The Blind Man

I got an entry comment the other day from a reader saying that the short story section of this website is for two types of stories: Romance and Adventure. When I first read the comment, I thought this person was maliciously attacking me and the short story that I had posted (which incidentally, had nothing to do with romance or adventure). I was understandably devastated. Finally, after four and a half hours of crying my eyes out and gulping whiskey, I came to the conclusion that this mysterious commenter was only trying to help me and point me and my writing in the right direction. After all, don’t I want more people to read my works of "literature"? Don’t I? (Answer: Yes.) So I decided to write a story. A story about romance.. or adventure.. or maybe even a romantic adventure. We’ll see what happens. Thanks, strange, anonymous commenter.

~THE BLIND MAN~

Chuck was blind. He’d been blind for as long as he could remember. According to his uncle Pat, who was a flamboyant circus clown of a man, Chuck had lost his eyes in a horseback-riding incident. Uncle Pat was also a horrific liar and Chuck knew it. When he’d lost his eyes, he was too young to walk, much less ride a horse. He always wondered what really happened, why his sight was taken from him at such a young age. Over and over, he begged his uncle Pat to tell him the real story, but Pat would always refuse, then laugh and turn up the bottle of cheap red wine, guzzling it like water until little red streams leaked from the corners of his gross lips.

Uncle Pat was an immense man, standing only 5’10, but weighing easily over three hundred pounds. Small patches of hair covered his bulbous head and a foul, pungent odor wafted from his arm pits, his mouth, and his rump. He often spent time naked, slouched into an old dilapidated couch, his loathsome gut hanging down between his legs like some enormous bag of oats. Luckily, Chuck had been blind growing up so he hadn't witnessed any of this. When he returned home from his first day of school, he hadn't witness his obese uncle passed out in the nude on the kitchen floor beneath the table, his face in a pool of beer, his lower body in a pool of urine. Chuck was clueless to the several times in his early grade school years when he had returned home, where uncle Pat lay passed out in the corner of living room, his body slathered in lard and his face painted like a grotesque clown. When Chuck brought home a girl after his first date, he was baffled as to why the girl ran screaming from his bathroom and out the front door because he hadn't witnessed his uncle, teeming with flies, passed out in the bathtub, the water murky and brown, with about a dozen apples floating around him. Furthermore, Chuck never saw the conditions he lived in, the clothes he was forced to wear, or the shady people his uncle frequently invited over to the house to suck down cigarettes, have horrible, disgusting intercourse with each other, and slog booze as if it were going out of style. Chuck never saw any of these things and he was probably a better man for it.

Needless to say, Chucky Pesevestos pretty much raised himself. He was a small man, roughly 5'7 in height. His blonde hair was shoulder-length and he always wore dark sunglasses so as to hide his empty sockets. Slender and athletic, he enjoyed exercising and getting out as much as his crippling handicap would allow him, which wasn't much. Even his favorite game, tetherball, proved to be most agonizing and difficult sometimes as his opponent would violently send the ball swinging around the poll at dangerous speeds, either slamming into his face with a sharp, painful crack that left an unsightly welt, or annihilating his sunglasses and leaving his empty sockets exposed. Most games ended in this manner and humiliated, he would stagger away, wildly waving his arms all about, trying to feel for his walking stick. Yes, Chuck had had a tough first twenty-two years. Maybe in the next few years, he'd find ROMANCE. It was definitely going to be an ADVENTURE. Time would only tell..

~~~THE END~~~