Don't Tell Them You Can See

I woke up and the world was dark. I couldn't see a thing. It was like someone had rubbed my eyes with sandpaper, and then shoved two black rocks into my eye sockets. I stumbled around in the darkness, bumping into things, tripping over the rug, and cursing under my breath. The only light in the room was from the digital clock on my nightstand and it was blinking 12:00 at me in an off-beat rhythm that made me feel like my head was going to split apart. I sat down at the edge of the bed and tried to rub my eyes, but all I managed to do was smear sleep across my face.

"Great," I said, "I'm blind."

I heard a noise behind me and before I could turn around, someone grabbed me by the shoulders and put something against my neck.

"Don't move," a voice said. They were right next to my ear now, whispering right in it like they were telling me a secret. "If you move you're dead."

What? Who would...why would...what does that mean? A dozen thoughts raced through my head all at once, but even if I stopped for one moment to try and figure out what any of them meant, it would be too late. Instead I sat there frozen, half-paralyzed by fear, half-paralyzed by confusion.

"You can talk," said the voice in my ear. "But stay quiet for now."

This didn't make any sense at all! Was this some kind of demented joke? Some weird prank? Why would someone pretend to be threatening me when they didn't have anything to gain from doing so? And why would they pretend to threaten me without actually threatening me?

"Um..." I stammered. "Who are you?"

"Shut up!" said the voice sharply. Now I really had no idea what was going on here! Was this person really threatening me or...or was this just some kind of bizarre game? Maybe it was some kind of role-playing scenario where we were pretending to be holding each other hostage while we were both naked in bed together talking about how afraid we were! Wow! That sounded awesome! Let's do it more often!

"Are we role playing!?" I asked excitedly. "Oh man, I love role playing!"

The person holding onto me let go and laughed quietly for a second before saying "No."

 "Then what are we doing?" I asked eagerly, still not sure if this was real or not, but dying to find out either way.

The person stood up behind me again and whispered "Listen carefully." Then they told me everything they knew about what had happened since The Great Blinding started two years ago, how people feared The Darkness because they thought it was punishment from God for doing bad things or something along those lines (I've always been terrible at paying attention during sermons), how people tried to live their lives as normally as possible despite being robbed of such a fundamental human ability as sight (which sounds great until you remember that humans are lousy at performing the most basic of physical activities without vision), how people finally gave up hope after two years when nothing changed (a depressing thought), how there is evidence that young children somehow retained their eyesight long after everyone else became blind (and yet amazingly stayed alive long enough to tell us about it), how babies born blind somehow seemed to grow into normal adults who could speak and walk upright (are they aliens!?), how scientists speculated that whatever caused The Great Blinding might have been biological (like an airborne virus)...and on and on she went until finally taking a deep breath and saying:

"So basically," she finished, "the entire planet has gone crazy." Then she grabbed onto my shoulders again and whispered one final time: "And don't tell anyone you can see."