes felt like flames, while watering at the same time, and the fire spread across her forehead and left smoke in its wake, a fog that never left her vision. Then, in the middle of her right eye, it was like someone took a hot poker and jammed it right through, piercing a black hole through reality. Dorothy’s own permanent eclipse.

As for the sun, it wasn’t perfectly round, like you draw it in school, and it wasn’t really yellow either. Even after the moon moved out of the way, the center of the sun was black, like this eerie purplish-black that felt more like an ache than a color, and it swirled and morphed like a slow cyclone, spitting out tiny black specks. Dorothy never stopped seeing those black floaties, either. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them waltzed through everything she looked at, even after she got her first pair of glasses at age seven.

That was the day when she started seeing too much.

Actually, the different shapes of her floaties was the first thing she noticed when she could see again. The eye doctor’s office was so sharp and bright that it made her want to barf, except for these comforting black spots drifting in the foreground. They were dark and fuzzy, like the legally blind world she’d grown accustomed to, and she reached out to try to catch them. Her mom and the eye doctor laughed.

“It looks different doesn’t it?” the doctor asked, and Dorothy scowled.

“Don’t be so grumpy, dear.” Her mom didn’t really mean it when she scolded her. It was just what she had to say so other grown-ups would think she was a good mom and Dorothy was a good kid.

Dorothy didn’t care if other grown-ups thought she was a good kid. And it annoyed her when people asked questions they already knew the answers to. Those kinds of conversations were space fillers, like gravel and flower gardens and pictures on walls. Unnecessary work designed just to pull people away from the natural, dirty world, full of weeds. Her dad had taught her this before she knew the alphabet.

“If left alone, everything turns into chaos,” he had explained dozens of times before and again last night at bedtime, his large, dark shadow sinking deep into the edge of her mattress and causing her to roll toward him. He smelled like beer and cigarettes, her favorite scent. She loved when his voice started to slur. That’s when she called him Fun Dad. That meant he was going to stay home from work for a few days, and when he stayed home, he would crank up classic rock and dance with her on the couch.

He’d already told her about chaos a lot of times but she’d let him tell her again last night because she could tell it made him happy. He was the only grown-up she wanted to impress. Dad was a scientist, when he wasn’t fired.

He continued, “You dust the piano, there’s more dust tomorrow. You brush your teeth, bacteria grows overnight. That’s how we’re made, little one. The world keeps on turning, and everything is breaking. Life is just about trying to die as slowly as possible. Do you understand, Dorothy Ann?”

She nodded, knowing what was coming next, but pretending to be interested.

“Equilibrium is perfect internal disorder. The law of entropy,” he said, tossing up his arms dramatically toward the ceiling and following them upward to standing. That’s how his chaos talks always ended. He murmured something else, forgot to kiss her, and stumbled away.

She didn’t exactly get the words he used, but she got the gist. Life was messy. Now that she could see more clearly, she could see evidence that he was right. The eye doctor’s face was slightly lopsided and his moustache hung too low over his mouth so it looked like he had no top lip. His face forgot to grow a chin and his mouth just sort of slid into his neck, framed by a white polo.

And her mom. It was the first time she’d ever really seen the details of her mom’s face, and it made her dizzy. Being legally blind didn’t mean the world was all black; her doctor had explained her vision was so bad that it could never be fully corrected, even with glasses. She had grown accustomed to her own way of getting around and identifying people and things by their color patterns instead of shapes. Her understanding of sight was a kaleidoscope of hues, shadows, and contrasts, and she was so good at translating it that she’d fooled all the adults until books came around and they expected her to read. And now she had to deal with this whole new layer of stimulation.

She reached up to hold her temples. Her mom’s shoulder-length brown hair was wispier than she’d thought. Her mom was smiling so wide that her mouth looked like it was going to eat Dorothy, and her teeth were crooked and three were a little yellower than the rest. Her brown eyes bugged in enthusiasm. Dorothy groaned and pulled off her glasses.

“Eww. Too much,” she mumbled, and she could feel the energy in the room drop a few degrees in disappointment.

“What do you mean, little one?” her mom asked.

“I want Dad.”

