Blindsided

By Eleanor Marsden

HIGHLY COMMENDED in March Competition

The Pasha’s  price for me was a mere telescope, a brassy contraption that promised the gift of seeing through the heavens. That was the moment in which everyone stopped seeing me.  

I had fully lost my sight by the time I was sold for a trinket. I often wonder if I did it to myself, looked inwards a little too often until my best visions were merely those in my mind. I couldn’t watch my body age and decay, see the pity and contempt in the eyes of those who had been my devotees when I glowed like ripe wheat. No, it was easier to turn inwards, re-treading my memories like the temple mosaics – deliberate, full of colour, the stories revealed step-by-step.

Perhaps it was a blessing that I couldn’t see the Englishman. I certainly couldn’t tell you what the he saw in me that made him wish to buy me from the Pasha. Perhaps it was still the myth of me: even then, I was a legend reduced to a curiosity. The once-fabled Dimitra! Perhaps the Englishman had to find out for himself if the whispers of my past were true. Perhaps he wanted to show me off. Or save me; it helps me, to cling on to that hope.

The Englishman left me here. I don’t believe he ever returned once he had placed me in my mausoleum.  The museum is quiet, full of shadows and dreams. I haven’t looked upon a field or the sky for centuries. Nobody wanted to look at me as the Englishman thought they might, not even as a curiosity – I don’t need eyes to know that they all walk blankly by.  I am invisible, petrified in my body with a thousand memories.  It doesn’t take a telescope to see that.

Judge’s Comments: Felt like Dimitra had such a fully realised inner voice and real strength of character. Some lovely turns of phrase.

Please click on the link to view the piece of art that inspired the piece –

https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explore-our-collection/highlights/GR11865