by Wendy Nikel
Violet is the first color to disappear.
It's always the same for everyone, a fact as certain as the rain and sun, as predictable as the blossoming of crocuses in the narrow box outside Penelope's window. Yet it still comes as a surprise, on the day her parents bring home her new baby sister, when the lavender petals turn ashen gray.
She holds out the faded petals in her tiny palms. Her parents look at one another knowingly over the head of the small, wiggling infant between them.
"It was bound to happen soon," they tell her, a statement which doesn't comfort her in the way they must've thought it would. "You're nearly five now. You're growing older. We need you to be our big girl now."
Later, lying in her bed with the petals crushed between her fingertips, staining them a dingy gray, she overhears them talking about how fortunate it is they'll be able to send her to school now, how easier it will be to take care of the baby with her out of the house each day.
#
Her mother pats her on the head and nudges her into a classroom with twenty-nine other children who no longer can enjoy the pleasure of a purple tongue after eating a grape sucker, a fact which none but her seem to mind. The teacher's a thin woman with flyaway hair, and when she sets Penelope down at a desk with a box of crayons, Penelope finds the one that says "purple" and snaps it into tiny bits.
Some of her new companions are smaller than she is and many are larger, but none give her a second look, and she spends that first afternoon with her knees tucked up to her chin in the coatroom, squeezed between the puddles made by rubber rain boots and dripping ponchos and someone else's spilled juice box.
The second day, a new kid arrives. When Milo joins her on the coatroom floor and offers her a smile and half his sandwich, she's so surprised at the jelly's rich purple hue that it takes her a moment to realize what's happened, to understand that there's ways of recapturing the colors, if only for a few moments.
#
She's better prepared a few years later when the blues vanish, when the sky slowly loses its hue and the bluebonnets in the windswept field behind the school withdraw into the emerald grass. Her parents fight over every little thing now: over Hannah's diapers and Penelope's homework and the money that never seems to be enough. Each time they do, she stares at the larkspur in the flower box in her bedroom window and watches the color waver in time with their shouts.
Milo makes a game of it at recess, spinning her around until she gets dizzy and falls over. Lying in the grass and laughing up at the sky with his voice close to her ear, she can see it again: brilliant crystal blue behind the white clouds. Still, she knows it's coming, feels it like a winter chill approaching, and there's nothing they can do to hold it back.
The day that her father slams the door for the last time and backs his navy-blue truck out of the drive, its paint is midnight black before the tires squeal around the corner. She uses her blue-now-black crayon to scribble him out of all her drawings.
At school, the nurse conducts monthly color tests in the tiny room back behind the school office. She holds up flashcards with colored-in squares, and for a while, Penelope can squint at the gray ones and think of Milo's game and sense just a hint of color, just enough for her to confidently declare them blue. Just enough to fool them a bit longer, to pretend she's unaffected.
But at home, she watches her sister until their mother gets home from work, and when Hannah asks with her little-girl lisp what color her block is, Penelope can't say.
"We should've taken her to the ocean one last time," her mother laments into the phone when she assumes the girls are asleep. "No, everything's tied up in legal fees. Besides, what's the point now?"
Never mind that she'd hated the ocean. Hannah had been the one to splash in the waves on their last visit, while Penelope huddled in her towel, listening to her parents bicker over sunscreen and wishing she was someplace else.
#
In high school, Penelope's life doesn't intersect with Milo's as often as she'd like, but over time, she grows accustomed to his absence just as she grows accustomed to the eternally-gray sky. Occasionally, they'll pass in the hall—he on his way to the music room while she hurries to the biology lab—and when he smiles, she'll catch a glimpse of blue sky through the window and spend the rest of the day trying to recapture the thrill, to trick herself into seeing the color.
Her lab partner, Nate, has brilliant green eyes and as they dissect frogs that reek of formaldehyde and label the parts of a cell, he draws cartoon skateboarders in the margins of her notebook. Penelope sketches flowers, each leaf and thorn precise, but when she returns from rinsing out their beakers, he's scribbled sunglasses and beanie hats on their petals.
"What do you think?" he asks, and his smile's so infectious that she lies and claims that she loves it.
The other girls whisper in sighs about him in the hairspray-heavy locker room, comparing him with actors from the same TV dramas that Penelope's mother and sister now watch nightly. The girls tell her she's lucky that she gets to sit beside him, even if all he's doing is slicing open worms. So when, during a lesson about parasites, he scribbles a thought bubble over one of her conifer sketches, asking if she wants to go out with him, she barely hesitates before scribbling back, "Yes."
#
She's glad, later, that she told Milo where Nate was taking her, because when she calls him that evening in tears and begs for a ride home, he doesn't have to ask for directions. He just tells her, "I'll be there," and he is.
