Darkness Falls

Plot: Rising Action (DF)

Rally wanted to be more like a normal boy when he was a teenager. So, he played a lot of sandlot baseball after school. He developed into quite a good right fielder. However, one day he had to run quite a distance to shallow, right center because he had a better angle on it than the second baseman did; he, too, lost the ball in the late-day sun, backing away, covering his head with his glove. However, the ball hit him in the back of the head, a part not covered by the glove. This "rang his bell" pretty badly, and "he was out for about three minutes," according to the other players on his team.

When he came to, he had some trouble seeing because the hit affected the visual cortex at the back of the brain. He sat out the next fifteen minutes, until it was time for his team to take the field, again. He finished the game with no real issues, and he pushed concern out of his mind, thinking, "That was not all that bad."

At home that night, he painted an entire canvas in about an hour with no apparent detractions from his talents. So, he pushed the incident into long-term memory, forgetting about it.

Years later, as a named part of Smithers, Witts, Harris & Adams Graphic Designers, Rally Witts started to notice some anomalies in his work, imperfections that few could detect, but he could. He made the necessary corrections through muscle memory, but he began to wonder if there was a connection with his baseball incident.

After 18 months, the issues he found in his work were so pronounced that he felt he might lose his job. He told Jessie, who had to sit down at this news.

Rally continued to work, and he even painted at home to hone his skills despite his deteriorating condition, but soon the other partners, including the Big Boss, President Paul Smithers, noticed.

That night, that he had to make it home by muscle memory, he knew he was done. Jessie called President Smithers the next to tell him of Rally's condition, and Rally was summarily dismissed.

Now, Rally would have to find a new way in life without a great salary, prestige, and daily praise from his professional world.

Learning to create as a blind man would not be easy, but he was convinced that he could still support Jessie and be a great painter.