The sky hanging above is a sort of toneless gray, like at the bottom of a drain when all that’s been poured down it is gravel. It isn’t the clean kind of gray, that of stone or the back of the eyelid during the night. It is incessantly plain, the tint of a dirty mirror. It is not the color a sky should be.

This is what people know, but very few actually remember what the sky is meant to look like. It happened so long ago; the loss. When first the trees had gone gray, then the oceans below and the mountains above, then the very people who inhabited the world. Then, of course, the sky.

But it has been so long now. And so very few who were here before are still here after.

There is one, however, who carries with her not her own memories of the time before the loss, for she is far too young to have been alive back then, but the memories of her mother, and her mother before that, and her mother before that. Her ancestors who lived during the loss and who have, through careful whispers and meticulous descriptions, passed everything they knew down to her.

It lives within her, all the knowledge of the past. It stews and it grows and it never hungers less.

It is a difficult thing, to describe colors to one who has never seen them. But it has been done before, only through the most painstaking detail, for nothing so delicate can afford to be nebulous. Only through the girl’s tenuous bloodline down generation by generation. Through difficult work, the aching tongues of her ancestors, the girl has become as familiar to the lost colors as to an old friend.

Blue, they told her, like the chill of ice on her skin, the melancholy lap of waves against her ankles at the beach.

Green, they murmured, like the rustling of leaves, or the harmony in finding someone who understand you.

Golden, they whispered, like the warmth of the sun during the summer, like the taste of apples in the fall.

Red, they chanted, like what you feel when you are the most angry you’ve ever been. Or the most in love.

On and on and on they would go, until the girl felt she had every color printed under her skin, beneath the very marrow of her bones. But that is no longer enough for her. It is no longer enough to allow the knowledge to endlessly hunger within her. No, the girl is quite frankly exhausted of harboring the craving that will never know satisfaction. Too much like being a child, and being unable to reach her favorite toy high upon a shelf beyond her reach.

No, today she works.

It starts in her garage. It starts with the petal of a flower. The flower is a delphinium, store bought and dehydrated, for she has not cared to place it in water. It does not matter. She only needs one petal.

She plucks the petal and discards the rest of the thing. From there it is only instinct.

She holds the petal in her hands and into it channels every word of her family and her family past—every golden whisper and fluttering green murmur, every moment of peaceful blue, every speck of love and hatred she’s felt in her life. She breathes in oxygen and breathes out distinction. The pump of her blood beats only in certainty, her heart pounds not for her survival but to produce the promise of recovery.

A gain, not a loss.

When she is done, and her instinct worn out, she opens her eyes. Then she opens her hands. Then she smiles.

She hears the voices of her ancestors, and they chatter in the background of her mind.

The petal is the chilly touch of ice, and the calm wisdom of the sea as it drags in and out forever. It is the depth of the ocean. It is not red, but it is love like the girl has never seen before.

Blue.