The Color of Clouds
an excerpt

Her son could see color.

Claire often tried to imagine what colors must be like. Words like bright and beautiful would coalesce in her mind, a hardened thought, and she would lean forward, squinting her eyes at the leaves of a plant in the hydroponics bay. They were green, she knew that. The chlorophyll bursting the cells and delicate veins. But she couldn’t see green. She only saw shades of gray.

She had asked Daniel once what colors were like. He had looked sadly at her, and then written on his small pad the single word vivid. When she had frowned, Daniel shook his head and then wrote brilliant. He had drawn a thick and heavy line underneath the word for emphasis, and Claire had only stared helplessly at the pad that he had pushed across the table for her to read. He had shoved his chair violently from the table then and come over to her shoulder.

You can’t understand.

He swept the pad from the table and moved away to his room. Claire had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. She traced the grain of the false wood with her fingers and she thought This is brown. And she knew her son was right, she couldn’t understand.