Skin Deep
CHAPTER ONE excerpt
Do blind people sleep with their eyes open? Are they even aware that their eyes are open? Do they feel them blink to stay moist?
Do the blind buy lamps for their apartments? When they get home from work, using the Braille buttons on the elevator, or the thump of their red-tipped cane on the stairs and it's a dark winter night, only 5:30 but dark already, do they turn their lights on?
Perhaps at night as you're driving by in your small blue car, using your eyes and your headlights vigilantly and you look up, really just with your peripheral vision for you mustn't take your eyes from the road, and you glance quickly and notice a dark house -- or one dark apartment in a building of lit up windows -- maybe a blind person lives there. Maybe a blind person lives there who doesn't know about the warmth of yellow light spilling into the night; the inviting and approachable glow of a home where people sit around the dining room table eating together, laughing and glad to be home. Maybe they just want to save on the electric bill.
Blindness, being blind and the lives of blind people, was the topic Martha was currently thinking about. She spent Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings in her office thinking. Or what she called her office, really the back booth by the window at the Winchell's Donuts down the hill from her house.