The Jane Tucker School for the Blind

Malorie stands flat against the brick wall of a classroom. The door is locked. She is alone. The lights are off.

She is blindfolded.

Outside, in the hall, violence has begun.

She knows this sound, has heard it in nightmares, has heard it in the echoes of a fallen house full of sane people tearing one another apart as she gave birth to her son.

Tom is out there in the violence right now. Malorie doesn’t know where.

She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

She reaches for the door, to unlock it, to open it, to find her son and daughter among the screams, the hysteria, the frenzy. Something cracks on the other side of the door. Sounds like someone slamming their head against the hall wall.

She pulls back from the doorknob.

When she last saw Olympia, the six-year-old was reading braille books in the Tucker Library. A dozen others were there, listening to the classical music played through the school speakers by way of the record player in the office.

Malorie listens for the voices of those people now. She needs to know if this violence has reached the library. Reached her daughter. If it has, she will look for Tom first.

She listens.

Her kids have taught her a lot about listening since arriving at the Jane Tucker School for the Blind. And while Malorie will never hear the world they do, she can try.

But there’s too much noise out there. Chaos. It’s impossible to discern one voice from another.

She thinks of Annette. The blind woman, much older than herself, whose name she heard screamed, moments ago, as Malorie, hungry, walked the hall to the cafeteria. Before Malorie had time to process the nature of the scream, Annette herself came around the corner, blue bathrobe and red hair trailing like spinning sirens, knife in hand. Malorie had time to note the woman’s open, unfocused eyes before closing her own.

Malorie thought, She’s blind…how is she mad?, then she went still. Annette passed her, breathing heavy, moving fast, and Malorie, hearing the first guttural howls from deeper in the school, stepped blind into the nearest classroom and locked its door behind her.

She reaches for the knob again now.

The last she saw of Tom he was in what was once the staff lounge, pieces of a new invention at his knees. Malorie is responsible for those pieces. Only six, Tom the boy invents like Tom the man, his namesake, once did. Often Malorie’s instinct is to humor this impulse. She feels a mother must. Or perhaps, a mother should have, in the old world. Now, here, she always destroys what Tom’s made and reminds him that the blindfold is the only protection any of them will ever need.

Yet, Annette is blind.

And now mad.