All That's Colored

When the shift occurred, without reason or warning, there were enough talking heads to fill a stadium – and many did. Lecterns were manned with the rapidity of automatic machine gun fire. But this was always an intellectual war, fought in city council meetings and university halls, among other places. Theories and ideas were lobbed with a casual surety that had never been reserved for bullets. They settled on calling it evolution, and when they did, the divisive nature of the human race took form in two very different but equally important questions. Which question you asked would ultimately define you in this new age of COLORBLINDNESS. I use this word in the most literal sense because over a period of 252 days from Mid-February to Late-October, mankind – the human species in its entirety – lost its collective ability to perceive color. The world through our eyes had become entirely black and white. As I said before, there were two immediate questions. The first – HOW? asked by the scientists among us. Theories were raised and dismissed until only one possibility was left standing – evolution. By a method of deduction, it was acknowledged by the scientific elite that receptors in the human eye had been somehow naturally modified. Strange it seems that, given the cavalier nature in which we use a word such as evolution, there have been no significant theories proposed regarding the so-called end game. We are evolving, but to what? There have been reports of increased audioception, gustaoception, olfacoception, and tactioception in test subjects, though the authenticity of these reports has been questioned. Regardless, they are known collectively as “The Mutation Papers,” and bring us to the next question – WHY?

***

In the days of THE BLINDING, most found themselves in their house of God. I was no different. I sat with my mother and father, brother, and little sister on wooden pews. With my hands clasped together and my elbows resting on my knees, I bowed my head and prayed. The Sunday morning televangelists coined the term THE BLINDING. They shouted into microphones chronicling our many sins and thousands fell at their feet. My father, disgusted, would turn the channel and whisper, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Like most everyone as time went by, we continued on. My father rested after a hard day’s work. My sister attended second grade. My mother cut fresh-grown tomatoes in the evening and sprinkled them with salt. And yet every morning I believe each of us opened our eyes, and for a brief instant, it seemed possible that the world was once again overwhelmed with color. I surely did. My mother jokingly called it the hindsight of the damned. Many believed this to be some sort of punishment, while a few others thought it an awakening. To this day, we all fail to speak of the future. There will be a time, not so far off, when the last set of eyes that recognized color will finally close - and on that day we all will have lost something and we will ask why. But my mother used to say that day would also bring our salvation, and I prefer to think of our future as such. God has taken our color because we will survive, we will persevere, but we will never be the same. I believe there is assurance in that.

***

We’ve come to this place because some need to see it and some need to feel it. Some need to remember what it meant to have these walls, these gorgeous murals with all this color smashed together. Bold and bright they sit in our memories like beacons in the sea. Of all the cultural phenomena that have taken place since the blindness, the glorification of graffiti must be the greatest. Across the globe people flock to these places like they once flocked to Roman ruins. These walls of graffiti, from California to Buenos Aires to Jerusalem and back again, have become something more powerful than simple tagging. They’ve become remnants of a lost age – like Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads – wrapped in wonder, mystery, and a bit of sadness. I suppose our mystery is that nobody does graffiti anymore. They still sell spray-paint of course, and one could still physically tag a clean wall - but nobody does. Out of some mutual desire we’ve decided that creating new pieces like the one in front of us is disrespectful, or even evil. Personally, I think everyone knows that if we create new graffiti the old pieces don’t work, don’t mean anything, and if that happens then what do we have left? Some would say we are left with a species and a world that is unexplained, and we as a civilization are afraid of nothing more than the unknown. So in some form of group therapy we’ve decided that we without color are different. We do not yet know how we’ve changed, or how we will continue to progress in this particularly shaded world, we just know that we miss our color. So we take comfort in memories like graffitied walls, and we lean on them like vibrant walking sticks. We crowd around the scribbles because there will be no others like them and because there is communion in past appreciation, even if said appreciation was not so long ago outlawed. We look because we are now black and we are now white and ultimately, we are all in this together.


Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Logan Theissen

The Good Stuff

At 10:05 every morning, the sixth graders at Fellowship Academy of Christ took a fifteen-minute break. They were too old for recess, for dangling from their growing limbs on jungle gyms and for getting sweaty playing tag. The sixth graders had more serious matters to attend to, like gossip and trading gel pens and playing the card game “Bullshit” around the corner of the building, well out of the teacher’s earshot. Andi had just broken into the card circle, and was gaining some street cred with her Bullshit skills. So this week, break was more crucial than ever.

The sixth grade card sharks were upping their stakes. It was Halloween, and Mallory was going to teach them how to play poker.

“Bring your candy stash tomorrow,” she ordered. “Everything you’ve got. We’re going big.”

