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 Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:04 pm
 “Because it’s traditional, that’s why.” Perigor walked down the sidewalk, kicking leaves out of the way if they were the soft kind, but stepping firmly on them if they were the crunchy kind. It was always so satisfying to find one of the crunchy ones—all puffed up dried out, slightly wrinkled. They made the best noise. The rest just squished, so what was the point in stepping on them? At that point, you might as well just go inside for some cider or something, because it was going to be a boring freaking day. “People have gone out to look at the fall leaves ever since we moved inside and didn’t have to sleep in leaf piles anymore. Course, I’m not sure what blind people did—crunching them’s pretty fun, but maybe that’s only for people like me.” Peri shrugged. “You know. Obnoxious and immature.” Those were the words he was supposed to use, right? “Besides, how can we write poetry about the autumn leaves if we don’t take a walk in the brisk autumn air?”
The verbal equivalent of a mic-drop performed, Peri threw his arms out wide and proceeded to walk backwards, still pointing his face in the direction of Histeol’s ears. “And they say the heat waves are going to end soon, so that’s a plus. This may be our last day of mellow weather before Ustule trades her tank tops for t-shirts for the rest of the year. Why not spend an afternoon outside with your best friend?”
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:06 pm
 Histeol could appreciate homework assignments following the seasons. It was a way to get people in a festive mood, and from what he’d observed of adults, they liked festive moods more than most kids did. They wanted to celebrate the turning seasons (rather than mourn them), and so they shoved the current time of year into every lesson and assignment. It was cute, and harmless, and so Teo could let it slide. But seriously? A poem about the autumn leaves? Teo was blind, he couldn’t see them. To him, falling leaves were sounds—crunch, rustle, crunch—and smells—damp, rotting vegetation—and not much else. He didn’t think he could write very good poetry about that.
He held up a hand for Perigor’s benefit. “Let’s see. One,” he pushed down a finger, “traditions are always either pleasant, pointless, or painful. Pointless traditions should be forgotten, painful ones should be illegalized. Two,” he pushed down a second finger, “crunching leaves is satisfying, there is no denying that.” He smiled. “I may be an old man in a boy’s body, but sometimes the boy takes over. Three, this isn’t brisk. It’s mild, like you said, and four, how am I supposed to write poetry about this? Falling leaves are all about color. And please don’t tell me that they’re actually about shortening days.” He sighed. “I gave this rant to Cal at breakfast, and she just about lectured my ears off about that. What’s anthocyanin, please?”
Ah, thank the Nine, Peri was using new vocabulary. No more evil, no more awful. Obnoxious and immature was about all Teo and Peri could agree on. That, combined with the snide remark directed towards their Borean friend, gave him a giggle.
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:07 pm
Peri frowned. The teachers were normally better than that. They didn’t usually make assignments that left people like Teo out of the loop. He could only chalk it up to the mysterious ways of teachers. You could never predict them. “Anthocyanin’s the stuff that makes plants red or purple. I have no idea where I picked that up.” He thought a little further while he turned himself back around. “Did she mention carotenes, too? Betcha she mentioned carotenes. They make plants yellow or orange, so they probably showed up in her lecture about leaves.”
As for poetry? “Okay, so the writing thing’s gonna be tough. But the teacher never said you had to write about the appearances of the leaves, right? Yeah, wait a sec.” He turned around once again, slipping off his backpack and rummaging around in it. He pulled out a rumpled sheet of paper with a flourish. “Aha! Yes, here it is: ‘write a poem about what fall leaves mean to you and what they make you think about.’ See? Nothing at all about the colors. You could talk about…” Peri looked around. “You could talk about…uh…crunching the leaves?” He made a face. This might be tougher than he thought, and poetry was always pretty tough to start with. They’d been getting more and more of it as they got older—probably because this would be their last year as freshlings. Next year they’d be juniors, and they’d be asked to do even tougher homework assignments. Good-bye coloring pages and questions like “what’s your favorite number,” and hello to essays, book reports, and a billion problems of math a night. Next year was gonna suck so bad.
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:08 pm
Teo quirked an eyebrow. “A-ha. So. Now the truth comes out! You can’t think of what I should write, either. Like I said, it’s all about the colors, Peri. People talk about them all the time. Apparently they’re ‘fiery,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. It’s not very helpful. People on warm coasts go miles and miles out of their way to go look at the leaves. Just to look at them! No one wants to hold one, or eat one, or smell one. Even I don’t want to, and I don’t have any other choice.” He sighed. “There’s just not much to say on the subject.”
