colorless

by Nayt Rundquist

Juniper was lost, but not hopelessly. She wandered the cool dark of the forest, focusing all her attention on the stretch between her shoulder blades that rippled with frigid electricity when spirits were near. But nothing.

She’d wandered haunted forests before, like wading through gazpacho—cold and thick with ghosty residue. Specters halfway to moving on, partially remembered by everyone left behind. Echoing forward through time in stories. Impenetrable canopy of tree branches creaking, birds calling, insects chirring—everything breathing together. This one was hollow. Silent. Trees not growing or decaying, locked in stasis.

Most forests taste green. This one was colorless.

Juniper found a beech to lean against and settled in. hollow—empty! A muscle behind her left shoulder blade clenched into a knot, and she skittered away, dancing beyond the sprawl of roots to a clear dirt patch to sit in.

Juniper pulled a baggie of almonds from her fanny pack and munched, searching for her bearings. Sliding out her notebook, she reviewed what she’d already crossed off: scorned lover, child-chomping witch, pack of children forever fleeing their captor. Tongue out, she searched for a hint of color. An urban legend that might prove true.

Juniper had been colorless before. Odell had tasted so blue in life—notes of azure, cerulean wafted through their home, infused Juniper’s every moment. She stopped investigating; settled into a simple, brilliant life with her. But the cancer. Blue lingered a while on Odell’s clothes, their bedsheets. When her scent faded, blue did too. Juniper grew hollow, cold. Stagnant.

A tiny spark off west, and Juniper slid everything back into her pack, stood, brushed off. Carried on, still stretching her senses out, hoping for contact in the emptiness.

As her boots crunch through dirt and twigs, her skin hardens. Thickens. Cracks into rivulets. Itches like nothing else. Her joints creak, stiffen. Juniper lurches forward haphazard, an armored cryptid through the trees. Straining, flexing against an elbow that only wants to grow straight and strong, she brings her hand to her arm, slow as old growth, and scratches.

Fingernails scraped along soft flesh. Against skin. Normal skin. Exoskeleton vanished. But still, the forest was colorless. She crunched onward.

Her brother, Oliver, had been green, like this forest should be. When he was old enough to help investigate, she brought him to a small-town roadside. Juniper’s palate couldn’t parse the colors, but Oliver followed a sad doo wop—down the road, through a ditch to a copse of trees and a quartet of teens torn apart decades prior by a backwards town who couldn’t understand them. Oliver sang them each to rest.

A dry twig snaps underfoot. heat—sweating—burning—danger! protect! Brilliant orange, red, yellow flash across her tongue, erupt her tastebuds. Tiny flames ignite her red blood cells, scorch their way through her veins. Hot black as her eyes pop, cry down her cheeks. Boiling rupture of organs overcooking in her abdomen. So much stench battling to enflame her smell receptors, she can only taste nothingness. Everything an inferno.

Colorless forest.

Juniper’s fingers found eyes intact. Carefully, Juniper collected her breath, then her feet. Maybe it was darker. Maybe her senses still reeled from the flames and nothing had changed. She crunched along through trees she couldn’t taste. Still hopefully lost.

Taste had returned many arduous months after Odell. So long hollow. So tasteless. Juniper met color again one unassuming day.

When Juniper brought Oliver to a crumbling Victorian mansion, all reds and violets, they promised to stay within earshot. In a house so labyrinthine, getting turned around was inevitable. Oliver chased after a faint harpsichord. Down a long hallway, through a door. When she caught up, Juniper found only a little rocking chair and a porcelain doll whose eyes followed her searching for the way through, back out the room. She helped many spirits to rest. But she never tasted Oliver’s green again.

Still wandering, waiting for electricity to strike. Until teeth—tearing—ripping—shredding. Putrid steely silver-grey slicing. Her intestines unspool from the fresh gash in her abdomen. Searing hot and purply crimson. Liver and stomach follow down, steaming in the chill twilight. Her freezing shoulder blades crack into the ground. Above, cold stars, almost-yellow, trace slow circles through the new hole in the canopy. Boots trample her arms, stomach. Stench of black oil and grey metal and white apathy. And she can only watch those stars—almost taste sugar, panic, electricity racing out her toes. The murky, mixed-every-paint-together non-color of failure—an unfriendly but not unfamiliar flavor.

Juniper blinks, running through colorless trees, electricity crackling still between her toes. When the clearing finds Juniper, the colorless is brighter—pressing against pupils, trying to force its way to her optic nerves. Squeezing her skull—shoving her, until she sees it. A massive stump, impossibly broad.

Pressure eases—a decrescendo. A palate cleanser. A dancing frigid electricity between shoulder blades. She takes that as permission, walks over slow, perches on the edge. hesitation—timidity. So, Juniper watches the stars; from here they’re frozen in place. She leans back, slow, until her back meets the stump. She stretches her arms above her head and can’t reach the center.

Juniper is still. Breathes in the clearing. Rolls to her stomach—without thinking, licks the stump. Dynamic colorless—translucent in a way she could have never dreamed. Shifting back into losing blue—losing green—over and again, compounded backwards through a prism. Juniper chokes on the absence of flavor.

She presses both palms to the surface: “I’ve lost, too, ancient one. Failed to protect those I love.” She sends blues and greens, vibrant, rich shades. “But holding on is only hurting them. Can you taste it?” A hum beneath her.

Exhaustion finds her there. Cheek to stump, eyes closed: “Allow them to be.” Blue. “Allow them to remember you, carry you with them.” Trailing off green, “Allow them to live again.”

She woke to the sun and a hint of green dancing between the leaves.

Photo of Nayt Rundquist

BIO: Nayt Rundquist’s (they/them) odd scribblings have been nominated for Best Small Fictions, shortlisted for the Brave New Weird anthology, and can be found in Whale Road Review, Inverted Syntax, Digging Through the Fat, Roi Fainéant, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Scavengers Lit Mag, The Citron Review, and others. They live just outside space and time with their artist-jeweler wife and their fifth-dimensional dog.