You could think of sight as a pact of sorts. There are things humans can see, and there are things they can't see. When Silas Brown looked at the smoking meteorite, he was expecting it to be only one of those things, not two or zero, but he was wrong.
In the brief, halcyon period when he thought he was looking at it, he thought it had the color of a meteorite. He almost understood, but he didn't. Meteorites have some color, black or grey or brown, but they aren't meteorite-colored. He wasn't seeing a color. He was seeing a meteorite and thinking of the object as a color.
He stared at it for longer, trying to describe it. Saying that he couldn't describe it was an understatement, like a computer saying "The disk cannot be read" as someone shoves rotting meat, teeming with maggots, into the disk drive. It was implying that the thing he was looking at could even have a visual description, when it was more like a horde of zealous maggots crawling into his brain through his eyes.
He tried to look at the ground, and it was the color of the ground and the shape of the ground, like he was making up a ground to look at. Disoriented, he tried to close his eyelids, only to realize he could see through them. He started screaming, but it was too late. He had sealed his fate from the first errant glance.
It would have been a categorical error to say he was blind at that point. He no longer had the privilege of blindness, or of sight. Prior to this, Silas had aphantasia - he couldn't visualize his mother's face in his mind's eye. But now, not only could he visualize her face, he couldn't distinguish between his memory of his mother's face and his mother's actual face. One second more, and he could see his mother's face in the same sense that he could hear or smell his mother's face, or the same way that he could use the abstract concept of his mother's face in order to keep his balance or tell where his feet were. Needless to say, he collapsed into a fetal position.
He clawed at his eyes, clawed them out, because he still naively thought he was seeing with his eyes. His fingers plunged deeper and deeper into his eye sockets until he realized he could see the sensation of his fingers feeling his eye sockets. To be clear, he could also see his fingers inside his eye sockets. However, his fingers were feeling the inside of his eye sockets, and that was being transferred to his brain as visual information. Even in his confused state, thoughts and sounds and sensations whirling around him like a hurricane of written words which he couldn't look away from, he understood that "the feeling of one's eye sockets" was a tactile sensation, not a visual one. He gave up and stared blankly at the ground, though he couldn't see it even after his frantic thoughts slowed to a crawl.
He was lying down, but he might as well have been floating in mid-air. He rolled over, a disorienting process of seeing the thought of himself rolling over, and seeing the sensations of rolling over, and seeing a dozen other rolling-over related things no human ever thought to describe, but without the actual, tangible visual feedback of rolling over. Once he was done, and all of the thoughts were gone, he might as well have been in the same position. He vaguely knew his eyes were on the ground, but he couldn't tell the difference between "knowing that his eyes were on the ground" and his actual eyes on the ground. That said, he was still desperately convinced he could stop this by destroying his eyes. He crawled along the ground, but it was a lost cause. He couldn't stop seeing his eyes because he couldn't stop thinking about them.
Then he noticed something that filled him with joy. Unlike everything else in his field of vision, it was very obviously not anything else. He couldn't tell what color it was - that made him a bit sad - but it had the vague shape of an egg on its side with irregular ridges and scratches all across it. He crawled up to it, rejoicing as it came towards him at the same speed. It took him a few seconds to realize he had reached it, since he had no other reference point. It was between the size of his eye and his head. He gazed longingly at it, putting his face close to it to see the minuscule, realistic imperfections that he suddenly remembered that all objects had. He thought it looked like a rock, and to his relief, the thought of it didn't overtake the object - he could tell which was which.
He touched it gingerly, with the hand he couldn't really see - and he felt it! He didn't just see himself feeling it, didn't see the warmth, didn't see the roughness - no, he felt them through and through! And the feeling meant he knew where his hands were, not just in the abstract, but as a concrete truth - he had hands, and he knew where they were! He rubbed his hands and face all over the rock, lovingly caressing his one lifeline to the real world.
And the rock spoke to him - and he could hear it!
"Paint with me," it said, and Silas saw everything fall into place again. He felt the breeze on his skin, smelled the acrid scent of burning grass, and thought about those things in his head, just as he always had. Silas was still facing the meteor, which he now realized was barely the size of his hand. He picked it up and saw the color drip-drip-dripping onto the ground and sliding off of it like quicksilver. He knew it had to stick in order for him to paint, and in his mind's eye, he saw a bright future for the both of them. He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and started digging.
Silas was no coward. He knew he couldn't see without eyes, and he definitely didn't have a mind's eye. As his world turned back into a storm of thoughts and feelings, the one thought that guided him was that no one should see this stone again.
Martha Rosewood and James Barnett saw something odd that day. Silas was crouching atop a mound of earth like a dog's mind in a human body, begging and whining not to dig down with his body more than his words. The blood from his eye sockets had dried, and a few of his fingernails had snapped clean off. It was an awful sight, to be sure, and Silas could see it too.
But Silas had no eyes. He could smell the blood running down his cheeks, feel the dirt beneath his hands, cringe in pain from his broken nails, but for the life of him, he couldn't see the oddest thing about the situation.
The color of his face, the color of his hands, the color of his shirt. They weren't quite the same, but they were similar somehow, like they'd been smeared all over with the color of themselves, somehow.
Squidmanescape has released this story under the CC0 license. This text has had its copyright protection revoked and can be freely distributed and modified by anyone who wishes to use it, depending on the laws and restrictions of their jurisdiction. |