"In Colors We Left Behind" by Brooke Chandler

Fiction - Grapevine, Winter 24/25 Issue

It was a slow experience of death, prolonged and nuanced– but comfortable. Perhaps, even longer than the 86 years he had been alive. He looked up through the heaviness of his eyelids and saw his soul, a swirling tornado of colors ranging from red all the way to black. Some colors he didn’t recognize, but they all had an individual scent. A scent he could feel behind his pupils, flickering and pulsing in routine patterns. The yellow swirls smelt of his childhood home, his mother’s perfume, and his fathers cigars. But the blue, the blue were different…so different it caused him a deeply unpleasant headache. 

The blue swirls were particularly strong, creating leaking fluid that drained out of his eyes then settled contently on his decaying eyelashes. Throughout the blue swirls, he saw rather than smelt. Visions of rejection, heartbreak, loss, and misery spread across his forehead and onto his temples. The colors began to transition from swirling around his head to swooping further and further down his body, hovering exclusively around his chest region. Now, he felt more than anything. A warm, spacious sensation wound around his unbeating heart, caressing it like a kiss. He felt shades of green and brown swirls invade his lifeless body as he became one with the earth, sinking deeper and deeper into the soil encompassing the area around him.

And as he sank, he began to hear clearer than he’d ever heard before when he was alive. The voices were shades of white and gray, ricocheting throughout the shells of his ears. However, he couldn’t discern the voices of his parents or siblings, his daughters– any of it. Except for, of course, his wife. How could he ever forget his wife. She was the only thing he had ever had the strength to love wholly and undyingly, she was every single color of his soul. She was every sound, every smell he’d had the luxury to experience on the side of death itself. She was the soil that surrounded his decaying body, she was his birth, his life, and now, his entire lack thereof. And as one pair of eyes finally closed, another opened. 

She looked around, her dull face painted with a profoundly perplexed expression. Where was she? Why was she here? What was her name? Why were there people apologizing for a loss? Her brows furrowed as she sank deeper and deeper into genuine confusion. Death? A husband– she had a husband? And who were these young women circled around the bed wailing like birds? She opened her mouth to speak but her clenched jaw refused to yield, almost as if it was permanently glued shut whenever the intention to speak arose. She watched silently as one of the girls rummaged around her bag, eventually pulling out an old photograph of a man. 

She unintendedly ignored the girl's quickened explanations, all of her senses focusing only on the man in the photograph. She felt as if she’d seen him before, maybe in another life. He was tall and well-built with large ears, a soft nose and long eyelashes, visible despite the degraded quality of whatever camera it was taken with. There was a youthful sparkle in his dark eyes that perfectly complimented his boyish grin. He wore a lightly colored collared shirt with dress pants that fell just past his ankles, resting upon his brown dress shoes. His long arms were stretched out, one on the porch stairs and the other around a woman. She held the photograph in her wrinkled hands and looked closer at the woman. She was undeniably beautiful, beautiful in a way that made her heart clench. The woman sported a gleaming smile, joy evident in her crinkled eyes. There was something so familiar about this photo…why couldn’t she remember why? 

Her eyes began to glisten with hues of vulnerability and frustration. A heartbeat stretched with every hitched breath and tight clutch of the photograph– then tears. They fell delicately out of her eyes then gently down her cheeks, rolling along her jawline and splattering onto the photograph. Unfortunately, until her death, she would never again experience the comforting sensation of memory. But when she did, her swirls– her colors, were the most delightful thing any human could ever have the pleasure of knowing.