Blindsome (A Small Story)

A man was mowing his lawn.
It was 1868.
The lawn had no grass -- only opium poppies.
But he thought they were tulips.
That's what his wife had said when she planted them.
She died while drinking opium tea.
(Cancer.  The tea helped a lot toward the end.)
She divorced him 30 years ago,
On the day he turned 18.
It was an arranged marriage --
Pretty common in this part of India.
He sometimes wondered what ever happened to her.
But he never admitted this to his current wife
(who was the sister of his first wife,
who divorced him when he was only 10 --
another arranged marriage deal.)
Anyway, his current wife, Mary,
Was a Thai stone mason and made a lot of money
When she wrote a book about magic.
So the man didn't have to work.
Which was lucky since he was blind
And blind men rarely got the good jobs.
Instead he puttered around the estate
Making lip gloss from tulip rouge and talking to demons.
The demons had lived on the estate since before
His father bought it in 1776
(from a recently bankrupted British general.)
The demons were exceedingly good at math and engineering
But most of them worked as field hands.
They called the man 'Blindsome'
Which in their demon language meant "Small Cog."
Later that evening,
Blindsome brought his demon friends some absinthe
And they raised a glass to the woman who planted the tulips.