Temporary Blindness

Here's a rough first draft of the very first short story I've written in months and months and months.

Temporary Blindness

I know it’s wrong to say, but I can’t help it: I wish he’d get hit by a bus. His walk is languid, easy. He’s one of the blessed few, the beautiful. God’s own chosen. For him, the world will open and engulf him like the countless women he’s made love him. No one ever said growing up, growing old is easy, and if they did, they were myopic. They were the beautiful for whom life is just that—easy. Perfect white teeth flashing in the sun when they smile their perfect smile. Their clothes, off the rack, shaping, contouring, molding to their perfect frames as if tailored on Saville Row in some spendy boutique that only money can buy the knowledge of.

He was no different as he glided past by me in the park. Ignoring the pile of work on my lap, I watched him to the corner where the light changed just for him. I know it’s wrong to say, but I can’t help it. I hoped his cell phone would ring, a woman desperate for his attention pleading for just one more orgasm. It was easy to imagine—he’d step off the curb as he pulled an earbud out, flip open his phone, not look left, not look right and step infront of a bus whose driver was distracted watching a group of hoods in the bak surreptitiously write “skank” or “penis” or “twat licker” on the window in permanent marker, maybe one of them rolling an imperfect joint for later, after the bus rolled to a stop, having crushed Golden Boy’s chest under the front wheels.

I’d bag up my papers and books, wait patiently as sirens wail and lights flash. “Yes, officer, I saw the entire thing. He, the boy,” because that’s all he really is—was—“stepped right into the intersection. I can’t imagine how the poor driver could have avoided hitting him.”

To an older passenger, her hair done up in a hairstyle that went out with Hoover, I would sympathize with her trauma. “It’s all too horrible to imagine and yet, here we are,” I’d say, all the while sizing her up, checking for a wedding ring and band. “If I may say so, and please, don’t think me too impertinent at a time such as this, but they are lovely pearls.” She would clutch her throat, maybe girlishly worrying about the folds of her chin, the worry lines her children gave her when they went off into the world to meet their own horrible fates at the hands of a negligent driver, because it’s always the driver’s fault, even when his own golden child steps into traffic playing the dating game.

She would twiddle her fingers down to play with the pearls, each a worry and an agitation strung on fine thread. Naturally, in a situation like this, I would be unable to hold back the need to comment on their origin—the pearls. But, of course, she would stop me before my lecture tumbled into the air and excuse herself politely; “I need to call my husband and tell him I’ll be late. The police will probably want to talk to us. Excuse me, Mr…”

“Samovar, Sidney Samovar, like the Russian tea service. Of course. Pleasure meeting you.” But she would already be digging out her own cell phone from the big black purse she’d picked out to match her sensible flats which wouldn’t pinch her feet as she ran errands all day.

Back on the bench, watching as the firemen spilled out of their trucks dragging hoses to close connections while others brought out push brooms for the glass, the ambulances would pull out, leaving the mess for the coroner to deal with. The henchmen of death with their gleaming stretchers and bleached white sheets and matte black body bags. It would fall to their lot t pick up the pieces of a defunct life and haul it away to a cold sterile room to be further photographed and dissected.

Under a cold light an elderly physician in his surgical blues and paper gown will secretly pray that there was some more sensible, scientific reason for the child’s death. Some better explanation to give the beautiful parents in their fine clothes and tasteful yet expensive jewelry for their prodigal son’s demise—something other than carelessness; youthful folly. Maybe he was pushed by the jaded old letch on the park bench who witnessed the whole thing from behind drooping eyelids. One of the lowly creatures that fill in the gaps of life with incoherent babbling about the terrible burden innocent mollusks endure for our own vanity in a grizzled voiced to some poor woman just trying to get to her husband who’s working late in a corner cubicle downtown cooking the books for corporate America. Any excuse other than sheer carelessness. Even that, maybe, from across the way, the sun flared on a window, temporarily blinding their son as he stepped off the curb.

And I know that it’s wrong, but I can’t help but wonder what will make the news later tonight. Will it be tasteful, just a quick blurb presented by a perfectly coifed waif with a degree in Broadcast Journalism from the local community college; a small box above and to the right of her head with a sanitized graphic of police tape and a body in outline. Will she say “Tragedy struck today” or some other seemingly clever yet innocuous word play about how that moron of a golden boy, the world opening in front of him, was run down in his prime, leaving behind a cell phone full of attractive young co-eds to move on to the next in a seemingly endless line of bright young men well endowed in the art of wooing?

Would the news trucks with their camera crews take tasteful shots from a distance of the carefully strung caution tape fluttering in the breeze as EMS personnel move about herding the shocked but curious onlookers away from the scene? I know it’s wrong to hope for, but I can’t help it. I can’t help but hope that, like the pictures of bodies riddled with bullets in some war-torn country, the effluences of a suicide bomber splashed on the mud huts and stone facades of a foreign city, the gruesome images of privilege crushed, bleeding, smeared across the tarmac are flashed on the TV for young children to see as they eat a late dinner in their quiet suburban homes. I can’t help but hope they’ll see the what end result of a skull’s impact with the front grill of a bus looks like; a warning, a wake up call to the beautiful people.

I hope small children cry at the sight of reality at home. But I know, I’ve been around long enough to know that the sanitized news won’t show that. They’ll only show images of the gruesome, the gory, the fragility of human life if it happens to someone else thousands of miles away.

Instead, they’ll show a photograph of this beautiful son of man smiling his thousand-watt smile on some beach in Florida while on spring break. Shirtless, arms around his friends, blessed as they are with nature’s finest and most admirable traits with the blue waters and white sands of the gulf as a backdrop, the sky righteous and burning behind them. White clouds piled here and there on the horizon as half naked co-eds—co-eds appointed by god’s grace to worship at their feet frolic in the waters behind them.

How else could the newscasters present the events to the blood hungry public? If it bleeds, it must lead. The story will run for a few days as witnesses are interviewed. The story of the over-taxed and underpaid driver will come to light when he defends himself by passing the buck onto the lower caste in the back seats who were working to undermine common decency; shirking their obligation to remain unseen and unheard as we all, the unloved, unwanted, must. Or at least that’s what the paid experts will say during round-table discussions, sipping water discreetly from a cut glass goblet, their waxy faces accented by just the lightest foundation and blush, eyes rimmed, lashes plumped reflected in the buffed surface of the solid oak table.

Together, the experts will make a fuss about single parent households, the lack of a responsible male role model in the poor, innocent hoodlums’ lives. They were just reaching out for help in the only way they knew how. Because they were raised by mothers and aunties and grannies working double shifts to support their Ecko habits—due in large part to the fetishization of modern consumer goods in the mass media—they walked the only path open to them, that of rebellion, isolation, self-destruction with drug and alcohol abuse.

I know that it’s wrong to say it, but it’s all true. Its always someone else’s fault. And maybe it’s wrong to say it, but, sitting on the bench watching that boy cross the street with the walk sign in his favor, the world unfolding before him, I wished a bush really would run him down. Maybe, just maybe, it would be the proof I need, the proof I’ve been looking for all these years, that there is some great equalizing force at work in the universe.

I didn’t used to harbor such ill will. I used to think someday I’d ditch the ugly duckling routine and blossom into a full fledged member of the ruling elite with an easy smile and quick wit that would charm the panties off every beautiful golden girl to pass my way.

It just never happened. The best laid plans blah blah blah. There was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeping on in their petty pace to this bench in this adopted city and this adopted life.