Whole Blood - II. The Death of the Rainbow (chapter 2) by Alika Yarnell

No one knew who saw Vierge first. A hiker found it in the dew of a star-flower. A pilot spotted it in the lining of a rain cloud. A garbage man caught it between crushed cans and a carton of eggs. After the news broke out, the consensus was that Vierge had been simultaneously experienced on many different parts of the planet. What caused it, no one knew, and for the most part, no one cared. All we wanted was to be near it.

Vierge: The New Color. How to describe it? I was only a child when it came into our world. It wasn’t just a blending of colors that already existed like Chartreuse or Teal or Dusty Rose. And it wasn’t like an upscale Home catalog attempting to disguise puke green as “Retro Olive” or shit brown as “Espresso.” This was a brand new color outside of the spectrum as we knew it. Scientists were baffled. They held prisms through beams of sun and the rainbow we were all familiar with appeared. But Vierge wasn’t there. And yet it was in the steam of my morning jasmine tea.

I should know about the colors in the rainbow, after all, I was named after them. I don’t think my parents did it intentionally, but I couldn’t help noticing in grammar school, when coming up with anachronisms for the order of colors, we were given ROY-G-BIV. No one made the connection except for me: Royal Garrison Belmont IV at your service. People called me Roy. And that’s who I was, just Roy, not Royal. My parents ruined any shot I had of claiming nobility. They were wealthy but went bankrupt before my fifth birthday. I wouldn’t know what it was like to be rich until much later in life.

It became a privilege to witness Vierge in person. Those who hadn’t seen it were considered primitive or low-class. But it wasn’t always easy to acquire it and it was near impossible to describe it to someone who hadn’t seen it. It’s like trying to paint “clear” glass on canvas or conveying the look of water. How do you explain colors to the blind? There’s that old trick of giving them a hot coal and saying “that’s red” or placing a cotton ball in their hands and telling them “that’s white.” A cool stone for gray, an ice cube for blue. But how can you know if they really see what you see? Then again, how do we know the sited see the same colors at all? Maybe it’s like going to a store that sells televisions and viewing all the screens in slightly different shades. They each look right when you stare at them individually, but when they’re sitting side-by-side, one face looks greener, or too pale, or too ruddy.

People generally agreed that Vierge was the most beautiful color on the planet. It wasn’t phosphorescent, but it glowed. It didn’t exactly shimmer, but it shined. Picture your favorite color from another world lit up like a silver moon on a clear night. And then multiply that by a hundred. It made you feel good.

One word to describe it: magnetic. People flocked to it. When Vierge arrived, it changed lives. People were frantic to find it, but once it was within site, they were soothed and content. Even those who had tested positive for colorblindness reacted to Vierge in the same ways. It had a benevolent energy to it, one without an agenda, and people recognized its purity without knowing why.

They called it Vierge after the French word for “pure” or “virgin.” They said it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But was it the end of the rainbow or the death of the rainbow? With everyone so obsessed with Vierge, our natural color-wheel was set aside. Some white-washed their houses in preparation for the inevitable Vierge-colored paint. They put off buying dishes, sweaters, sunglasses, waiting for them to come out Vierge style. They put themselves on waiting lists for the new products. It was not only a personal statement but a status symbol.

Businessmen began scheming. They wanted Vierge toys and soda pop. It would become the fastest trend to saturate all markets. They wanted it in our shampoo, our cars, our candy-coated chocolate, but it would take time to perfect. There was something about the color that made it hard to reproduce.

It was studied in labs. Out of what particles was the pigment made? How could it be imitated? They couldn’t find a way to extract its essence. The only way to color an ordinary object with Vierge was to bathe it in a vat of naturally Vierge- colored objects. It was this way that they made Vierge paints and dyes but most agreed that the original, unexplained Vierge sightings had a stronger hue, a more striking presence.

The rainbow might’ve been set aside, but we needed it if only to help Vierge along. Studies found that if Vierge was put next to our own colors from the Earth’s prism, it caused heightened reactions. Vierge-blue made people calmer, Vierge-red made them more energetic, Vierge-yellow made them hungrier. It wasn’t long before the government began regulating it, saying it was a narcotic even though it hadn’t been proven that a drug could take effect just by looking at it. Marketers and politicians used it to sway their audience and the government couldn’t do much to control it. Vierge was everywhere.

And then nowhere.

One day, just as the color had ignited on our planet, it disappeared. A switch flipped and everything that had been painted, dyed, washed, soaked, enameled, dipped, coated, and bathed in Vierge turned to a dull brown-red. And since it had been such a popular color, the whole world became a sickly dried-up blood bath. Scientists attempted to reproduce Vierge, artists tried to mix it in their pallets, but every time they failed. People remembered the color fondly, talked about the days when it existed, tried to describe it to their children, but over time the color turned into memory.

Vierge was gone.