This my first flash fiction since November. It’s good to be back. This is also the first of these originally written out longhand. Enjoy!

FROM WHITE TO NOTHING

The first time he saw her was only for a second. He was just a kid, deep in a magnolia tree, trying to find a branch high enough and sturdy enough that he could make the jump onto Brian’s second story roof. When Brian said something, he looked over his shoulder and glimpsed her standing next to his friend before immediately having to return his attention to his precarious perch. Once he got his bearings again she was gone. When he mentioned her, Brian had no idea who he was talking about. She had been wearing the color white like it was clothing.

She was never the same color twice.

She was the red of blood behind a thin membrane when she slid into his bed and between his dreams and consciousness. He was thirteen then and would be able to perfectly recall the sensation of her breath against the hollow behind his ear for decades to come.

When he graduated college she was a blue so pure he couldn’t understand it. She was summer yellow the day he married. He saw her each time his wife was pregnant, her own belly rounded with potential. She was a different shade of green for each child.

She made many appearances through the years. She never spoke and, other than that first conversation with Brian, he never spoke about her. She was his private and perpetual mystery.

Now he lies on his final bed, slipping between waking and sleeping in an unnoticeable manner. A thin plastic tube is part of his respiratory system. Little more than phantoms, people come and go at the edge of his reality. But when she arrives she’s solid and real. Almost painfully so. She’s the color of empty and nothingness. So much so that she doesn’t exist.

But he no longer exists, either. Now he’s her mystery.