Gingerbread Man

loose from his tether, floating through space, only without a spacesuit. Or a body. Or any senses at all. He was adrift in a vacuum that was stretching him in all directions and dimensions, and he was thinning, and thinning, and wondering when he would simply become a part of the void.
    * * *
    THE NIGHTMARES STARTED my first night home, barely forty-eight hours after the bandages came off my eyes. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Because really, that was major, that day. It was fucking
huge
.
    I hadn’t taken the bandages off myself. Not because the doc had warned me so sternly against it—like
that
would have stopped me. I wasn’t real good at doing what I was told. Or conforming. Or following rules. Or anything, really, except writing books telling people to follow their bliss. The more ways I could find to say it, the more books I sold. But the truth was, the whole premise—that you could attract good things to you by being good yourself; that a positive attitude would make life go smoothly; that belief could create fortunes and castles and bliss—was flawed. It had been drummed into me by the well-meaning adults around me ever since I’d lost my eyesight for good.
    Look for the silver lining, Rachel.
    Everything happens for a reason, Rachel.
    Something positive will surely come of this, Rachel.
    And I remember thinking,
My God, they actually
believe
this shit!
    And when they started getting me books—audiobooks back then, though now it’s ebooks with text-to-speech enabled, because let’s face it, braille is kind of passé these days—that spouted the same bull, I realized they not only believed it, they
wanted
to believe it.
    By the time I was sixteen I had figured out that these Pollyanna idiots would pay any amount of money for any product that supported their inane beliefs, because those beliefs were so flimsy they needed constant reinforcement. One stiff gust of logic or common sense would blow them to hell and gone. Hence, the self-help guru explosion of the first decade-and-a-half—so far—of the new millennium. Entire companies have been born and built around the idea that one could create one’s own reality. Those companies produce books and DVDs and card-kits created by authors who pretend to understand quantum physics, and use their brand of pseudo-science to support their claims that
you are what you think
and all that crap.
    Eventually I figured, why fight it when I could make millions off it instead?
    So that’s what I did. That’s what I
do
. Being blind makes me even more popular among the sheep—I mean masses. Silver lining? No. Smart thinking.
    But back to the subject. No, I didn’t take the bandages off. I was an obedient conformist for the first time in…well, ever. I waited because I was scared shitless. I had not seen in twenty years, not really. The post-transplant unveilings of the past had been little better than the blindness that had preceded them and of course, short-lived. And before I’d lost my sight entirely, there had been a solid year of slow fading, so the final unforgettable image I’d seen—my brother, Tommy—had been dull and dark around the edges.
    Point is, I was too scared to take the bandages off myself. I don’t even know what I was scared of, exactly. That the transplant hadn’t worked and I would still be blind, maybe, or maybe that I would be able to see again and it would be terrible.
    I know, stupid, right? How can seeing be terrible? I guess it’s like anything else in the human psyche. When we don’t know what to expect we’re all alike: terrified. And frankly, I probably would have gotten over the fear and yanked the eye patches off myself if I’d had to wait very long for the doc to do it. But I didn’t. Just overnight.
    So I was sitting up in the bed, listening to the clock tick and my sister yap at me in an effort to try to distract me from my impatience. My breakfast tray was still there, wafting aromas that weren’t really bad but were making my stomach turn anyway. Amy was there. She was unusually quiet. Barracuda Woman was there via Skype, on a laptop beside my bed. The twins were at the mall. Sandra wisely thought maybe I’d like to see them for the first time with just us four.
    Mott hadn’t even shown up. Him and his idea that being blind was something to be proud of. Like we should have a freaking parade. Blind Pride. Fuck that. If I could see, I damned well wanted to.
    And there it was. My hopes were high. I