Teo nodded gloomily. Of course the ten-crown words had to do with that stupid subject again. Ugh. Teo didn’t know what had gotten into him lately—he was getting grumpier and grumpier as the days and weeks went by. He hadn’t been quite this angry since he’d been five years old. At least people were being a lot more understanding of his grumpiness these days. Back then he hadn’t had any slack at all when he was feeling low. He supposed it was probably the colors, but he didn’t normally get this upset about sight. It was normally a non-issue for him. It’s because Prometheus has been so distant, ever since he became a junior. Ustule was a junior, too, but she still spent time with them. She didn’t disappear entirely with no explanation.
So it was a combination of loneliness and frustration with a school project that had him grousing to Perigor and nearly biting the half-Demon’s head off.
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:09 pm
Peri tried to think about it. People did talk about colors a lot. It was something he noticed occasionally, usually around the time of school festivals, but not much at other times. “What’s it like? Having something everyone loves to talk about be totally alien to you?” he asked. If he hadn’t known Teo so well, this would have been a rude question, but he’d known Teo for a few years now, so he was pretty comfortable in asking him personal questions like this. He just had to remember not to get so personal when other people were involved. It wouldn’t do to upset strangers by asking them all personal questions about a sense they lacked.
Peri reached out to catch an oak leaf drifting down. He held it out at arm’s length, and tried to imagine what it would be like to not see the leaf. “Okay, so,” he said. “Leaves are…okay, so, you know when you’ve been outside for a long time? And you’ve gotten really cold. Your toes are freezing and you can’t feel your fingers. You go inside, and you meet this sort of wall of warm air. And you smell cinnamon on the air. Maybe someone’s baking cookies or they’re warming up apple cider. That’s what this leaf looks like.” He handed the oak leaf to Teo, and picked up another leaf. “Okay, so this one is it’s a really cold day, right? But you’re bundled up warm, so the wind feels actually kind of nice against you. You can feel it on your neck and your face. Your ears are freezing, but you just don’t care. That’s what this leaf looks like.” He handed it to Teo. “I’m not sure if any of this makes any sense.”
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:11 pm
Teo shrugged. “It’s like people are talking another language. I know that red and green are the color of holly leaves and the Winter Solstice, but I don’t know what red and green are. I know that apples are red—most of the time—and that red is the color of fire—except when fire is orange, white, or blue—and I know that green is the color of growing things. But it’s like you’re all using a bunch of weird adjectives. I’m expected to know what the colors are by your definitions, your ‘this is the color of grass,’ stuff, but it’s all arbitrary. I can’t pick up a spoon and tell you what color it is, and yet you insist that it has a color. Every object has a, a quality to it that I can’t identify or quantify or even detect. It’s like I told you that my dog smells sploink. You don’t know what that means, you can’t tell that my dog smells sploink and your dog smells tiffy. And you never can. I never can. There’s just no way Above or Below.”
Then Peri did something very interesting—he started describing a scene. Teo fell silent and listened to what Peri was saying. He imagined the scene in his mind, coming in from a long walk, all cold and shivering. Then a crispy leaf was placed in his hand. It was one of those long, scalloped leaves. He felt it all over. “This is from a ‘scarlet’ oak, right? Is it actually scarlet-colored?” Then he looked over at Peri. “Please, go on. I’m not sure if you’re making sense yet, but please go on anyway.”
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:12 pm
Peri looked the leaf over. “In bits and places,” he said. “It’s got a dark green spine, but the rest is red and orange. I’d say it’s more crimson than scarlet. If it was scarlet, you would have been wearing wool socks and your toes wouldn’t have been so cold.” He held out a hand to stop Teo in their tracks, then carefully reached out with his foot to step on a crunchable leaf. “Those leaves are different. They’re all solid, so they’re more like…they’re more like being asleep in a room with a space heater on. You’re in a dreamless sleep, or maybe you’re just awake enough to be lucid dreaming. You can’t be arsed to move, though, so you don’t. That’s what those leaves are colored. Other leaves turn into them over time.” Then he reached out a foot and nudged another one. “This one’s like the first leaf in shape, but it’s also a sleepy-leaf. This time, you’re troubled. You’re too sleepy to think clearly, but you have a test in the morning and you’re not sure if you studied hard enough for it. In between thinking about one subject and the next, you fall asleep.”