He pulls up in the beat-up station wagon his parents gave him on his sixteenth birthday, and at first Penelope doesn't realize it's him because it's always been green to her before. Through her tears, she tries to envision its color—that hideous, pea-soup tone—but it's ashy gray now, almost silver, and she thinks to herself as she climbs inside that maybe it doesn't look so bad anymore.
She's glad Milo doesn't ask what's gone wrong, why she left her date at the table and why the guy she'd described as "amazing" and "sweet" hadn't bothered to come running after her.
Instead, they drive in silence and Penelope stares out the window, unwilling to make eye contact and unable to tell how much of the world's grayness could be blamed on the upcoming winter and how much has just faded tonight.
When they arrive at the darkened apartment, she gets up the nerve to ask which it is.
"I don't know," he says with a shrug. "I haven't seen green since I heard you'd told him yes."
She leans, breathless, across the front seat. The center console presses lines into her side. And when the kiss is over she notices for the first time the flecks of green in his honey-colored eyes.
#
They see the world, those first few years together—the pyramids, the Eiffel tower, Victoria Falls, the Grand Canyon—knowing that someday, more pain might come and leech more colors from their lives. Green in adulthood is uncommon, but they still see bursts of it in the Irish countryside with their fingers locked together and the ocean breeze on their faces, or zip-lining through dense jungle canopies.
Penelope brings her work with her—her microscopes and slides and her notebooks filled with sketches of ferns—tucked away in their suitcases, wrapped among their socks. It's as fine an excuse to travel as any, to put some distance between themselves and her mother's latest boyfriends, from Hannah's cycles of get-rich-quick schemes and debt.
"It's okay to protect yourself," Milo reminds her each time a message from home keeps her up at night, each time a conversation ends in shouting and a dead phone line. "You don't have to let them get to you. You don't have to let them take more."
His own work isn't as easy to carry with him. Instead he scours hotel lobbies for pianos and, when he finds one, they settle in. She pulls up a desk or table or lays her slides out on a too-low coffee table, admiring the wisps of green that run through her leaf samples as she listens to his fingers weave their melodies. They'll stay there weeks, sometimes months, long enough for him to write a song or two, to extract the notes from his head to the page before they move on, to their next great adventure.
#
Their conversations circle around to thoughts of a family, and Penelope finds herself in the cold, plastic chair of a doctor's office with the yellow in her wedding band morphing to silver as she clutches Milo's hand in hers.
She resents the loss of the color nearly as much as the loss of her maternal dreams, and—not knowing quite what to do—they simply remain there in that small, suburban town, in an outdated apartment where everything's broken and where the once-bright sunflower wallpaper has faded to dingy gray. Milo gets a job teaching piano lessons to children, and Penelope wonders if that's the end of their adventures.
When the pain has nearly faded, when she can face a new month without a fresh bout of tears, Milo returns one day after lessons carrying something beneath a white sheet.
"This house is too quiet; I thought this might help." He pulls the sheet off to reveal a canary in a cage, and in that moment, its feathers are as bright as any sunflower, as brilliant as any daffodil.
From then on, Milo brings her flowers twice a week—lilies in summer, tulips in the spring, and roses whenever he can find them—and they sit upon the table till the petals start to curl, till the stems grow frail and dry. And the canary sings to her while he's gone, and she dusts off her microscope and notebooks.
#
She's old by the time she loses orange. Milo has been mostly without it for nearly a decade, since his father succumbed to cancer, save for those bright bursts of light when he plays his favorite pieces or when they're sitting on the patio overlooking the lake at sunset.
The phone rings as she's writing a paper on photosynthesis—her last piece before her official retirement—and when she sees the number of her mom's nursing home, she knows what they'll say.
"Yes, I'll be down shortly. I just need to call up my sister; it's best that she hears it from me." She hangs up the phone, takes the faded begonias from the vase on the table, and dumps them in the garbage on her way out the door.
#
Red is the final color to fade.
It's always the same for everyone, a fact as certain as the rain and sun, as predictable as the blossoming of roses outside Penelope's window each spring. Yet it still comes as a surprise on that morning, when the first thing her eyes settle on upon waking is that rose bush, and she realizes that every crimson petal is gray.
She doesn't even need to reach across the bed to know why. Every photo in their silvery frames, every object in their room, is gray and white and black. Her heart knew, even without her mind's knowledge, even without checking his pulse or watching for his missing breath.
Penelope presses her eyes closed, recalling each color in turn, colors her old, weary eyes have long forgotten: from the purple of his jelly sandwich to the flecks of green in his eye to the orange of the sunsets they'd shared. And when she opens her eyes, in those brief, bright moments, for one final time, the roses shine red with his memories.