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Jake was seven before he believed in rainbows. After a storm, his mother would sometimes lead him to the porch and point a long finger at the sky. “Look at the colors,” she would say. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
And he would look, squinting until his eyes watered from the sun peeking behind once gravid clouds. He didn’t understand her game, but he would play along anyway, because she was his mother, his all.
“Yeah,” he would reply. “Beautiful.”
It had taken multiple trips to see a man with cards that flashed in confusing patterns before he understood it wasn’t a game at all. His mother held him against her gray flowered dress as he cried, mourning his blindness to a bit of magic in the world.
It wasn’t until years later, standing on another porch with his new wife, that he let himself think of rainbows again. He felt a twist in his chest as the woman in his arms looked up at the sky, drawing pleasure from something he would never understand.
And then she kissed his wrist and began to speak.
It was an arc of bright bands, she said, as if God had brushed trails of light against the sky. Red was the first, and in it was the tartness of a raspberry and the savage snap of a distant wildfire. Orange was next, brought to life in the sweating excitement of a Marti Gras night, followed quickly by yellow, which was the sunlit scent of fresh hay. Blue was the trickiest, she cautioned, for it could be so many things. Right now, though, it could only be the sweet slide of his calloused fingers against her skin, gradually darkening to the sandpaper grind of beach sand in the aftermath of a storm.
As she spoke, the knot in his heart fell away. His eyes still only saw shades of gray, but in his soul a picture had unfurled; something that he could touch, taste and wrap around himself like a blanket. And for the first time, he saw that it was beautiful.
Sarah Wilson lives in Anchorage, Alaska, where she writes in her free time and attempts to dodge the moose.
This story is sponsored by
Is Rah El?: Before time itself…. The People lived a simple life; there was no need to Think, and so there was no Thought. This was Paradise ~ “Is Rah El?” by Max Stockinger
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SELECTIVE SIGHT • by Sarah Wilson,
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11 Responses to “SELECTIVE SIGHT • by Sarah Wilson”
Comments
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July 25th, 2012 at 12:21 am
Your story really touched me Sarah. Yes it is very beautiful and illustrates how words can paint colours for the blind well. Thank you Susie
July 25th, 2012 at 1:06 am
Awwww! I’m all misting up.
I’m reminded of the boy in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ when he discovered he was colour blind.
I enjoyed that.
July 25th, 2012 at 2:40 am
Sarah, thanks for raising these meditative/devotional questions this mornng.
How did wife know what he needed?
What blindness kept mom from offering a coloring book filled with her words?
Where is beauty?
In what part of my life am I blind?
Am I blind to the blindness of others?
How about those closest to me?
What triggers the “twist” in my heart? Or others?
What can I do about either?
I pray you have a have a rainbow filled day. I will … now.
July 25th, 2012 at 3:46 am
Nice story – fewer than a 1000 words to paint a beautiful picture.
July 25th, 2012 at 6:08 am
The only thing is, a moonbow – a rainbow cast by moonlight at night – is quite visible and impressive yet colourless, from the illumination being too dim for colour vision to work. The boy should have been both able to see rainbows from the beginning, and able to perceive beauty in them to the extent he could perceive it in anything at all, a capability the story itself shows he had.
July 25th, 2012 at 6:50 am
What a lovely slice of life. Your description of the rainbow was nicely done. This story is subtly haunting in that there is so much the reader can interrupt.
July 25th, 2012 at 7:35 am
Beautiful and elegant, but not my kind of story.
July 25th, 2012 at 8:26 am
That’s a beautiful story. I wish there had been more to it.
July 25th, 2012 at 9:49 am
My son is color blind and I have often tried to show him rainbows. He can see a difference in the sky but if the colors are muted or pale, he can’t make out the difference between one color and the other. Sometimes he can see the red. Most color blind people do see color, just a bit differently from the rest of us. I knew my son was colorblind when he was 2 and couldn’t find a yellow ball in the grass. He’s 9 now and it’s only a problem when he wants a pink ball instead of a blue one, and gets totally embarrassed when he’s told it’s pink. A touching story. Glad you wrote it and shared with the rest of us!
July 25th, 2012 at 10:07 am
a beautiful love story. Five stars.
July 25th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Indeed a lovely story, the words so gently placed in just the right order. The author created an angel in the wife and gave her magic to share with her husband. Five stars.