Red

I didn’t expect red today. Most days it felt blue, green, gray, or some combination of the three. There was the wind pressing itself flush against my cheek, and it felt most certainly red. I stood there, taking a deep breath, trying to make sense of it. I had felt oranges and yellows on the occasion of a heatwave coming in, and purples or browns when the storm was coming in. What was this new sensation, though? Red. Red. Red. The color vibrated against my skin. Red. Red. Red. Why Red?

As a child, I was very quiet. I had spent my time in fields of flowers or the depths of forests walking with my eyes closed and feeling the breeze ebbing and flowing in vibrant colors against my skin. The animals and insects never bothered me. They’d watch me ever so closely, it seemed, but never came near.

I remember the first time it overcame me. I was in a field of Sunflowers in my backyard. The Sky was blue, but suddenly I felt a deeper shade of purple dance across my skin. At nearly the same time, the birds and rabbits in the field seemed to run for cover wherever they could find it. Then I heard my mother shouting for me from the house to come in for dinner. With the hunger of a growing youth, I ran to the house, forgetting the color for a moment, but not for long. Five minutes later, the clouds rolled in and the rain began. It stormed heavily for a week. I couldn’t go outside, I couldn’t focus. Purple. Pulsed across my skin every waking hour and sometimes even woke me in the dead of night. I could barely sleep or eat. My mother noticed and called for a doctor.

The afternoon the doctor arrived, the storm had just sunk to a lull. He stood at the door, short wet hair matted against his face, and rainwater dripping from his long leather coat. I watched him through the window as he knocked on the door. As my mother opened the door, a gust of wind entered with it. I screamed, my vision blurring as the purple overtook me. My mother turned to face me just in time to see me faint. Later, she would tell me it was at this point that the Doctor took a step back, shut the door with himself on the outside, and ran. It would be a few days before I came to.

The day I woke up, the storm outside lifted, and purple had gone. What arrived in its place were two things. First, I felt no colors for some days after. It was as if my skin had been so overloaded by the sensation that it demanded rest. Secondly, the matron of the village. At 101 years of age, the matron, my mother, and the doctor were all peering down at me as I opened my eyes.

This was the first time anyone else had realized I had this gift. Although it was personally my first realization that not everyone sensed the world in this way. I was told that I wasn’t the first or even second of my people to experience color in this way, that it tended to run in families. It did not run in my mother’s family. My father, a ship’s Captain, had disappeared into the sea not long after my birth. It had been a little over eighty years since anyone had seen anyone with the gift, at least in our village. Only its oldest members could remember the last person to have it here.

A gift. They kept saying it was a gift. It felt like more of a curse than a blessing. What kind of gift causes you to lose all control of yourself and collapse? I remembered listening to the adults babble on and fawn over me for a while as I drowned out their prattle and closed my eyes. I remember closing my eyes, focusing on the blackness of the inside of my eyelids, and feeling a temporary sense of relief from the colors I wasn’t feeling. Soon, thinking I had fallen asleep, they left the room to talk about me elsewhere.

Now, a year later and hundreds of miles away in the depths of the Capital city, I felt this new color. I had been sent there to hone my skills and meditate for hours a day to learn to control it and not let it overtake me. There were a few others there like me. They came of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. The youngest was five. (I hadn’t felt it the first time until I was ten.) The oldest seemed permanently stuck to a rocking chair at one hundred and thirteen. The centenarian bragged about sensing great storms. They spoke about long droughts they had sensed coming weeks ahead of time by the briefest touch of colors in the wind. Half of us longed to harness our gift so well, and half didn’t believe the tall tales.

Red. What was Red? I wasn’t prepared to feel this color, although my training had helped enough so it didn’t completely overcome me. I had been leaning out my bedroom window in the western tower when I felt it. Wrapping my robe around me, I scurried down the hallway, down several flights of stairs, and into the great hall. At the same time that I arrived, all the others did also. The five-year-old, dragging a kite behind him, was visibly shaken, and the centenarian, hovering in their rocking chair just above ground level. (Most likely enchanted by the magics of the wizards who trained in the eastern wing.)

We stood solemnly in the early morning light and just stared at each other now. I did a quick head count, and someone seemed to be missing, but I wasn’t sure who. We all badgered the oldest among us to tell us what it meant, but they could only tell us what it did not mean.

Calliope Candor, that’s who was missing. I realized it about a moment before she entered the room. She was newer here, all about twenty years old, with blue eyes so pale they almost faded into the whites, and hair as black as the deep night. We could see tears in her eyes. We asked her if she had felt the Red also? She nodded and turned, pointing out the window facing the Mountains of Gorm.

There was the answer right in front of us. It wasn’t just the Red of a breeze we had all been feeling; it was smoke as well. The Volcano had just begun to erupt.