It was a perverse pleasure  him playing a sight-diminished man  

and if the sunlight was strong enough he became a blind man cautiously negotiating his surroundings

Yes  it was perverse  though possibly only because he adored his sight

if it were an idol hed prostrate himself on his knees lay on his belly in subjugation

and if it wanted

                           hed sacrifice   animals         human animals for its pleasure

his Sight was God

he ached  anticipated his temporary blindness

                                                                              it piqued him as he walked down the long hill to the street where his mailbox was mounted on a square post stabbed into the parkway before a neighbors house

 

he read as he descended 

                                          the books white pages reflected the bright sun up into his eyes   served as an interrogators naked dangling bulb in the midst of the days torture

he laid his handwritten correspondences on their manilla edges  clasped the box  and pulled up the metal red flag that forewarned the postman of outgoing mail   which was now ridiculous to the postman  unnecessarily redundant

he rarely arrived at the box without parcels of mail tendered for collection

   

the unseen man who lived high on top the hill apparently had a lot to say   every letter was stamped again and again

the envelopes stuffed like sausage casings

 

climbing the hill as he read his breath quickened  though not by his exertion

he crossed the front porch to the screen door and only then just before turning the doorknob to enter the house did he stop reading   he tenderly shut the book   a slip of random paper to mark his place

the heavy black screen door groaned

someone else might have oiled it but he enjoyed its belligerent protest and thought  laughed  You cranky bastard

 

entering 

               he goes into his tittering humoured blindness   

he can feel his sight drain  dribble down onto his cheeks

deep gray stands on black

the rooms white walls are vagrants  shadows wearing badges where pictures hung 

 

on the carpet a cats toy lays like an emaciated snake  the feast of a small mouse in its thin patient jaws

the coffee table a shape gown out of the floor is crowded with gaping maws laughing mouths sheaves of corrupted black skins and darts shaken free from their backs and humped shoulders or spent porcupine quills who started in fright and ran to hide from him

 

a trembling nocturne of silence rises

too soon the blindness artlessly unfurls 

 

quicker than he wants

 

giving way to the acrid bleach of day that penetrates the blinds and loose curtains   seeping in like a stubborn virus

a white mould

as his seeing returns  viscerally  it reminds him how he tries to invoke another blindness with his moltenlit candlelight evenings or by the yellow and orange tonguelashed flames flickering in the firebox

he would never want to be blind

he simply enjoyed the tenuous vague shapes that came and haunted the smeared darkness   embracing him as how a childhoods cloak and long coarse scarf did as they tried to thwart the harsh cold   and let play the silvered phantoms dancing in his breath

     

1247,  Monday,  28  9. 15