Invisible Women

Women & Eyes 2

The woman down the hall is blind, and we’re not discriminators, no, we’re not haters. We like her blindness. It isn’t her blindness that bothers us. We try not to point it out, to showcase her difference, but this woman down the hall, she wears her blindness like beaten pride. She walks into the room and stumbles on chairs and tables. She trips over rugs that have been in the exact spot for decades. We’ve even made concessions not to move furniture to make it easier for her to remember, but she refuses. She continues to fall, each time more severe, first a simple shuffle, then a twist, until she has broken bones and bruised organs.

We wouldn’t mind so much if she were nicer, but she isn’t. She’s an old hag with a stained mud voice. She comes into a room and falls and yells at us. She accuses us of moving things around, and even after we insist that we haven’t, that we wouldn’t, she picks up anything she can reach and with strange accuracy, hits us repeatedly until we are the ones with broken bones and bruised organs.

The woman down the hall, the old bitch, we hope she dies. We hate her, and there are times when we want to move the couch just one centimeter to the left or right. We want to put metal spikes where rugs should be and blackberry bushes into the elevator. We want to see her suffer, but it isn’t right. We aren’t people to discriminate, even against insufferable old women, even if we do hate her. We don’t want to, you see. We don’t. It isn’t right, but she makes it more and more impossible every day.