Why Doesn’t Gray Appear in the Kaleidoscope?

Fiction by | April 13, 2008

Sunrise, this lone miracle by which night is transformed into day; a perpetual incarnation of beauty to a city that they think has stepped out from the pages of a fairy story.

Far from what seemed remote a land was a castle of cold shacks where two boys, dull and gray, awoke to the realm of men’s coats and women’s dresses moving in throngs. These spectacle of colors they never tire of seeing, yet sorely wish at harmonizing.

Across the castle was the Land the boys call Fairy in which they see people go as they break from the moving throng and then come back, still in harmony amidst the hubbub of such beauty. In their heads were the different wonders, marvels, and miracles dragged from the cupboards of the Fairy and certainly kept for these people, them so full of color.

As several men went in and out of the Fairy’s store the two boys arose from their cold mats, made their way through the throng of colorful people and began their survey to the land of Fairy. Like flies they hovered behind the windows that create between them and the people in the Fairy’s store, an artificial closeness. The boys were earnestly trying to look for something useful for a day’s endurance.

A woman broke out from the throng and came across the boys, shooing them away. Her brasses too bangle-y and noisy like cymbals, fun and flamboyant but certainly not happy. She sat and ordered the paltry out of what the Fairy calls coffee, from which she pays by loose silver searched from amongst her sack. The two boys backed off, yet paused to press their mouths to the window pane just parallel with the woman’s face. She was powdered white, as white as those meringues the boys drool over in sweet shops.

Then another tall man broke out from the throng, went inside the Fairy store but rushed out soon after acquiring his drink.

“A mercy please,” greeted the boys with mouths foul in odor, upon his exit.

“Have Nothing to give,” said he, donning his white coat.

The boys stared at his coat, slowly dismissing their fancies that white picket fences meant a safe and happy abode, that white was the color of the Man above.

But the coffee man of the Fairy noticed the boys and he came out with a fly swat.

“Away you little boys! Find another place to scavenge!”

“Boo! Boo!” They retorted. Life appeared simple to the boys, though very harsh and violent it was. They were still full of wonder with their playful attention.

The coffee man motioned as if to hit them, but they had scampered out before he could. Thus, he instead chose to swat the fly hovering on the table, “Pestilent colors to the Fairy Land’s beauty.” He turned and loosened the button of his sleeves, purposefully reaching for a forgotten wallet left beside the dead fly. It gleamed with the porcelain cups that were certainly expensive, more so with the tables in the shop.

Meanwhile, the throng of the colored people had not yet ceased growing in numbers and pouring themselves into the streets. The boys’ frail eyes, adjusting to see more of the crisscrossing throngs , now even yearning to know the celebrated secret behind that Fairy Land’s door that gives color to these people.

And though with the confectionery sorceress still chanting and the knight of the flies roving, the boys still persisted with the treasure—the coffee table at the corner laid with unfinished orders.

So, with determination and desperation in their eyes they set their bruised hooves into motion. All the while they thought, not anymore of the cupboard and the coffee cups, but of the lone, stout-bodied fly as it flapped over the cups, on how it must be tasty to their arid and gray tongues. How it will wriggle in their hands, fulfilling their empty stomachs and faking the satiation of their hunger. More so, how it makes them chase for more and more flies.

So the boys, into the throng of colors, disappeared.

In the kaleidoscope, the color grey does not appear.

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