Fragment: And the Sky Hid the Sun

I have seen those colors in the sky, yes. Old photographs my grandmother saved, and the canvases she painted. Reds, oranges, streaks of purple and splashes of yellow. Grandmother spoke of them the way she spoke of her friends. Nicer, actually.

"Twice a day," she would say, her withered fingers brushing my cheek. "You could see them twice a day- sunrise and sunset. Dawn and dusk. Beautiful colors."

We still have beautiful colors. Grandmother isn't impressed, but I guess I wouldn't be either, if I had seen the colors in the sky.

Our house is crimson with maroon shutters and grandmother's favorite dress is blue and dark green. But the sky is only gray. I've never seen any other color, except when grandmother asks me to try and picture it differently. Then the leaden skies become streaked through with the red of the fire hydrant outside the library, the purple of the eggplants grandmother loves, the blue of her dress. Or else I see her painting, brush strokes and all.

"Yes, Grandmother," I would say dutifully. "It's beautiful."

"Ah, Lela," a wistful sigh. "If only you could really see it. The light changes too, pink or blue, or green, if a storm's coming."

Grandmother was very old. She could remember the days before the sky hid the sun, when great clouds of ash and pollution blotted out the colors. She had tried so hard, fought so fiercely, to prevent that.

"Those damn money-grubbers!" she'd cry, shaking her gnarled fist. That was perhaps the nicest name she had for them, the unseen giants that dumped awful things into the oceans, and breathed toxic breaths into the air.

A lot of grandmother's friends protested with her. They're all pretty strange too, and not because they're old, either. But in those days, their voice was too small to be heard, and scattered, and so the giants brushed them aside like bugs.

I was sad about that sometimes too. I was sad Grandmother lost her colors and I was sad because I wished I could have seen them. I envied her for having at least the memory.

Grandmother used to write angry letters every Sunday. I guess the government got pretty fed up because they sent her a painting and a snippy note asking her to stop. Now Grandmother writes them two letters a week.

"Unbelievable," she snorted when she saw the painting. "My own painting. Those bureaucrats send me my own goddamn painting and call it even."

It was a lovely piece. The sun was rising from behind some ice-cliffs overlooking the sea. There's a big fish that Grandmother calls a Beluga. I think she forgot the name herself because that's a pretty ridiculous name for a fish. She said that they don't exist anymore. That's pretty sad too.  I sometimes forget that Grandmother used to be pretty famous for her paintings. Famous enough for the government to have one of them.