Random short stories.

The Operation

The room smelt of disinfectant. Somewhere an air con was going. I could feel the cool wind blowing through my hair. There were people here. I could hear them breathing and there was the occasional rustle of newspaper as one of them turned a page. But no one spoke. It was as if they shared my fear. As if they knew what was coming and dreaded it. What if something went wrong?

Mum guided me to a chair. We sat in silence for a while as I tried to hide my nerves. "Mum" I said, hesitant to break the silence, "What's it like to see?" There was a pause as she thought about what to say.

 "I don't know if I can answer that, Anna." she said, "It's like trying to explain sound to a deaf man."

 I was sick of this answer. Why couldn't anybody tell me anything?

 "It's possible though." I told her, "Surely you could get the deaf man to understand." I could almost hear her thinking: how on earth can I explain what sight is? But she relented.

 "Okay, I'll try." 

"Sight helps you to... to know where things are, if you can't hear them or feel them." I wasn't satisfied. 

"There must be more to it than that." I said, "what do people mean when they say something looks beautiful?" There was a pause in which I could almost hear everybody in the waiting room straining to hear our conversation. I wondered how many of them had realised I was blind. Then Mum spoke again.

 "It's a bit like how you might find music beautiful." she answered finally, "The colours and shapes come together like music notes to make something look beautiful."

Someone came into the waiting room then. They walked briskly and I heard the clink of high heels against the hard floor. A girl then. She spoke quickly, as if she had better things to do. "Miss Anna? Is Anna here?" Mum's chair creaked as she stood up.

 "Here!" she said, speaking for me.

 "Follow me." the woman ordered. We walked with the woman for a while, following the sound of her footsteps ringing in the corridor. She opened the door for us and we stepped in. 

This room felt smaller than the waiting room. The air was warmer and the noise of our footsteps was muffled. A man spoke from the corner of the room,

"Are you Anna?" I told him I was, and that I had come for an eye operation. The man talked with Mum for a bit, confirming that I had come for the same sight restoring operation that he had scheduled. Then he went over what I had heard before. "Anna, you know the risks of this operation." He said, "This is an experimental treatment and may not work like we intend it to. It's your choice Anna."

So this was it. Last chance to back out. I thought about what my Mum had said,

'The colours and shapes come together like music notes to make something look beautiful.' and I heard my brother say,

 "I wish you could see the sunset Anna. It looks amazing."

I decided.

 "Let's do this." I said to the surgeon, trying to inject confidence into my voice. He guided me to the bed. 

"You'll see me afterwards." Mum told me. If it works, I thought but I didn't say it out loud. By then, cold hands were pulling a mask over my face.

 "Breathe deeply." the surgeon advised. His voice dipped and faded into silence. 

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I heard voices. They got gradually louder like an engine coming to life. The surgeon was talking to someone. My mum, I guessed.

 "We think it worked," he said. "Her lens has been repaired and we removed the scar tissue left over from juvenile cataracts." Okay, so the doctors had done it. I got that much, but the rest might have been in Chinese for all I knew. The surgeon spoke again. "There may be a problem with how her brain interprets the information from her eyes. How old did you say Anna was when she lost her sight?"