Free Blind by Kory M. Shrum

When Dr. Barnard finally reentered the room, in a panic, Edison bumped his elbow on the examination table. A sharp resonant ping of pain vibrated his arm where it connected. Mr. Jacobi, the boy’s equally impatient father, also jolted upright from the stark wall he’d braced himself against.
    “I found it.” The doctor handed a sheet of paper and a pen to Edison. “I’m sorry to frighten you like that, since it turned out to be such a simple matter. I only needed the nurse to replicate the original.”
    Mr. Jacobi’s large, squared shoulders relaxed. “This shouldn’t take long. Just tell him what you want.”
    What I want. Tell him what I want.
    Edison’s hands shook the paper. “I want new eyes.”
    Both the doctor and his father smiled, encouragingly.
    “Of course,” Dr. Barnard said. “And you’re entitled to them.”
    Mr. Jacobi, a tall lanky man, tapped the mechanical orbs jutting from the middle of his face, fixed objects which moved and clicked as his father’s focus shifted from one object to another, from the doctor, to the boy, to the application in his hand. Again. Tap. Tap. “These are certainly more sophisticated than what you have now.”
    Edison cheeks burned at being misunderstood.
    “No,” he said quietly, his face flooding with a fresh wave of heat. He breathed through the overwhelming pulse of the room, warping under the pressure of his impending confession—“I don’t want another pair of Mathematical eyes.”
    He forced himself to breath, and then turn toward Dr. Barnard for help. “I—I want something else.”
    Dr. Barnard spoke on behalf of the boy almost intuitively. “It is not uncommon for young adults approaching Settlement to desire change. If I remember correctly, Mr. Jacobi, both of your parents had Technical eyes, did they not? Therefore your choice for Mathematical eyes was a deviation as well.”
    But Jacobi’s shoulders were already hunching again, rising up toward his ears. And the place on the back of Edison’s neck where he was certain his father’s glare rested, burned.
    Dr. Barnard, with a wide, generous smile seemed ignorant of the tension thickening around him. “What kind of eyes are you interested in, Edison?”
    When the boy did not immediately answer the doctor removed one wrinkled hand from the pocket where it rested and pointed to an area on the application that trembled in the boy’s hands.
    “It’s all here,” the doctor continued. “You need only check one of the labeled boxes. Instructive, Technical, Systematic, Empathic , Topographic— you have excellent neurological scores. You even qualify for Architectural and—.”
    “Ar-ist,” Edison said. His voice cracked.
    “Arsonist?” Dr. Barnard laughed, a hearty chuckle. “Sorry but we don’t have—”
    “ Artist .” Edison wet his lips and when he could bear it, he said it again, the way he’d practiced for the last two months. “I want Artist eyes.”
    The spinning room stopped. Neither his father nor Dr. Barnard moved. Edison knew from the stimuli interpreted by his own Mathematical eyes that only seconds had passed. His Mathematicaleyes also informed his brain that his father, Mr. Jacobi, was very, very upset. The darkening shade of his cheeks meant his blood vessels were dilating. The increased perspiration forming at his temples, and Edison suspected, his palms—the awkward shift in his weight and the rapid click of his metallic eyes as he looked Edison up and down, as if unable to process him.
    “Artist?” Dr. Barnard asked, softly. “Are you sure?”
    Only then did the rest of his rehearsed speech, his practiced argument come back to the boy. “I want to see color. To dream. And I want to experience imagination like—”
    “No,” Mr. Jacobi said. He trembled. “ No .”
    Dr. Barnard intercepted Mr. Jacobi’s escalating anger with a raised hand. “Mr. Jacobi, please. If you’ll run the calculations, sir, you’ll see that your anger is misplaced.”
    His father