She could no longer see her mom’s face, but Dorothy could feel the frown. She knew her dad hadn’t come because he was home passed out, and she knew it would hurt her mom to bring it up, but her head hurt and she didn’t like her new glasses at all.

“Just put them on one more time for me, Dottie. I need to do a quick measurement,” the eye doctor’s mustache spoke with a slight whistle that her ears hadn’t noticed when she could see him.

“Fine.” She slid the glasses back on and wrinkled her nose a few times to get them in place. She slunched in the plasticy, stiff exam chair and blinked and rolled her eyes, trying to adjust. Everything looked small and far away. The doctor leaned in so close that she could smell the coffee and bacon he’d had for breakfast, and it added to her sickness. She looked toward the ceiling and tried not to think about it, and she felt someone else walk into the room behind him. Over his shoulder and in her new peripheral vision, she saw the person’s silhouette. She diverted her watering eyes and squinted to see who it was, while the doctor shined a bright flashlight right down her pupils.

As the person slid closer, fiddling with something near the counter, she noted the form had the same size and stature of her doctor and the same brown hair color, only it was wearing a red shirt. It almost looked like it had her doctor’s matching lip-eating mustache, maybe, but amid the flashlight’s glare, her new eyes would not focus enough to make out the details. She squeezed her eyes shut to will them to work. When she popped them back open, in place of the shadow twin she saw a flash of the sun, rolling into itself in iridescent purple-black like a cooling stream of lava. And then nothing.

“Huh?” She sat upright and shoved the doctor away. Her eyes began to water. “Who was that?” The doctor stared at her in confusion. “What was that?” Still confusion. “I saw a person behind you.”

The doctor peered over his shoulder and looked back at her. “A person?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw another doctor right there at the counter, but now he’s gone,” She said, standing up. “Who’s here?”

“No one else is here, Dottie. You must have imagined that,” her mom answered.

“It sounds like you just experienced double vision,” the doctor said. His know-it-all tone rung condescending. “Sometimes when something gets really close to your face, like I just was, your eyes get crossed and it looks like everything is double. But it’s not really. It’s just a silly trick your eyes play.”

“Everything wasn’t double. Just you were double,” Dorothy said. “And you were doing something different. You were wearing a red shirt. Maybe it wasn’t even you.”

Her mom could feel her frustration so she chimed in. “You’re still adjusting to your glasses. It might take a while before everything looks right, now that you can see.” Her voice rose an octave in forced optimism. “I bet it’s all so new and exciting!” She patted Dorothy on the shoulder. Dorothy wanted Fun Dad and Boston’s greatest hits.

“I want to go,” she said. “I don’t like this. I want to go.”

The doctor nodded. “Okay, try these out for a few days and call me if you have any problems.”

She tried to take a step but the floor was too far away and she stumbled and felt stupid. She tore the glasses off her face and ran toward the front door. She could feel the vomit burning its way up her throat in a race with her tears. She didn’t want to see what was out there.

They drove home in silence. Mom knew when to talk and when to stay quiet. Dorothy crunched her knees to her chest in the small backseat of the tan pick-up and clutched her glasses in her hands. She knew the road by its turns and bumps and the sizes of the blurs outside the window. They started out multicolored, low and close together and grew farther and farther apart until they began growing taller and turned reddish-brown. That meant they were in the valley. That’s when the roads wound tightly and the truck slowed down.

She squeezed the frames tightly and wondered how hard she had to squeeze to break them. When she knew her mom wasn’t paying attention, she cautiously held them up to her eyes, not hooking them around her ears or anything. She saw the wall of the valley and realized it was a huge pile of rocks stacked on top of each other, not a single mountain slab. The sky, too. It was a bunch of separate white clouds and streaks, polluted by her black floaties drifting by all casually. She gasped and jerked the glasses away. Everything was so broken. Dad was right. Again. She preferred her bad vision, when all shapes and colors bled into each other and the world was soft.

