A Beauty to Anticipate by Mathias Nelson

Blind at birth, he grew to be a depraved blind man, twenty seven and still living with his mother, sitting in his bedroom amongst a clutter of flowers that she bought him out of his fondness for sweet scents-asters, carnations, gladiolus, tulips.  Late at night, and sometimes in the morning, he brushed his lips against peddles, but nothing stirred.  He knew not a woman’s physical love.  He knew not a woman’s breast.  He knew not joy but for the smells and singings of caged crickets.  Sometimes he opened the window and rested in the sill, chin cupped in hands, listening and trying to picture the sounds, but only seeing the blackest black, nothing, as cars vroomed by spilling jazz and country and rock from their summer windows, while birds chirped, sometimes screamed with cat hiss.

His head out the window, cocking to every sound, May twenty-third he smelt something else, something of a different sweet, so potent it could almost be tasted when breath drew around his tongue.  Fond of this peculiar sweet, he climbed through the window, stumbled over the bushes and crawled through the grass, running long green blades through his fingers, searching for the scent’s source.  Ah ha! He found it, fluffy and limp.  He cupped it, brought it to his nose, inhaled, tasted the air, this forbidden sugar.  “Mmmm,” he hummed and brushed it against his lips as ants climbed from the fluff and tickled his forearms; he laughed at the black of his mind until his mother leaned out the window and yelled “Put that dead rabbit down!  What the fuck yuh doin’, Jesus!” and he dropped the rabbit out of fright, but knew for the first time that it was death, and that it was soft and so beautiful it tickled his arms and laid honey air about his fervent tongue.

Mathias Nelson has publications forthcoming in Hobo Camp Review, The New York Quarterly, and The 13th Warrior Review.