Colorless World

                                    

                                          
There came a time when the world was dark. And no color was left.
                          
	Not a single stream of color remained, not in painting nor photographs. Not in the pale pigments of human flesh nor the feathery fire of a robin's bosom. And life went on, with great smoke trees sprouting from the ground and wrapping their tendrils around the bitter gray earth. Fog swept through the streets past humans with hair as black as charcoal. People with eyes as gray as a sweeping storm cloud. And flames in the factories arose such a clatter as they whistled and twisted like a blizzard in the night.
                          
	The color had been harvested, the light nonexistent, and it was only in one man that this process could be reversed. There was only one man who could take his last bit of light and use it to restore the spectrum to reality.
                          
	This man discovered it at a graveside. As he bent down in prayer to a forsaken god he knew nothing about, his senses picked up something peculiar. He looked around, trying to identify what was making his hair stand on end.
                          
	The culprit took form in a rose that had seemed lifeless without the luster he remembered from flowers containing color. It was a little piece of red with a stem of green. The petals, although strewn oper the gravestone several days prior, were still lush, and the newfound radiance brought a certain sparkle to it.
                          
	It took him a second to collect his thoughts. It had been lifetimes in his mind since he'd seen a morsel of color, a deviation from the black and white and shades in between that had dictated his sight.
                          
	At first, he just stood there, staring at the hunk of marble above it. Then he kneeled down, and in one swift motion, plucked the flower from the grave. "Oh Clair," he murmured over the place her sleeping body lay. "Oh Clair, my darling. My sweet, beautiful girl, I thought miracles didn't exist anymore."
                          
	He departed from the cemetery where he'd laid her to rest. It was about a half mile from the city he'd walked from. Not many people walked anymore, he'd found. This city of his was the destination of fancy cars traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. It's where many businessmen, many greedy corporate users went, for it was the source of the world's demise.
                          
	This man had been a faithful worker once. He used to work for Cortec, sucking the color off of all objects and leaving rooms barren. He sucked the soul of the eye away, returning its juices to the factory to be harnessed into electricity.
                          
	Before its existence, he hadn't believed that you could ever feel color, that it was anything more than a quality. It wasn't any different the depth of an object, or assigning it a mass or amount of matter it contained. It was just a word given to an attribute that was already there.
                          
	But he learned as he stared, glassy-eyed into beaker upon beaker at a greasy liquid that sloshed and burbled not unlike soup that his assumptions had been incorrect. He partially blamed himself for what had become of Earth, but when he saw that last glimpse of vibrancy, a bubble of hope returned. It was like a candle in the dark.
                          
	He started walking away, eyes filled with wonder. He wandered past white picket fences of the domestic sectors in the countryside. He took a deep breath when he reached the long stretch of hill leading up to this city in the sky.
                          
	A friendly sign to his left beckoned him in. 'Dirk, ¼ mile,' the sign on the highway read as cars whizzed by him. At first, he feared that somebody might catch sight of the rose, but he abandoned this grievance. Not one noticed him. He was simply a blur of motion, a blended blob that was there for a second and then gone. He had no need to worry that workers from Cortec would find it and destroy it in all its beauty.
                          
	He trekked up the hill, entering the dank ruins of the city. The entrance passed through the untouched space, where buildings were desolate and deserted. They harbored memories of black shadow people clinging to the walls, people that would forever be there, plastered to stone. Some had shock on their faces. Others were busily pampering their yard with a wild ferocity.