The girls all nodded. They’d wanted to try poker for a while, but gambling, like smoking, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and boy-girl relations, was prohibited at Fellowship Academy of Christ. Halloween and the ruse of “trading candy” was to be their ticket.

Andi had a lot of problems. Namely, her off-brand wardrobe had gained her only probationary admission to the card circle. Outside of break, most of the girls ignored her. She hadn’t been invited to anyone’s slumber party yet, and sometimes Mallory made fun of her hair. So even more pressing was the matter of Halloween—of getting hold of the candy she’d need for the ante.

“Halloween is the devil’s night,” Andi’s mom said that afternoon. “I don’t want you and your sisters out there while spirits and sinners and drunk teenagers run wild. It’s not safe, and it’s not godly.”

“But what about the church party?” Andi pleaded. “Can we at least go to that?”

“I don’t agree with churches offering some kind of consolation prize for Halloween. They’re still celebrating a night that belongs to Satan, and we’re not having any part of it,” her mother said. “I don’t know why you’re worked up all of a sudden. We’ve never done Halloween. We’re not going to start now.”

Andi stomped up to her room to sulk. She took out her Teen Bible and scanned the index for Halloween. Nothing.

I bet Jesus never said one word about Halloween, Andi muttered under her breath. She rushed through her math homework and did a half-ass job on the dinner dishes in protest. When trick-or-treaters rang the bell, despite Andi’s mom turning off all the lights downstairs, Andi looked down on them from her bedroom window. They didn’t look so satanic to her. Just happy.

The next morning, Kim from next door picked her up for Wednesday morning prayer breakfast. Kim was a junior. She had wide-set eyes and a voice like a Disney princess. She was devout, and Andi’s mom thought she was a very good role model, so she’d talked her into this carpool arrangement. Kim was a vegetarian, but the last prayer breakfast of the month featured chicken biscuits from Chick-fil-A. Kim wanted to stop off at Pop’s Korner Mart to buy a few bananas.

“Why don’t you just eat the biscuit part?” Andi asked Kim as they climbed out of her rusty old Volvo.

“It still tastes like meat,” Kim said. “I think they just take the chicken out and re-wrap the biscuit. I can pray better if I just have fruit,” she chirped.

Andi wandered through the aisles while Kim puzzled over produce. Pop’s Korner Mart was a weird hybrid of a place—like if you meshed a general store with a gas station. Andi’s dad liked to remind his daughters that Pop’s had been open when he was a boy; that he had even known Pop himself back in the day. He couldn’t go to Pop’s without grumbling that any day now the new Wal-Mart would force gems like Pop’s to close.

Today, Andi agreed that Pop’s was better than Wal-Mart because the candy aisle was a treasure trove of poker ammunition. Candy cigarettes, cinnamon jawbreakers, and ginger zingers were the good stuff, worth way more than a whole palm full of candy corn or powdery Smarties. She felt around in the pocket of her skirt. A washed gum wrapper and some lint, but no money. Andi never had any money.

“Allowance?” her father had scoffed the one time she brought up the subject. “I pay for your food and put a roof over your head! Why should I pay you just for being alive?”

A thought flashed through Andi’s mind. She could take what she needed. The Bible said steal from the rich and give to the poor, right? And Pop’s Korner Mart was obviously rich if it was as old as her dad.

Andi slid her hand into a bin of licorice. With one eye on the front of the store, she slid five licorice sticks up the sleeve of her sweater.

That was easy, she thought. And she didn’t look any different than she had a few seconds before. She moved on to the Lindor truffles, slipping a few into each pocket. She partially unzipped her backpack and lingered for a second in front of each candy bin, grabbing a few pieces, then easing them through the opening in the zipper.

“Hey!”

Andi gulped, releasing a handful of mini Mars bars back into their basket.

“You ready to go?”

It was just Kim, clutching her paper bag of bananas.

“Yeah,” Andi said. “I was just…thinking about getting some gum.”

“Oh, I have some in the car,” Kim said.

Back in the Volvo, Kim sang along to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. Andi sat very still so she wouldn’t crinkle from all the truffles in her pockets. All through prayer breakfast, she hugged her backpack to her chest, afraid someone might go through it and know what she’d done.

At break, the sixth grade girls sat Indian-style on the pavement and dumped their loot into their laps.

“Wow,” Mallory said, eyeing Andi’s haul. “You must have gone to the rich neighborhoods. Hey, you should come to our slumber party this weekend.”

Thank you, God, Andi thought, lifting her eyes toward heaven.

“Sure,” she said. “Now deal me in.”

Photo by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Dot Dannenberg