Ficlet: Colour

[vilakins]

For the b7friday five senses challenge, 200 words.

Colour

Hal Mellanby remembered the enormous sense of loss when he was blinded. His image amplifier gave him partial vision, though it was not real sight; his optic nerves had been destroyed. It was a signal transmitted directly to his brain which it interpreted as contrasting light and dark. It worked very well, rather like a vid unit that needed tuning, but he still remembered how much he had mourned the loss of colour.

He got Dayna and Lauren to tell him the colours of things by describing them, so that he knew that Lauren's hair was as bright and yellow as the sun, her eyes blue-grey like the sea in early morning, and of course he remembered that Dayna's skin was like chocolate and her hair the colour of midnight.

Like her mother's.

He did not let on to them that he had long ago forgotten the actual colours, that instead the things compared were what he grasped at: the warmth of the sun; the cool refreshing feel of water; the smooth, melting taste of chocolate, the velvet secrecy of night.

His regret now was for a strange and unknowable gap in his perceptions that he could no longer plumb.