Member-only story
Blind Date
Dark fiction about an artist and her muse, her masterpiece.
“Didn’t Charlotte tell you?”
I nodded dumbly, then coughed.
“Uh, no,” I finally sputtered, “no she hadn’t, uh, mentioned it at all.”
Helen nodded and arched an eyebrow which, for some reason, struck me as ridiculous. I stuck out my tongue at her just to see what would happen.
“I hope it won’t be an issue,” she said, staring somewhere over my left shoulder. I wanted to ask her if she just saw black but then wondered if she’d know what black looked like.
That’s the moment it happened. The moment I didn’t ask her the question.
That’s the moment I fell madly, passionately, head over heels in love with her.
Charlotte hadn’t told me about Helen’s blindness, it’s true. But she also hadn’t told Helen I’m an artist. The idea of painting for the blind struck me in that moment and I leaned over, elbows on the table, head in my hands, and stared at her. Really stared. Because Why Not? It didn’t matter.
I asked her about her work. What did she do for a living?I don’t know what I imagined, but it wasn’t this. She was a professor of Mathematics at a local university. My jaw dropped when she said it and she seemed to sense it.
