Shifting (Fiction)

***

Jonathan stepped forward onto a riverbank, water rushing with calm consistency past his feet. He had been on his way somewhere, and now he was…where? He looked around, trying to make sense of his surroundings. He’d been walking down a busy road and crossed the street. He was still clutching his sketchbook and pencil case to his chest. But the riverbank felt real, the grass between his toes moist with the quickly evaporating morning dew, and the breeze carried the scent of the honeysuckle he could see growing at the edge of the copse of trees on the opposite bank. The scene glowed with the bright yellow of summer, but the edges faded, as if an artist had begun a sketch with bold lines, only to trail off into haphazard crosshatching that dwindled into the white nothingness beyond. Jonathan knew that he wasn’t dreaming–neither artistic training nor human imagination would allow him to invent what he saw hovering across the river.

Casting an odd, pulsing glow, a luminous sphere sat near eye level, stationary but for the colorful lights which danced about its porcelain-like surface. Orb, not sphere, Jonathan decided, for though at first glance the thing seemed spherical, something about it belied that simplistic label of three dimensions. A stretching, a curving, as if, just beyond the bend of its horizon, the orb’s surface might suddenly change course and dart off in an unfathomable direction. Like one of those hypercubes Jonathan’s math teachers used to draw on the board, hinting at a geometry impossible to truly view.

As he studied it, the colors shifted, their tones racing along axes Jonathan could not understand, reaching across a divide defined by the limits of his anatomy. His cones and rods worked overtime to translate what he was seeing. The light dappled the grass with tones of acid, sparkled off the dew into rainbows in hundreds of different spectra, a million kaleidoscopes for a million dimensions. Each blink shot fireworks across the darkness behind Jonathan’s eyelids as the orb’s afterimage worked its same magic.

Jonathan tried to see around the edge of the orb, moving for the first time since his arrival, and his head spun. While his view of the landscape shifted as expected, a fixed and material reality, the orb did not, folding instead along an axis he could not make sense of, almost as if it were keeping him in view as he walked, peering out from behind a mask. Its porcelain facade began to grow, the colors zipping faster across its perfect skin.

For a brief moment, the cacophony of colors resolved itself into a pattern, and Jonathan almost thought he understood it—his mind scrabbling like fingertips and failing to find purchase—but the message slipped away. His pulse pounded in his throat. He prayed that he would be able to cross that gap of communication, the impossible dream with a being such as this.

Colors. It talked in colors. Jonathan knew colors. Hadn’t he just started art school? A prestigious school in New York, no less. And there were times, too, since he was a child, when the personalities of people and things bloomed around him in colors and shapes, hallucinations supplementing his normal vision.

In haste, keeping the orb in his peripheral vision, Jonathan flipped to an empty page of his sketchbook. With shaky fingers, he pulled out a new pack of colored pencils. He sat down at the river’s edge, barely aware of the dew soaking the legs of his jeans, and began to sketch a

vague glowing humanoid shape: himself. Maybe this orb might share in Jonathan’s particular breed of misfiring neurons. Maybe it spoke in colors, too. By the time he finished drawing and looked up once more, fingers smudged by his newly broken-in pencils, the orb had begun to cross the river toward Jonathan. He scrambled up, stuffing pencils into his pocket, and flipped his sketchbook around, holding his drawing up for the orb to see—if it even could.

The drawing wasn’t a perfect likeness—the colors weren’t as vivid as they should be—but he hoped it was enough to spark something in the orb. Some type of reaction. The leap necessary for communication. Jonathan’s hands shook as the ever-expanding glowing edge reached the near bank.

The orb’s expansion accelerated, as did the speed of its flashing lights. It began to rotate erratically, as if in and out of space and time, warping everything around it, the images of grass and trees being pulled in by its spin. The flickering took on such speed and intensity that Jonathan saw a moving image in those thousands of frames per second, the nature of which tickled at his mind. The orb spun faster and faster until, in a great, final flash of light.

Jonathan was floating in nothingness. The trees and grass and river around him had vanished, replaced by a blank white void. 

The orb shone before him, and Jonathan experienced its colors with more than just his eyes, through a sense beyond his visual cortex. He thought he must be witnessing the true colors of this orb’s—no, this creature’s—soul.

