At last Jamal told her of the colors. It was only a matter of time, he realized, because this was Azhar. He could not hide the truth from her: he loved her like a man and trusted her like a child.
“Well, I see it too,” Azhar laughed.
She was lying. She gazed too far to the left, where there was no yellow. He rolled his eyes and didn’t contradict her. He didn’t have the heart. Or he did, rather, and that was the reason.
She rolled around on her stomach and lifted herself on her elbows. A veil of grass rippled like silk in the space between them, so that only her eyes were visible, butterflies that batted the wings of her lids at him. He turned his head, pillowed by a tree root, and offered her his crooked half-smile.
Again the tinkling of bells as the goats finished that bramble patch and moved on. Again the blades of yellow light that sheared through the haze of twilight. The goats—they’d reproduced to ten—shuffled further into the desert, but still visible from this grass at the oasis’ edge. Jamal watched the golden glow and felt Azhar’s eyes seeking his. This time he restrained the smile, a smile at the beauty of the colors, for that would exclude her. She noticed, still, how his face softened.
“I don’t, fine, I don’t,” she huffed, and slumped back down. Jamal lurched up into a sitting, reached out and pinched her crinkled nose, rewarded by the rosy sparks blooming over her head as she laughed. Azhar straightened and sat up, so that they crouched less than a foot apart, face to face. The colors fizzed away as her giggle faded.
“What does it look like?”
He took her hand, traced the lines of the palm with her finger. “It depends. High notes are bright, maybe lighter hues. The chime of the bells, say, sharp gold and amber, like blades of light cutting through the air.” His finger pressed her palm and drew short choppy lines. Then it paused, backtracked, and caressed the skin in a random choreography of swirls. “Sometimes colors emerge from the trees when the wind stirs the leaves… they’re like… swirls, teal… and serpentine, winding around the branches. When raindrops fall, sparks rebound from the ground like tiny springs.”
She sighed and looked at his fingers in her palm. “I wish I could see it.”
Jamal said nothing.
“Why have you never told me? Why have you never told any of us here? This is a gift, Jamal. This is extraordinary.”
A gift. Through her eyes: a gift. No, it was crazy. He had never heard it phrased like that. But could he doubt her? If she chose to call it a gift, he would wish it so. Within him, now, he knew it to be true. No demons. No madness. A gift.
“People would not like it, Azhar. They would only loathe me more”
She crouched forward and cupped his cheek in her hand. “Nobody could ever loathe you,” she said, and Jamal’s eyes stung with the well-meant untruth of her words.
He thought of her grandfather, blind yet fuller of life and color and vision than any other. He wondered about the rest of her family, an unmentioned past of pain. “People have a way of treating those who are different,” he said. She tried to smile, but behind the mask he saw the reflection of the large, sad eyes of her childhood. Jamal spoke to release the reflection.
“Sometimes I am blinded. When my people were attacked, there was too much sound and color, and it was terrible. But there is so much beauty. The chiming of bells—of the church, of the herd—appear as shades of gold. The steps of camels are copper. I can sense emotions, too, in the stains of voices. Your laugh is the happiest flame of colors, like sunset.” Jamal’s finger drew a sun in her palm, then folded her own fingers above it to keep in its warmth forever.
She kissed him then. His eyes softened on her face as the world exploded in colors.
"Angreek87"
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