the.colors.of.nothing

The days are ever bleak. The overcast sky weighs on me, weighs on us all. We walk through cities, hamlets, lakeside resorts and rarely see color anymore. They, the colors, exist; but our eyes (or our brains) fear the acknowledgement, like troops trained not to see the families they gun down in the midst of war. The grays simply wash away the other hues. The entire world through which we now journey is a village covered in a volcanoes ash. An ash that cannot, will not, wash away because a figment of imagination grown to encompass the psyche is harder to disperse than wet ash on a mountainside town.

One by one I gain companions as I make my way along. First, there was the young girl. Fifteen years old, or so, I guessed. I noticed her trailing behind, far enough back to not disturb me. I let her keep pace but did not invite her any closer. The Dark can take hold at any moment. I did not want her to suddenly lapse into that void and take me with her. So I listened intently as I pretended to not notice her loud shuffling feet. At least, I thought, if there is a mob nearby I should be able to escape unnoticed, as they are alerted to her presence and seek to remove her from this world. Her fate was not my responsibility. Perhaps before The Dawn I would have felt a pang of sympathy for the thoughts that run through my head regarding her safety. That was before. Now, the only blood on my hands is blood of my potential failure as a father if I do not get to my son in time. Or if I do not get to him at all.

I come to the side of a barn and decide to stop to eat. With my back to the building I don't have to worry about being caught off guard. At least not from behind. I walk halfway down the broadside of the barn and squat to unpack. With at least thirty feet to either end of the barn it would be very difficult for someone to sneak up on me from the side. I slide my bag from my should and set it on the ground. I think my shoulders will never again remember a feeling free of that burden, my back never again unfamiliar with the raw embrace of canvas straps rubbing through my denim shirt. But my muscles have reappeared as they were in my youth when I spent summers on a basketball court, or in a barn much like the one that towers behind me now. Hot days dragging me with them as I tossed bales of hay into the loft struggling to keep up with my older cousin, who was oblivious to the fact that I was competing with him, if only in my own mind.
Those barns were red though. This barn is more rare. Green. The abandoned tractor in the field across the road is red. The grass is green except where the blood spatters, which used to be red, have turned black in just the few weeks since that large rear tire of that red tractor slowly rolled over the head of the farmer in the blue overalls. I used to wonder at these things and try to imagine the story that these scenes were telling. Where was the farmers boots? What stole his attention long enough for someone to take control of the wheel and run him down? Why didn't he try to run? Was the killer his wife?

But wondering is wandering and wandering leads me astray and I do not have the luxury anymore of indulging my curious nature. I have time only to assess the situation and make use of the facts before me. I see this scene, and I see the colors and chide my eyes and my mind for making even that much sense of useless facts without making use of senseless acts. Is the murderer of the farmer still lurking nearby? That is useful to me. The mechanics of his murder and the prologue to the farmers end and the damn greens and reds and blues all mix with the grey and wash away as I sit and silently pick soft orange carrots from the can with my fingers and feed them to my down-turned mouth.



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