Fundamentals of Creative Writing Prompt 2

PROMPT: You lost your sight along with everyone else on Earth. Without warning, two years later, your sight returns. As you look around, you notice that every wall, floor, and surface has the same message: “Don’t tell them you can see it.” What do you do? Hakamata Katsumi had been blind for as long as she could remember. Everyone had been blinded two years ago for some unknown reason, or so she was told. She didn’t remember much from before everyone lost their sight. All she remembered was waking up one day seeing nothing but darkness. On the bright side, at least the electricity bills were lower. Her quadruplet brothers didn’t take the whole being blind thing nearly as well as she did, though. Hideaki took it the worst, vain young man that he was. Yoshiaki was surprisingly calm about it, but Katsumi could tell he was hiding his true emotions for everyone else’s sake. Kazuhiko and Akihiko, on the other hand, went uncharacteristically quiet. Well, it was uncharacteristic for Akihiko. For Kazu-nii, it was like he just…shut down. He’d always been the unspoken leader of the quads, being the oldest and being the most sensible one. This whole epidemic seemed to break him. But the five of them learned to deal with it. They got used to being blind and learned to live with it. Sure, it sucked for a while, but for Katsumi, being blind was all she knew. That is, it was until now. She simply opened her eyes and found herself in an unknown room, with every single surface having the phrase, Don’t tell them you can see it. The simple statement sent a chill down her spine. Looking around, she noticed that every square inch of the room had writing on it. Against the bright white of the room, it looked far too close to blood for her comfort. She didn’t dare call her brothers. She didn’t want to know what happened if she disobeyed. For a moment, all she could do was stay where she was in stunned silence. This place felt like a glorified jail cell the longer she stayed. Whoever had taken the time to write all this certainly had some spare time on their hands…and functioning eyes. It didn’t look like the work of a blind person. It was too neat, too uniform. Were there people who didn’t lose their sight to the epidemic…or was this the work of the person who caused it? It certainly made sense, if they were trying to protect people from seeing something that would hurt them, potentially even kill them, upon seeing it. “Kacchan?” Her brother’s voice jerked her awake. It was a dream. Nothing but a dream, she thought in relief. …The only problem was, she could still see. “Kacchan, are you alright?” Her brother sounded concerned, uncharacteristically so. Yoshiaki wasn’t the type to sound worried. He always was the tough one out of the five of them, though that wasn’t to say that he didn’t care. Katsumi sighed, her mind still in that strange dream-room. “I’m fine, Yoshi-nii.” A beat of silence, then: “ Are you sure…?” He sounded so careful when normally Yoshiaki was the exact opposite. When Katsumi found it in herself to look him in the eye, she was relieved to see the way he looked past her shoulder, unseeing. It only seemed to be her that was affected so far. “Just a bad dream, nii-san,” she reassured him. She didn’t know what she would do if any of her brothers had seen what she just did. Yoshiaki fell silent for a moment, a strange, unreadable expression crossing his face. “… Alright, then, Kacchan.” Reluctantly, he left the room, returning to the bedroom he and Hideaki shared. This secret felt like a weight on her chest. But she wouldn’t endanger her family by mentioning it. She couldn’t do that to them. …She had to leave. Who knew whatever this “it” was? The message could have been something to scare her, but she doubted it. Katsumi moved swiftly, changing from her pajamas to something more suitable for survival. It would be hard trying to sneak out—her brothers and father were all light sleepers. She’d had years of practice sneaking around to not wake them up, though. Hopefully, that would translate over into surviving on her own out there. Food, water, clothing, iodine for purifying water, a small first-aid kit, a filtered water bottle, and a non-filtered one. She was as prepared as she could get. In the quiet of the night, it almost seemed like everything was okay again. Like they were back when everyone could see and the government didn’t have them all so regulated. She wished she could say goodbye…It was for the best that she didn’t. She couldn’t risk any of them following her. Without a glance back to the house she’d grown up in, Katsuni opened the door to the ravaged world their Earth had become. Here went nothing.