The desert is full of blind men these days, all abandoned to God.
It started out as just a local tradition. Now, though, they come from far away. Some even put their own eyes out. They use knives and spoons. Even their own dirty fingernails.
Still others, believing such an action would be hubris, patiently stage accidents. They leave rusty canisters of acid on a shelf above their beds, robbing themselves of sight purely by chance or, if you will, by invited grace of the divine.
They’ve driven the sandy hoot-owls from the desert now with their night-long wails for succor and repentance, their filthy feet wrapped in filthy rags flattening the dunes and trampling the lizards and the spiders.
The townsfolk and the nomads fear the blind men, thinking them harbingers of judgement. They leave them packs of dates and full water-skins behind the palms that line the camel trails, especially now since every night the hoot-owls gather on the edges on the flat roofs of the huts around the caravanserai.
Anyone can tell those wide-eyed hoot-owls are bad luck and messengers from God.
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