See

• Sadia Afroz, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2022

Two years. Two years since the beginning of all the chaos. Two years since the start of all the disasters and mayhem. Two years since the world started to fall apart. Piece by piece. Two years since sight was abruptly torn from our eyes and lives.

In this digital era that we have built for ourselves, sight is the most important of our five senses. Without it everything began to fall apart, catastrophe, calamity and cataclysm wreaked havoc throughout our perfect, structured world.

It started with our neighbourhoods, local areas, communities, towns and cities. It started small but was no less dangerous than everything else. Alarm, panic, anxiety and terror took over our brains preventing us from thinking clearly, and sanely.

You could hear the screams and cries of the people unfortunate enough to be in the way of all the chaos. The chaos of the vehicles crashing into each other. Into buildings. Into pedestrians. Anything around them.

If you think that's bad, you haven't even heard the worst of it all. The disasters then continued to cause problems nationally and thus globally. Power stations were left unmanned and unattended, crops weren't being looked after, not farmed or harvested. There was no trade or commerce. Not being able to complete via the LED screens we all had become so attached to. So accustomed. So dependent on. These blind mistakes had now cost us our whole world. Now pandemonium, discord and mayhem ruled our once perfect world.

For the first in two long years, I could finally view all of the horrors and atrocities that were only experienced by our other four senses. The repulsive, nauseating stench of decomposing and rotting corpses left on the sides of the streets, on the roads, and in our homes. The torturing silence of machinery no longer in use, pierced by the screams of those meeting their painful fate and death against others in fear or desperate cries for food. Cold confusion and panic cloaked everyone's minds like a blanket, blocking out any sense of calm anyone left.

It was written on every flat surface. From the side of high-rise buildings to homes to roads, they were all covered in the same blood-red stain complication of letters and words repeatedly. It was everywhere. Letting my sight adjust, I could finally read the mysterious mantra and its compelling order.

DON'T TELL THEM YOU CAN SEE



If only I had anyone left to tell.