Not much escapes me, which is quite something when you take into account I’ve been blind since birth.
You want an example? Okay. Take my brother’s throat clearing when his wife walks into the room. He’s probably having an affair. And before I hear a sniffle, I know Jenny’s coming down with something. Kafka said the world freely offers itself to you to be unmasked—if, I’ll add—you know where to look. That’s a joke, by the way. Same thing when I say: ‘See here, Jenny,’ or ‘I’ll keep an eye out for that, Jenny.’ Jenny’s my roommate.
She’d been staying with Ersy, her best friend from Starno High, while scouting for a place after a break-up. She initially worried about living with a blind guy, though I heard her whisper to Ersy after that first visit that she could walk around naked and I’d never know. But of course I would. It’s subtle, but I hear what people are wearing.
Pretty quickly, we had our routines. Mornings, I made coffee while she read something to me. Today, my first cup poured, Jenny came in and sat at the kitchen table. I heard her yank a tissue from the box and blow her nose, then the thud of a book on the Formica surface.
“It’s either my allergies or I picked up a bug somewhere.”
I carried my cup in the direction of her voice, pulling out a chair and sitting close, but not too close. Close enough to feel tiny droplets of oily spray dot my hand before smelling the tang of her peeling an orange.
“This book I’m reading,” she started. There was a slight moist sound of her sucking juice off a finger or two. “It’s about disasters where people survive. Hear of Juliane Koepcke? She fell from the sky into the jungle when the plane she was on broke apart in mid-air. Unbelievable.”
“Anything about the Hindenburg disaster?” I asked. “The blimp that blew up in Jersey?”
“Totally, and there’s a picture. I’ll describe it to you.” I heard the papery friction of her fingers as she shuffled pages back and forth to find the image. “Here it is,” she said, splitting the spine open with a muffled crack. The warmth of her breath filled the space between us as she turned towards me and started her description.
“Imagine an ear of corn, and it’s pointing up. That’s the shape. What? Stop laughing! Now imagine big, like the difference between your thumb and—” she trailed off and I heard the smile. “Now I get it. Twisting my words, are you?”
“They say a spark started the fire on the Hindenburg,” I offered, inching my chair closer until I sensed Jenny’s thigh next to mine.
“Yeah, sparks can cause all sorts of fires,” she softly replied. I didn’t see her shift her weight or pucker her lips. But I swear I saw her kiss my forehead a moment before I felt it.
Lisa Schmidt writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She’s a member of the Quebec Writer’s Federation and the Montreal Writer’s Collective. Her work has appeared in Literary Hatchett, Room and Prairie Fire. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.