Three men entered a room. All were blind in one way or another. 

The first one had eyes in the back of his head. Two dark things, peeking through his flat orange hair. I saw velcro where they should be. He approached me with a righteous leap forward. I knew then quite clearly that he was fake. He prodded me on my leg, and his fingers glittered with hand cream, leaving a stain in the shape of his finger print. He hummed, and took out a pen.

           Peony with feet?

The second one had bloodshot eyes and would not see anything that wasn’t red, white, blue. A pimple-shaped face, red irises turned on like a travel agent’s advert. His boring voice clicks like echolocation when he greets me. I knew then quite clearly that he had trained to be fake – or that he was pretending to be. I was a goosebump under the floodlights. When he touched the skin on my arm he whistled like he’d been pranked.

          A hairy painting. 

The third bent when he walked in and smelt me up and down, it looked like he plucked his eyes out to make it easier to pretend he was somewhere else. He pulled his face along my neck, his nostrils snail trailing their way to the branch of veins beneath my collarbone. He freezes, head cocked. He might not be fake, if he could hear that thing crashing against my ribs. In the empty concaves of his face, a mist was growing.

        Animal. Stuffed.

Three men in a room, all blind in one way or another – I am dry like a mouth can be. Their guesses are final, ink embossed into my flesh. The last one was dug onto my ribs, leaving something bigger there than just one word. The men lay beneath me like I was the sun. I bled back and forth onto their faces while they argued about who was right.

—First Published 13th of December 2025

About Amelia Mehta

Amelia is a third-year student at Royal Holloway University Of London studying Drama and Creative Writing. Her main mediums of writing are playwriting and poetry, and often her subject matter is inspired by Surrealism, sexuality, femininity and identity.