She pulled her glasses back up and leaned closer to the glass. With each exhale, her breath fogged up the window and the blurriness felt safe. She watched it melt away and the world beyond piece back together into its many sharp edges and fragments. Blur. Melt. Focus. It was in these small, breath-shaped chunks of reality that she grew her confidence during the whole hour-long drive up the mountain to the farmhouse. By the time they pulled up, she was ready to re-meet her world. At least she thought she was ready.

Everything was so dusty, making their bi-level yellow farmhouse appear foggier than the horrible doctor’s office, which made her smile for the first time that day. The truck had stirred the dirt road into the air, and she inhaled the familiar cloud with a cough. The first detail that struck her was the long row of bushes lining the roadside edge of the property. They were dotted with the most elaborate, tiny purple flowers that she’d never seen before. They seemed to be calling her.

“I’ll be back.” Dorothy jumped out of the passenger door on legs still wobbly from shifted depth perception. She felt like she was running on a trampoline. The earth seemed to bow beneath her. She crunched over neighborhoods of cacti and milkweed until the property line. She grabbed a branch a little too hard and knocked a flutter of buds off. She chased them downward and snatched them back up amid a handful of dirt, breathing in their fruity freshness. Her glasses tumbled off with her careless squat.

Click, click, click.

She patted around the dirt under the bushes for the lenses, wondering now why she’d selected rose-colored frames that would be impossible to keep track of. Click, click, click. There it was again. It almost sounded like the sound was inside her head, although that was impossible. Click. Her fingers found a plastic arm and she blew them off and shoved them back on her face. In the excitement and summer heat, she was sweating. Her glasses immediately slid down her nose.

“I hate you,” she growled to her glasses and set them back into place.

She turned her head side to side, looking for the clicking sound and eager to examine what had to be a bug with her new clarity. Most of the world was fragmented and disgusting when in focus, but she bet a bug would be awesome.

“Here, buggy bug!” she sang, but no one clicked back. She crawled deeper into the row of lilacs, wedging between the scratchy branches. Her long blond hair snagged and she grunted as she yanked it loose. That’s when she saw it. At the far end of the row, two dark and dirty bare feet. They were small, definitely another kid’s, and as an only child living on a seventeen-acre farm, she was always excited to have someone to play with.

“Hello! Hi! Hi!” she called out, trying to push herself out of the lilac jail as quickly as possible. The nearest neighbor was a mile away, and that was a family of three girls, including her best friend, Belle. Dorothy called her B.B., a nickname that’d stuck from when it had been her first ever word when she was learning to talk. B.B. was six months older and her first friend. They had silver “best friend” necklaces, even though B.B. had pushed Dorothy down the staircase that one time and broke her arm.

These weren’t B.B.’s feet. These looked like boy feet, not that feet have a gender, but you know, you can just tell somehow.

“I’m here!” The feet heard her, because they stopped and rotated toward her voice. She saw one big toe dig slightly into the loose soil and felt a flash of gratitude for her ugly glasses because she would have never noticed that kind of thing before. Actually, she wouldn’t have even seen the feet. It made her wonder how many feet she had missed over the past three years.

“Hi! I am Dorothy!” she shouted as she broke her way out of the branches and tumbled onto the field. Without losing momentum, she flung herself to stand, facing the far end of the bushes wearing her friendliest grin. “Hello?” No one was there. “I saw you. It’s okay! You don’t have to hide. I am Dorothy. I live here.” She crouched down to look through the bushes, but they were too thick. “You won’t get in trouble. I live here,” she repeated, now running toward where she had seen the feet. “I’m seven years old and I just got these stupid glasses today. Did you see them? They the dumbest thing ever.” She forced a playful laugh, even though she wasn’t really the laughing type. She tore around the corner of the bushes and her heart collapsed. No one.

She peered around the other edge, but still, no one. She didn’t get it. He couldn’t have run away without her seeing him. There was nowhere else to hide or go. Just a mile of bumpy dirt road and open fields in every direction. She pulled apart the branches, but no. She was alone. She must have imagined it, or maybe she really did need to get used to her new glasses, like her mom had said. She let out a slow and frustrated sigh and straightened her frames. She needed to go get lunch anyway. Plus, there was a whole new house to explore. She turned to head back home but stopped. There was no mistaking it. Two small footprints in the soil. One extra deep toe print.