Don’t Tell Them You Can See

The world went dark two years ago.

Not poetically. Not gradually. There was no final sunset bleeding beautifully across the horizon, giving us one last chance to appreciate the color orange.

One second, I was standing in my kitchen arguing with my mother over the phone. The next, I was blind.

Completely, violently blind.

I remember dropping my coffee. I remember the mug shattering and hot liquid splashing across my bare feet. I remember screaming for my mother even though she was forty miles away and had never been particularly helpful in a crisis.

Mostly, I remember her breathing.

“Kara?”

“Mom, I can’t see.”

A pause. Then, very quietly:

“Neither can I.”

The entire world lost its sight at the same time.

They called it the Great Blinding because human beings are incapable of experiencing mass tragedy without giving it a dramatic little title. It made the apocalypse sound biblical. Intentional. Like somewhere, some pissed-off god had finally grown tired of watching us kick each other in the teeth and flipped the universe’s circuit breaker.

There were no answers.

There were plenty of theories, of course.

Solar flare. Bioweapon. Government experiment. Divine punishment. Mass hysteria, which was personally my favorite because it implied eight billion people had simultaneously imagined themselves blind.

For the first several weeks, civilization behaved exactly as well as you’d expect.

Cars folded around trees and telephone poles. Planes fell out of the sky. People wandered screaming through intersections, calling names that would never answer. Hospitals overflowed with injuries they couldn’t properly treat because the doctors were just as blind as everyone else.

Then the world became quiet.

Not peaceful.

Quiet.

There’s a difference.

Peace is a held hand. Quiet is waiting to find out whether the thing breathing beside you has teeth.

We adapted because that’s the disgusting miracle of being human. The body wants to survive even when the mind has already decided this is all a bit much.

We stretched ropes between buildings. We painted raised symbols on doors. We memorized the number of steps between our beds and our toilets. We learned which canned foods could be identified by shape and which could betray you with an unexpected mouthful of peas.

I learned the geography of my apartment through bruises.

Seven steps from my bed to the bedroom door. Twelve to the bathroom. Twenty-three to the kitchen if I didn’t collide with the end table I kept forgetting to move.

For two years, my world existed beneath my fingertips.

The chipped edge of the bathroom sink. The soft collapse of the couch cushion. The splintered wood beside my front door where I once missed the knob and drove my palm directly into the frame.

I knew everything I owned by touch.

At least, I thought I did.

Then, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning, the world came back.

There was no warning.

No gentle dawn.

One moment I was asleep. The next, light ripped through my eyelids like a blade.

I screamed and rolled off the bed, dragging the blanket down with me. My shoulder struck the floor. White fire exploded through my skull.

For several seconds, I thought I was dying.

Then I opened my eyes.

The first thing I saw was dust.

Tiny particles drifting through a beam of sunlight, suspended like stars. I watched them move with the kind of reverence usually reserved for miracles. I had forgotten dust could float. I had forgotten sunlight had shape.

My room slowly assembled itself around me.

The crooked dresser.

The laundry spilling out of the hamper.

The water stain on the ceiling that had apparently grown large enough to qualify for its own zip code.

Everything was hideous.

Everything was beautiful.

I started laughing.

Not a cute laugh. A deranged, snotty, open-mouthed sound that scraped its way out of my chest. I crawled toward the window, nearly tripping over furniture I had successfully navigated in darkness for two years because sight had somehow made me clumsy again.

Outside, morning stretched across the city.

Buildings stood in solemn gray rows. Vines had swallowed the lower floors of the abandoned office across the street. Rusted cars remained piled where they’d crashed on the day of the Blinding, softened now by moss and weeds.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I pressed my hand against the glass.

That was when I noticed the words.

They were written on the window in thick black paint.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

I stopped breathing.

The letters were backward from where I stood, painted on the inside of the glass. Each one was jagged and uneven, as though written by someone who couldn’t see what they were doing.

I turned around.

The message was on my bedroom wall.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

It stretched above my bed in faded red paint.

Another waited on the dresser.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

Smaller this time. Scratched directly into the wood.

My stomach dropped.

“No,” I whispered.

The words were everywhere.

Across the baseboards. Beneath the window. On the back of my bedroom door. Tiny versions crowded the light switch. Someone had written it repeatedly across the wallpaper until the letters overlapped into a frantic black knot.

I stumbled into the hallway.

More.

On the floorboards.

On the ceiling.

Carved into the bathroom tiles.

Written in permanent marker around the mirror.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

I backed into the sink hard enough to bruise my spine.

My reflection stared at me from the glass.

I looked older than I remembered. Thinner. My dark hair hung in uneven clumps around my shoulders because I had cut it myself with kitchen scissors. A white scar split my left eyebrow, though I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten it.

The woman in the mirror looked terrified.

Underneath her face, scratched into the glass, were five more words.

YOU WROTE THIS, KARA.

I vomited into the sink.

For the rest of the morning, I sat on the bathroom floor and tried to remember.