A tendril of swirling light sparked from the orb’s writhing skin, a solar flare of swirling mist and intense vividness. It reached across the intervening space and snagged at something inJonathan’s chest. He felt a pull. A separation. Like a film of dirt sloughing off in one piece, that rare eggshell which comes away unharmed. Jonathan gaped as a dim, shadowy copy of himself pulled away, blurry as a pencil drawing. His very soul, standing before him. The orb prodded it once with its tentacle of light and colors bloomed across its surface like spreading ink. The outline he recognized, but the rest was a mess, like a Pollock painting, a confused rainbow splashed across the Jonathan-shaped canvas.

The orb retreated a step, an invitation. Transparent legs seemed to tremble as Jonathan moved toward this messy approximation of himself. He already knew where he would start, what he would change first. But could he make it real? Could he make it him?

His arms were transparent, ghostly, but when he touched these ghost limbs to the drawing, the colors responded. A few more experimental prods and began to learn the rules. The colors reacted like paint, though they shimmered with the brightness of photons. He changed bright red into magenta, then to a deep blue. He had perfect control. With this palette of colors he could make anything.

And so he began. Time meant nothing here in this blank space. Jonathan could have been working for hours, days, years tweaking and pushing fibers of color across the spectra of himself, watching patterns emerge, feeling the synesthetic glow of warm rightness when a color finally reached its ideal shade. That green needed to be just a bit higher, a tad cooler…the pink flash across his forehead brighter…the azure shoots of his legs straighter, sturdier. He forgot the orb, floating nearby, watching. He forgot the limitations of the body and mind, forgot that he was mere mist now, and that this many colors between magenta and red should not exist. He forgot New York entirely, forgot he had a life beyond this white void. He was lost in creation. He became creation, and it became him.

The wave of relief when the image was perfect was better than anything he had ever experienced. No food nor drink nor drug had ever filled his being like the knowledge that before him floated the true nature of himself, translated from the stuff of the soul into his own language of colors. A key had turned within his breast, releasing a tension that had existed there his entire life. He barely registered the second great flash of light as the nothingness disappeared and he felt himself falling.

The orb was gone, and so was Jonathan, lost to himself, to the world.

When he came to, all was noise and light. A sidewalk beneath him. Pencil smudges on his fingertips. A honking sound blew past, the doppler effect pulling its pitch down as its frequency slowed. With the sound came a burst of light in Jonathan’s vision, and when it cleared, he realized he was standing in the center of the intersection. Broadway and 12th. Not the most dangerous place in Manhattan to be standing, but not ideal. Another car flew past and he rushed to the sidewalk.

The world bloomed around him as he ran: flashing green, swirling blue, streaks of the softest, brightest pink. He’d always been able to see colors like this, but it had always been fleeting, coming in random spurts. Now, no matter where he shifted his gaze, the ability remained.

“There you are!” called a voice from the sidewalk, and Jonathan stopped and turned. “What are you doing running through the gutter like that?” The voice was full of laughter and disbelief, and filled Jonathan’s head with color. As he stepped nearer, he saw his own light reflecting off her face, merging his blues and greens with the deep, rich browns and reds he saw when she spoke.

“You forgot our date again, didn’t you? Get lost in one of your drawings again?” she asked.

He shrugged and she laughed. She grabbed his hand and dragged him to a coffee shop on the corner. Colors flashed from shop windows, blues and purples and greens haloed passers-by. Inside the shop, colors bloomed out of every cup. A child skipping by with a muffin in hand shone with radiant gold. The whole world glowed.

Jonathan followed the woman he knew so well to the table at which they always sat, one from which they could see the snow begin to fall on the busy street. With tears in his eyes and the snow’s pure white radiance sparkling across his vision he whispered under his breath, “Thank you.”

“It’s just a coffee,” she replied with a smile, but Jonathan thought of the orb, which he was sure he would never see again, and this wondrous gift of color it had given him.

Evan Satinsky is a software engineer, musician, and writer of science fiction and fantasy from St. Louis. He has stories published in Homunculi Magazine and the Opolis Anthology by NUNUM and an upcoming story in The Forbidden Fruit Anthology by Newton Press. Find out more at www.evansatinsky.com.