GrayScale... Part I

Bright colors were everywhere! Sika was being blinded by the intensity of their brilliance. Her dark eyes were wide open and her pupils had contracted until they were nothing more than horizontal slits in the immediate yellow of her eyes. Her skinny ten year old body was squeezed tightly into a corner in her room and a fist was stuffed just as tightly into her mouth, her teeth clamped down stubbornly on that little fist and they had broken through the tender skin, blood flowed freely and continuously form the wounds they caused as she clamed down even harder and stretched the wounds even more. With all this padding, little whimpers could still be heard emitting from her. These sounds were like nothing any human being could or should be allowed to make; little growls and pitiful mewls all with a haunted melody imbued into them, as though the thing making those sounds knew the essence of sorrow. At first her other arm, the right arm, was clenched in her lap, her nails clawing into her soft palm and drawing more blood, but as the pool of blood dripping from her left arm and gathering by her knees grew, she began to scribble in the blood with her right hand. She wrote neatly and in tiny letters, but she also wrote quickly. When she had finished writing, she took her fist from her mouth, raised both hands to her face, covered her face with her hands and let out a sharp, piercing scream. With her eyes shielded by her bloody hands, all she should have been able to see was black, but the colors haunted her, the images threw themselves at her eyes, the blood dripping from the ceiling was still an impossibly luminous scarlet color. The bodies were still being mauled and torn apart, and the paleness of the remnant was still dazzling white, like polished marble. The colors in the room and of the clothes was still too bright, and everything was still happening before her shielded eyes. Sika took a shaky breath and tried to close her eyes, but, again, her lids refused to close. When she saw a head being ripped from its body as easily as though a banana was being taken from a bunch, she howled in horror again, her pitch and volume even higher than the first scream. She screeched as though she was dying, and honestly speaking, at the sight of the bloody massacre, a part of her was slowly dying, very slowly, but very surely.
Her door burst open and her mum rushed into the room, at the sight of Sika huddled in a corner and seemingly covered in blood, the doctor paused, but then she rushed to her child’s side and reached out to take her into her arms. Sika flinched from her touch and tried to push herself further into the wall, blubbing insensibly as she exerted herself in an effort to avoid human contact.
“Shhh! Darling, you are alright, mummy is here.” Dr. Luna tried to reach out to her child, “Mummy is here and mummy loves you. Calm down baby, nothing can harm you”. From a faraway place, Sika heard her mothers voice and the noises she was making reduced to little whines and whimpers, she turned unseeing eyes in the direction of her mother, the massacre still taking place in her head. The colors, were, however, reducing in their intensity and the pace was slowing down. Slowly the images vanished from her sight and she was back in her room, her gray room, where there were no colors, she looked at her gray mother and looked at the gray blood on the carpet. Slowly, she realized that her world was returning to normal and she scrambled toward her mother and held her tight, sobbing fitfully, “Mo… Mother, I-I-I saw co-colors”, she managed to breathe out between sobs. Dr. Luna gasped and clung to her daughter, exhilarated and frightened at the same time.

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Sika had been born on a gray day, the clouds had been gray and dreary, hanging heavy with impending rain, the sun that struggled to shine through the clouds had also had a strange tinge of gray to it. The trees in Fall Town had appeared to agree with the weather and all the vegetation in Fall Town had seemed to have a grayish cast over them that day. Nobody seemed to notice, but Dr. Luna had noticed that even the people seemed a little gray themselves when you got right down to it. When her child was born, the doctors thought that she was jaundiced because the whites of her eyes where yellow, but upon testing, they found that she was as healthy as could be, the only other strange thing being that when the baby’s pupils dilated, they turned into horizontal slits, like snake eyes. When the child was presented to her mother, she kept turning her head from side to side and the nurses laughed, “Look at the little seeker.” One said teasingly. Everybody laughed and another replied, “Yes, she does look like she is seeking after something don’t you think?” “Probably her place in life!” “And at such an early age too”.
Dr. Luna smiled around the room in agreement, “Yes”, she said softly, silencing the laughing nurse, “She does look like a little seeker, doesn’t she? My little seeker. So be it little one, you have picked your name, Sika Luna.”
“Oh!” The youngest nurse breathed out in bliss, “Sika Luna! What a delightfully exotic name. everybody laughed and the little baby tilted her head to one side and smiled like she knew what was so funny.
As time went on, it was discovered that Sika had a rare disorder, fantastically rare even amongst it class. Sika was color blind! It wasn’t like she was a protanope, or a deuteranope, or even a tritanope. She suffered from all three. She basically saw in shades of gray, one doctor had tried to make light of it and had referred to her as a walking grayscale monitor. Another doctor had said, “Ma’am, it’s the strangest thing, but it appears that your daughter can see only one color. She sees everything in dirty intermediate shades of gray. The three forms of colorblindness are so rare to begin with, but this, this is an impossibility”. Riben Luna had felt lost, her husband had died in a car crash, the day she had discovered she was pregnant with Sika, the pregnancy had been a very difficult one, so much so that she was always in the maternity section provided by the lab for scientists working on material so delicate they were not allowed to interact with the outside world until it was over. After such a difficult delivery, they were trying to tell her that her daughter could not see colors. They had, however, made it through the years. Sika had grown up to be a quiet child with an unusual level of intelligence. She was a sweet child, very affectionate and reserved to the point of austerity.