The paint.

The carvings.

The handwriting.

My handwriting.

I recognized the way the R leaned too far forward. The way I crowded letters together when I was upset. Even blind, apparently, I still couldn’t leave enough space between words.

But I didn’t remember writing any of it.

I didn’t remember buying paint. I didn’t remember damaging the walls. I didn’t remember taking a knife to my furniture or scratching a warning into my own mirror.

I searched the apartment.

The message appeared on nearly everything I owned. Inside cabinets. Beneath plates. Along the handles of silverware. Someone—me—had even managed to etch it into the metal of the can opener.

Everywhere I turned, my past self begged me to keep my mouth shut.

So naturally, I went outside.

I wish I could say curiosity drove me. That I was brave and determined and hungry for the truth.

Mostly, I was afraid that if I stayed in the apartment, I would discover another message written in my own blood.

The hallway was dim, but I could see.

God, I could see.

Ugly green carpet. Peeling wallpaper. Water damage blooming across the ceiling like moldy flowers.

The message followed me.

It had been carved into every apartment door.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

Someone had painted it along the stairwell in letters taller than I was. Smaller warnings clustered around it in dozens of different hands.

I wasn’t the only one.

Outside, people moved through the street with white canes and careful steps.

A man stood near the old bus stop, tapping the curb before stepping down. A woman guided a child with one hand while trailing the other along a rope stretched between two buildings. Volunteers in yellow vests distributed food from the back of a truck, announcing each item aloud.

Nobody looked around.

Nobody reacted to the sunlight.

They were still blind.

I stood frozen on the sidewalk while the seeing world moved around people who could no longer witness it.

Then the little girl across the street looked directly at me.

She couldn’t have been older than eight.

Her cloudy eyes locked onto mine.

Slowly, she raised one finger to her lips.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

Her mother tugged her forward.

The girl turned away, lifted her cane, and became blind again.

I should have gone home.

Instead, I followed them.

They led me through three blocks of ruined storefronts to what had once been a library. People lined up outside while volunteers checked identification and distributed weekly rations.

The girl and her mother disappeared into the crowd.

I was about to leave when someone grabbed my wrist.

I flinched so hard my teeth clicked together.

An old woman stood beside me. Her eyes were milky with cataracts, her mouth folded inward around missing teeth.

“You’re making too much noise,” she said.

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Not with your mouth.”

Her grip tightened.

“You’re looking.”

Cold crawled through my veins.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Good,” she said. “Keep not knowing.”

She pressed something into my palm and walked away.

It was a folded piece of paper.

There was a flower drawn on the outside.

Inside, someone had written an address.

Below it were four words.

COME AFTER THE BELLS STOP.

At sunset, bells rang across the city.

They had been installed after the Blinding, a way to mark the hours for people who could no longer read clocks or track the movement of the sun.

I waited until the final bell.

Then I followed the address to a church at the edge of downtown.

Dozens of small flowers had been painted along the buildings leading there. I had seen them before but assumed they were little acts of beauty. Tiny rebellions against the ugliness of the world.

Now I understood.

They were directions.

Inside the church, thirty people sat silently in the pews.

Every single one of them turned to look at me.

The old woman from the library stood near the altar.

Beside her was the little girl.

“Close the door,” the woman said.

I did.

“What is this?”

“A support group,” a man answered.

A few people laughed.

It was the first real laugh I’d heard in two years. It sounded wrong inside the church. Too alive.

The old woman didn’t smile.

“How long have you been awake?” she asked.

“Since this morning.”

Murmurs moved through the pews.

“Awake?” I repeated. “You mean able to see?”

“No,” she said. “I mean awake.”

She approached me, stopping close enough that I could see the burst blood vessels in her eyes.

“You’ve regained your sight before.”

“I haven’t.”

“You have.”

She pointed to the scar through my eyebrow.

“They took you last time.”

The room tilted.

“No.”

“You came here eleven months ago. You found us the same way. We explained everything to you.”

“I would remember that.”

“They made sure you didn’t.”

I touched the scar.

Somewhere inside me, something recoiled.

Not a memory. The shape of one. A locked door rattling in the dark.

“What happened to us?” I asked.

The woman glanced toward the church windows.

“They came six months before the Blinding.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know.”

That answer pissed me off more than it should have.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“We know they look like us,” the little girl said.

Her voice was soft, almost bored.

“We know they didn’t before.”

The old woman continued.

“At first, only a few people could see them. Children, mostly. Some animals reacted. Dogs barked at empty rooms. Babies screamed when certain people held them.”

My mind flashed to every conspiracy theory I had mocked over the last two years.

“They learned quickly,” she said. “Faces. Voices. Behavior. But sight kept betraying them. Reflections were wrong. Movements didn’t match. Their eyes responded to light differently than ours.”

“So the government blinded everyone?”

“The governments tried to fight them.”

“Tried?”

She gave me a look I didn’t enjoy.

“The Blinding wasn’t an attack against humanity, Kara. It was our last defense.”

