He didn't care much for roses anymore. Not since red became the color of blood. Not since blood became all that he saw. It trickled through the forests of Normandy, little scarlet creeks, but there was no sweet bell-like cadence that followed its descent into the waiting arms of the soil. These creeks were silent as the grave because it was the current of death crawling beneath the sentinel trees. He'd learned to ignore it. Tread through fatality's tributaries that threaded through the soles of his feet and stained his innocence. No longer a boy, but a man. Someone who had watched the life bleed out of someone's eyes. Yeah, ignoring the fallen enemy was the easy part. It was ignoring his own that became harder as the months yielded to years and red became pain, too.
But that didn't mean he had to like it either.
He'd decided since that yellow was a good color. If he could bleed one color, it wouldn't be red. It'd be something soft and warm. Yes, just like yellow.
Yellow was the color of the sun. Of heat that penetrated sheets of ice in beds of snow. Of another tomorrow, if he lived through today. He'd grown up where it was warm on Christmas, where snow was something he always read about in books, but never had made its formal acquaintance. Winter was a stranger in his parts, back where the family waited on letters that would never come, but now he knew him intimately. They were sort of like odd companions, their ties as old as the friends he'd watched die in the foxholes that were meant to protect them. The ones that had been unable to escape, cold and barren, paper dolls stained in uniforms and red and ash beneath the bare arms of the trees that had once been green in Normandy. He couldn't save all of them. And that was the burden of truth that came with wearing the red-cross band on his arm.
But when spring returned in 1945, yellow was the color he knew he liked best. It was what chased some of the frozen memories out of hiding, melted them, icicles of the past. He'd lean his head back in quieter times, when medic packs lay propped up against walls gone untouched by flak and bullets and blood, and yellow would find him when he'd look up at a pale blue sky. Clouds traced in gold, stitched into heaven like a quilt pattern. Where paradise seemed a little closer than an otherworld away.
He'd offered a side-swept smile and a nickel for the street vendor. In exchange, a bouquet of flowers for his girl.
And they were all gold as the laughter of the sun.