Published in the Weekend Australian Magazine, September 2015
There’s a moment some days, as the sun sinks low over Fitzroy, and the fading natural light drains the orchids’ cheeks of colour, when Jodi Dowley’s chest pulses with fear, and that familiar, horrible thought flashes through her head: It’s happening again.
Jodi sees her flower shop, and the rest of the world, through a narrow tunnel of light from her right eye. She holds a hand out. ‘I can see it.’ She moves it a few inches to the side. ‘I can’t see it now.’ From her left eye she sees nothing but a fuzzy patch of light, like a cloud across the night sky. As with evolution, the smallest improvement helps. ‘It’s amazing what that little patch does,’ she says. ‘I can’t see anything, but it gives a bit of light on that side.’ Real vision is a thing of her past, and Jodi sees her past as though it occurred on another universe, in another dimension, to a different person…