Silence filled the church.

Without sight, we couldn’t identify the things hiding among us.

But they couldn’t identify one another either.

Humanity had made itself blind because seeing had become a death sentence.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would I warn myself not to tell them?”

“Because the blindness is failing.”

A man in the front pew lifted his head.

“The effect was supposed to be permanent,” he said. “For some of us, it wasn’t. Sight comes back in flashes. Minutes at first. Then hours. Eventually, it stays.”

“And they know?”

“They know it’s happening,” the old woman said. “They don’t know to whom.”

“What happens if they find out?”

No one answered.

I touched my scar again.

“Oh.”

“They take you,” she said. “They open your head. They remove whatever memories might expose them. Then they send you home.”

My knees weakened.

“You said I was here before.”

The little girl slipped her hand into mine.

“You told us to make sure you found your way back.”

I looked at the flower painted on the paper.

“I drew these?”

“You started them.”

For one stupid, fragile moment, pride warmed my chest.

Even terrified, even knowing my mind was about to be carved apart, I had left myself breadcrumbs.

Then someone knocked on the church door.

Three slow knocks.

Everyone went still.

The little girl dropped my hand and unfolded her cane.

People turned away from one another. Heads lowered. Eyes emptied.

Blind again.

The old woman gripped my shoulders.

“Whatever happens,” she whispered, “do not react to what you see.”

The door opened.

My mother walked into the church.

I hadn’t seen her since before the world went dark.

For two years, I had survived through occasional phone calls and secondhand updates carried across broken communication lines. She lived forty miles away. Travel was dangerous. We kept promising to find each other when the world became easier.

Now she stood ten feet away from me.

She looked exactly as I remembered.

Almost.

Her smile arrived a second too late.

Her chest moved, but the breath came before the rise of her ribs.

And her shadow leaned in the wrong direction.

“Kara?” she asked.

Every part of me wanted to run to her.

The wanting was so violent it hurt.

She stepped closer.

“Kara, baby. Is that you?”

The thing wearing my mother’s face stared directly into my eyes.

Behind her pupils, something moved.

Not light.

Legs.

Too many of them.

My mouth filled with saliva. I thought I might vomit again.

Instead, I tilted my head toward the sound of her voice without looking directly at her.

“Mom?”

Her smile twitched.

“Oh, thank God.” She came closer. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

I held my hands out in front of me, grasping at empty air.

She stopped.

I could feel her studying me.

Waiting for recognition.

I made myself look through her.

“I can’t see you,” I whispered.

For one unbearable second, neither of us moved.

Then she wrapped her arms around me.

Her skin was cold.

Beneath her shirt, something shifted against my stomach. Hard segments folded and unfolded beneath the imitation of flesh.

I bit the inside of my cheek until blood filled my mouth.

“My baby,” she whispered into my hair.

Her voice was perfect.

That was the worst part.

I let the thing hold me.

I even held it back.

Eventually, it released me and left the church.

No one moved until the bells began ringing again.

Then I collapsed.

The old woman sat beside me while I cried.

Not gracefully. Not silently. I sobbed until strings of spit hung from my mouth, mourning a mother I hadn’t known was dead until her corpse walked into a church and hugged me.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Yes, you can.”

“I don’t want to.”

“That has never mattered as much as it should.”

I laughed, and it came out broken.

“What happens now?”

“Now you decide.”

She placed a paintbrush in my hand.

We could expose the truth. We could tell everyone what lived among us and watch civilization tear itself apart. Every mother would question her child. Every husband would study his wife’s shadow. People would murder one another over delayed smiles and unusual reflections.

Or we could remain quiet.

We could pretend to be blind.

We could preserve what remained of humanity by never looking too closely at it.

I used to believe truth was inherently good. That dragging something into the light robbed it of power.

That was before I learned some things grow teeth in the sun.

I returned home before morning.

My apartment looked different now. Not like a prison. Not exactly.

It looked like a promise I had made to myself.

I found the black paint beneath the kitchen sink. Beside it sat a stack of notebooks filled with handwriting I didn’t remember.

Maps.

Names.

Dates.

Drawings of people whose shadows bent the wrong way.

On the final page, I had written a message to myself.

KARA,

IF YOU ARE READING THIS AGAIN, I’M SORRY.

MOM IS GONE.

YOU TRIED TO EXPOSE THEM.

IT DIDN’T WORK.

DON’T MAKE US LEARN THIS A THIRD TIME.

Below the words, I had drawn a single flower.

I sat there until sunlight crawled across the floor.

Then I painted over the warning above my bed.

Not because it was wrong.

Because it was incomplete.

In its place, I wrote:

DON’T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE.

LOOK ANYWAY.

Outside, the city began to wake.

Canes tapped against pavement. Bells announced the morning. Human beings and things wearing human beings stepped into the sunlight together, each pretending the darkness had made them equal.

I watched from behind my curtain.

Then I closed my eyes and practiced being blind.