He linked his arm in Teo’s and continued on their walk. “That tree over there is colored like a warm day when you’re wearing a long-sleeved shirt. Those trees over there are pine trees, so they haven’t changed colors at all. Their colors are more like sitting in a cool, fragrant kitchen, eating a salad. They have some dead needles, though, which are like that dreamless sleep without anxiety. That’s more or less the whole gamut of fall colors right there.”
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:14 pm
Teo nodded. “So scarlet is a ‘warmer’ color than crimson? But they’re both red, right?” He thought about it some more. “Why is it that there are about fifty different shades of blue, but only three shades of red? There’s crimson, scarlet, and poppy, and I can’t think of any others. Unless orange is a shade of red—apparently orange things get called red a lot. It’s awfully confusing if you ask me.” Teo continued to collect leaves, picking them up and handing them to Perigor for description. The ones that Peri was finished with Teo stuffed in his pockets so that his jacket was soon puffed out with leaves in the pockets. A subtle change in the way that Haint pulled at their leash hinted that they were close to home by now. Mom would have some hot cider for them to drink. Then they could do their homework together, and then Peri would have to be taken home. “I’m glad that leaves represent feelings rather than time,” he said suddenly. “I don’t like time going forward. I don’t like being dragged around by something we can’t control. Don’t you wish we could just sit in one place and not have to worry about anything? Not have to worry about things changing and the future coming on us fast?”
Teo wanted to put his hands in his pockets, but they were full of leaves. He refused to take them out, though—when he got home, he was going to print up a bunch of labels describing what each one looked like. Maybe then he could figure out what the correlation was, some way to detect the color by touch or taste or smell.
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:15 pm
“Yeah, scarlet’s warmer than crimson. Crimson’s a darker red, and it’s more on the pink scale. Pinker reds are cooler, orange-ier reds are warmer. Pink’s a warm color, and it’s warmer than purple, but it’s not as warm as red. Red’s very warm, but personally, I don’t think it’s as warm as orange. Most flames are orange, after all. Yellow’s warm, but not as warm as orange. Green’s the warmest of the cool colors, and after that, there’s blue—that one’s the coldest—and purple, which is a little warmer than blue. Green and purple can either be as warm as each other, or less warm, depending on the shade. Same’s true of red and yellow.” As for the other question? “Yeah, that’s something I’ve wondered for a while. There are always more blues than reds, even when you factor in rose, cranberry, raspberry, and cherry. Rose is either red or pink depending on how dark it is, cranberry and raspberry are on the pink end of the spectrum, and cherry’s sort of smackdab in the middle of the colors. I swear this makes more sense if you can see them all.”
Peri fell silent for a while. “Have I helped you at all? With understanding what colors are? ‘Cause they may be photons of light bouncing at various frequencies of energy, but people don’t like them because of what they see. People like colors because of what they feel. What the colors make them feel. That’s why I like green and orange, because they remind me of pumpkins and I like pumpkins. Also, I’m green and orange."
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 7:16 pm
Teo shuddered. He hadn’t absorbed any of that explanation at all. “Colors are weird. I’m beginning to think that they’re the most complex thing I can’t sense.” A circle, he thought. They were a hoop of some kind with no beginning and no end, but two distinct sides, the warm side and the cool side. It seemed that if he wanted to learn about colors the way that normal people knew them, he’d have a lot of studying to do. Possibly it wouldn’t be worth it. Possibly, it would be more worth it to learn how to sing or how to knit. You didn’t need to be able to see to knit, right? At least not to knit a scarf of some kind. Maybe he could learn how to crochet. Maybe that would be easier.
“I think you’ve helped me. You’ve definitely helped me a little. I can see why people would care about color, though maybe not how much you all care.” They were almost home now. He swore he could smell the cider on the air. It was possible that his mother had opened a window in the kitchen. It was a relatively warm day, after all. “I still can’t figure out what color an object is just by touching it. But we can work on that another day.” He nudged Perigor playfully. “Thank you, seriously,” he said. “I think I know what I’ll write my poem about. Walking in the fall air with a friend, talking about nothing important. Picking up leaves and describing them to each other. Falling leaves mean…friendship. And learning.
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