I Can See
by Ben White

It is sundown when she walks up to the clinic. Only I am there, and I am only there to call a transport for the emergencies and to tell everyone else to come back tomorrow. The drug company will be back then, with their van of creams and shampoos and ibuprofen and cough syrup. Things Americans would scoff at, but these people don’t seem to know better. Advil is like morphine to the uninitiated.

She looks blankly at me. Her eyes were blue once, I think. They’re cloudy now, and I wonder if she can she through her cataracts that the sun is setting or if she knows that I am a white man. After the days of constant stares, her near blindness is a pathetic relief to me.

She hands me two pamphlets in Spanish. One asks me to choose between heaven and hell. The other is about Sodom, Gomorrah, and the homosexual shadow group that runs Hollywood. I stuff them in my white coat pocket. There is no chance that she can read these scraps of paper, and I wonder if she even knows what they say. Her hand is out. She says nothing but smiles with gaps and gray teeth. I am new here, but I think she is making her rounds. I press fifty pesos into her hand. She bows slightly, nodding her head before she turns to go. She does not ask for help. I do not offer it.

Soon I will leave this place. I will take a cab home from the airport, and my boyfriend will surprise me in our apartment with lasagna and two bottles of crisp white wine.

I watch her walk westward down the rocky path. The Dominican sunset is too bright, and I squint to take it in.

 

BEN WHITE edits Nanoism, writes Midnight Stories, and has been going to the gym lately. His recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Matchbook, PANK, and elimae, among others.

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