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GrunkleStanwhich t1_j70oix3 wrote

"What do you see?" I asked, staring up to the blackened sky above.

"Hundreds, thousands of lights. Little, white lights, some big, some small. Like Christmas." Jackson replied over my shoulder.

I squinted my eyes and tried to imagine it. To concentrate hard enough that maybe the lights, stars, would appear, but nothing as always. The sky remained barren.

Star blind, they called it. Such an interesting term for a mundane defect. A genetic disorder categorized by ones inability to see the wavelength projected by stellar bodies., is what my medical sheet said.

"See anything yet?" Jackson moved closer, eyes still fixed to the sky.

"Yet? I never will. I won't just suddenly get over my Star Blindness." I shot back. I could feel the sadness creeping up at the back of my throat. I was angry, jealous, but most of all frustrated that I still felt so incomplete. That my entire world was in blackness. That I couldn't tell the difference between day and night. That me and the others like me had to carry around those damned solar lanterns when nobody else did.

"I...yeah I'm sorry. I didn't really think." Jackson mumbled to the ground.

But I was no longer concerned with his words as something had appeared up in the sky. A spiral, small at first but growing larger by the second.

"Wait, Jackson! I think I see one!" I pointed to the sky. "It's growing!"

He looked up quickly in excitement, but was only left squinting as I had been before. "Uh...Marcy, there's nothing up there. As a matter of fact that's the only place in the sky without stars." His voice changed to panic.

I stared as it continued its blackened swirl, like a pit of tar holding all that it could within. Swallowing but never full. A void of nothingness.

It's me, I thought. Doomed to never see what it swallows, yet taking it anyways. Doing my bidding, making sure that next time someone looks up to the sky, they see the same blackness as I.

I hoped it would leave the world truly black.

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Vegan-bandit OP t1_j71jp6c wrote

Nice! I especially liked the idea of solar lanterns for star blind people to be able to see. It didn't quite occur to me that they wouldn't be able to see at all without them, but of course, our Sun is a star.

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