Rainbow
Dylon Duval — 12th Grade
Two thousand years past two-thousand and seventeen, evolution has once again cradled mankind in its dangerous fingertips, running its course straight through predictability and landing somewhere at the end of confusion and the beginning of understanding. The gene of being monochromatic (full color blindness, only seeing shades of black and white) went from being recessive in 32,999 out of 33,000 people to being a dominant gene in all 33,000. As a basis, all humans see in only shades of grey. Somewhere in adaptions grasp, emotions and the retinas in our eyes (an organ so intertwined with the brain that some may call it part of such, the part of our eye responsible for the transfer of light into nerve impulses and then, the travel of aforementioned impulses to the cortex of the brain by the optic nerve) melded into one, successfully and surprisingly causing a direct link between what you feel and what you see.
Historically speaking, the three additive primary colors of the color spectrum were blue, red, and yellow. These colors were said to be the input of any color that the human eye was able to see; you couldn’t see green without your eyes first processing the tones of red and blue beforehand, but trying to mix two colors together to make any of the three base colors were impossible. One could say you could use the shades black and pink to create red, but loopholes don’t exist within logics walls — to have an output, an input is needed. If something is at its beginning stages, it can not already be finished.
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Easily the most misunderstood organ, the brain doesn’t even understand what the brain is doing. The brain just adapts, and Xaz knows without knowing that he knows that he must adapt with it.
The first color that Xaz can remember seeing is yellow. He doesn’t remember what he was doing when he first saw it, or where he was, but he sees the color on his mom’s shirt a few days after the initial happening and gasps, reaching out for the fabric of her right sleeve with trembling fingers coated in confusion. He’s all breath and no words, all wonder and new possibilities and fresh starts and shaking fingers and he can see a color besides black and white now, thank god because being monochromatic can be so ugly. He’s so overwhelmed that he can’t choke out enough coherent sounds for his letters to even bloom into words, so he settles for grabbing the material of his mom’s shirt harder, feeling tears soak his face as his fingers turn white from clutching onto the cotton.
He can still remember the stretch of his cheeks as he smiled, the ache of his jaw afterward from the ferocity of his grin, and the happy shouting that came from his mom when the gears slid into place in the mechanisms of her mind. Her humid, naturally nervous hands shook in excitement as she picked her up toddler, lifting him high into the air with both hands firmly planted on his belly to smashing him (gently, of course) into her chest, hugging him for dear life.
“That’s yellow, honey,” she choked out, the hand not slipped under her son’s behind to keep him steady pointing when she finally pulled back to the collar of her shirt. “Can you say yellow?”
He couldn’t say yellow, but he could say something close, a mix of syllables slurred together into the concoction that Xav had pronounced “ello,” and his mom figured that he had at least tried, and that in itself had to mean something.
