Losing Yellow
The Firebird Suite, Igor Stravinsky
When Brittany was a child she used to wonder what colors tasted like.
It was a few days after her ninth birthday when she finally decided to find out for herself. When her mother left the house to run a few errands, Brittany drifted from one room to another, grouping objects together by particular colors, before licking and biting each one in turn. But no matter how many things she bit or licked, nothing seemed to taste the same.
When her mother returned with the grocery in her arms, she was met with the sight of almost everything in the house sorted into their dominant colors, and a solemn-looking daughter staring up at her.
"Mommy," Brittany whispered, tugging at her arm, "Do colors have tastes? Or is there something missing in my tongue that makes me not taste them?"
Mrs. Pierce bit back an unholy shriek of laughter, before setting the paper bags down and lifting her daughter up into her arms. "Oh, honey." She kissed a flushed, round cheek once. "You know something? Maybe it would be better if you stopped trying to taste colors and tried to feel them instead."
Brittany looked at her mother, feeling puzzled. How could you feel colors but not taste them? She was about to ask confusedly. But the warm blue of her mother's eyes seemed to smile at her lovingly, and suddenly the taste of colors didn't really seem to matter anymore, because her mother was right. Feeling colors was so much better.
And blue was totally the color of home.
When Brittany was twelve she decided that yellow was the color of happiness. It was the color of the little duck balloons of her birthday party, the first birthday that her Daddy attended in almost two years. It was the color of her Daddy's hair when it grew back out, after being cut all the time in the Army. And it was also the color of her little sister's hair when she was born almost a year later, though Brittany wasn't allowed to see that part. But it was okay. Yellow was a happy color and twelve was a happy year.
She was thirteen and a half when green became a sad color. She used to love green because green felt warm, and rich and earthy, but green began to feel sad when they brought her Daddy back from that place far away. Everyone went to the funeral wearing black but to Brittany the saddest part was the big picture of her Daddy wearing his green Army uniform.
Brittany was fifteen when she decided that white was a sad color, too. She and her mother alternated shifts when her Grandma had to be put in the hospital. Everything looked so white, like the long white strands of her Grandma's hair that she liked to comb to make her Grandma feel better. She remembered the white coats the doctors were wearing when they pulled her out of the tiny hospital room when her Grandma stopped breathing. She felt surrounded in white, like it was creeping along her skin and biting into her bones.
She was seventeen when she connected the drab gray color of the concrete road with leaving home. As she watched the home she had grown up in grow smaller and smaller behind them, she looked nothing but ashen and felt nothing but gray.
Brittany knew she was having a dream, but she couldn't seem to wake up from it.
Everything around her was bright yellow. The sun was high and hot in the sky, flooding yellow light down in golden streams around her. It was beautiful, and Brittany felt safe, somehow, as though she had just escaped from something so large and dreadful she couldn't even put it into words.
"Brittany!"
Brittany's head turned to the source of the call, her heart fluttering in her chest. "Daddy?"
Then she saw him emerge, through the yellow haze around her, dressed in cool blue. His smile felt like a weight lifted from her chest, a sadness evaporated into thin air. He held his arms out and she felt herself running straight into them.
"My little angel." He murmured into her hair, holding her close to him. His voice sounded like the shadows of an echo from so long ago. "It's so good to see you again."
"Daddy," she exhaled, trying not to cry. She began to breathe him in as much as she could, like she was a balloon and he was her helium. When she opened her eyes and looked to the distance, she saw two other figures waving at her, both clad in the same lovely blue. "Mom? Natalie?"
The figures began to move closer towards her, until her little sister's arms were wrapped tightly around her torso and both her hands were tightly interlocked with her mother's.
"We're so glad you're here, honey." Her mother smiled, lightly pressing a kiss to Brittany's right temple. "We're so glad you're here and we love you very much." She smiled again. Brittany tried to smile back, but there was a lump in her throat and there were tears in her mother's eyes.
Brittany blinked, and the image before her wavered ever so slightly, like ripples disrupting a reflection. "Where are we?"
Her father shook his head once and smoothened her hair, as though she were asking a dark, terrible secret he could not reveal. Her mother smiled and shook her head as well, kissing her again. Then, much to Brittany's surprise, they gently began to let her go. "Always remember that we love you."
With the sudden lack of physical contact, Brittany began to feel slightly dizzy. "Mom?" She asked fearfully, trying to reach for her mother. But her mother just retreated farther into the yellow, shaking her head.
"It isn't your time yet, honey."
Brittany felt terrified, all of a sudden, as the yellow seemed to suck in her entire family right before her eyes. "Wait!" She cried out, trying to break through the bright color to reach them. "Don't leave me!"
"Always remember that we love you." The words were whispered into the air, faint and almost inaudible. Brittany pushed desperately through the haze, trying to find them, but something kept holding her back.
Everything seemed to shift then, all of a sudden. The yellow around her seemed to swirl in mindless circles, darkening until they were closer to red-orange, almost like the sun was bleeding. The light began to shake, until the golden streams around her changed into something darker, something fiercer, surging around her. It began to dance around her in red-orange streaks, throwing shadows around and within her.
It was at that moment that Brittany felt that red and orange were the colors of fear and pain. And they were both so strong and primal, gripping her entire being in an iron-clad fist. She choked on them.
Then the colors began to scream at her, screaming incoherently, the sound hurting Brittany's ears and bouncing around her like never-ending echoes. She felt the screams around her, felt the screams go through her, shattering her into a million shards and breaking those shards into a million more tiny pieces.
It was overwhelming, and Brittany almost felt ready to lose herself in the sheer agony of it all. But before she could, everything abruptly fell silent. For a moment Brittany felt her entire body suspended in nothingness, before the colors began to shift so rapidly she couldn't keep up.
She closed her eyes, praying to wake up. When she opened them again, everything was swallowed in black, and Brittany felt herself being stripped of any kind of emotion, until all that was left was a strange feeling of calm, washing over her like waves lapping a shore.
Brittany closed her eyes again, and she felt herself begin to fall into the blackness. It's going to be okay, seemed to resonate from some half-remembered memory, then just as she began to fall faster, she felt herself jerk into being, snapping sharply into consciousness.
Brittany inhaled deeply, trying to ground herself back into the reality of the present. The air around her smelled different, but somehow not unfamiliar: it was almost as though she could remember smelling this particular scent not so long ago, but she couldn't quite pinpoint what memory she'd already had of it.
She began to become aware of other things: the stiffness of her body, the sound of a constant beeping somewhere near her, like an annoying alarm that wouldn't turn off. Sighing slightly, Brittany inhaled one more time before opening her eyes again.
The first thing she saw was pure, immaculate white of a foreign ceiling. She turned her head, confused, and saw a man standing by bedside, with a woman standing not that far behind him.
"Good morning, Ms. Pierce. How are you feeling today?"
Brittany stared at him for a moment, trying to decide whether she should scream or respond. Her eyes ran over him, taking in the white coat he was wearing.
"Where–" Her voice was unbelievably hoarse, and the woman moved towards her, a glass of water already in her hand.
"Here, drink this." She instructed. Brittany took the cup carefully and sniffed at it slightly, before taking a cautious sip. When nothing tasted amiss, she downed the rest of the water slowly.
"Where am I?" She tried again, her voice stronger this time. Her eyes swept over the room, taking in the shut blinds and the sophisticated machinery that appeared to be attached to her body. With a growing sense of understanding, Brittany turned to look at the man before he answered,
"You're at the Lima General Hospital."