London afternoons are perpetually damp, like a worn rag that never fully dries.
I stand beneath the eaves of 14 Sainted Road, the chill of the metal umbrella handle biting into my palm. I don't step into the rain immediately—instead, I find myself staring at the traffic signal at the intersection.
It glows with a deathly gray.
I frown and rub my eyes hard. Perhaps it's temporary color blindness from straining over those dimly lit Victorian-era maritime logs? The doctor once mentioned that prolonged stress can distort perception.
The light changes—or rather, it shifts to another faint, whitish shade of gray.
Pedestrians with umbrellas flow across the zebra crossing like a school of silent sardines. They move with such certainty. No one pauses to check the malfunctioning signal. No one pulls out a phone.
"Hey, Elias! What are you standing there for? Trying to catch pneumonia?"
A familiar voice comes from behind. It's Arthur, my soon-to-retire supervisor, struggling with a large black umbrella, the buttons of his trench coat crooked.
"Director," I point toward the gray signal, masking my unease with a forced lightness. "Look at that. Did the council divert the maintenance budget to tea funds again? The colors seem completely washed out."
Arthur follows my gaze, his clouded eyes calm.
"Washed out? It looks perfectly normal to me." He turns back, giving me an odd look. "Elias, if you need leave, just say so. Don't concoct such clumsy jokes. Red means stop, green means go—even a child knows that."
I chuckle self-deprecatingly and fall silent. Perhaps it really is just my eyes.
Entering the lobby of the Cultural Heritage Administration, I instinctively glance at Arthur's signature red tie—the one from his daughter, which he proudly wears and mentions daily, often to the point of tedium.
But I see only emptiness.
His collar is bare, not even the faint imprint of a tie clip. Stranger still, when I try to summon the image of that tie in my mind, the memory of "red" seems bleached—rapidly blurring, fading, until only a hollow concept remains.
I sit at my desk, my heart beating too fast.
My hand dips into my pocket, fingertips finding something small and hard. A tiny red paperclip.
It isn't "evidence" of anything—just something I absentmindedly took from my fiancée Claire's desk this morning. She used it to mark our wedding planner, calling it a "festive color." I slipped it into my pocket, intending to glance at it during lunch, a reminder of the gentle life waiting beyond these dusty archives.
I pull it out.
The once vibrant, fiery paperclip now rests in my palm as a chaotic, unstable gray. It flickers every few seconds, as if struggling in its final throes.
I stare at it, my throat tightening.
I am not pondering "physical laws"—I am thinking: If the paperclip has changed, what about Claire? Will the words she left on that page still be there?
I yank open the drawer and pull out the Manual of Sensory Constants. This isn't about studying the cosmos—it's the closest thing to a "standard answer" within my professional instinct as an archivist. I need proof. The world isn't broken; it's just my optic nerves.
My hands shake as I turn to page 42.
I see the clearly printed text—the characters defining light waves, frequency bands, color spectra—beginning to curl and blacken at the edges under my gaze, as if licked by invisible flames.
They aren't disappearing. They are being rewritten.
The line defining red, in the blink of an eye, morphs into an unfamiliar term: [Visual Redundancy: Removed.]
I slam the book shut. The sound echoes through the empty archive, stirring dust in the corners.
Cold sweat trickles down my spine.
I look out the window. A large fire engine screams past—no siren, no flashing lights. It moves like a gray, silent ghost through streets equally drained of life.
In that moment, I don't yet think of debts to the void or encroaching nothingness. I only feel a profound, unprecedented loneliness.
Because I suddenly realize: if the entire world sees it as normal, and only I see it as gone…
Then perhaps it isn't the color that has vanished.
It's me—the one who can no longer see it.
I clutch the fading paperclip desperately, its metal point digging deep into my palm.
I stared at the gray shadow between my fingers, my stomach churning.
This wasn't the nausea of illness, but a deeper vertigo born of logic unraveling. I fixed my gaze on the faded paperclip while my cerebral cortex screamed warnings: This defies physics. This defies common sense.
"Elias?" Arthur's voice cut through again, laced with that uniquely unsettling brand of supervisory concern. "You're pale as a specimen fresh from formaldehyde. Listen to me—go to the infirmary, or go home. You're in no state to handle delicate antiquities."
I looked up at him. His face was real. The desks around us were real. Even the stale air, thick with coffee and mildew, was real.
The self-preservation instinct of reason stirred awake inside me.
I began desperately searching for rational excuses for the anomalies before me. Perhaps it was an early sign of retinal detachment? Or some rare form of neurological chromatic deficiency? I'd been in the archives too long—the dim light, the toxic lead in ancient inks—they must have corroded my optic nerves.
Yes. It had to be me.
"Sorry, Director," I forced a strained smile, my voice trembling in a way I didn't recognize. "You're probably right. I've been pushing too hard. I… I think I really need to go home and sleep."
I grabbed my briefcase and almost stumbled out of the lobby.
The rain on Sainted Road fell as endlessly as before. I stood at the corner, frantically scanning every passerby. I searched their faces for even a flicker of alarm, a single confused glance.
Nothing.
A woman with a transparent umbrella crossed the street gracefully. In my vision, the vivid floral pattern that should have adorned her skirt was now just a blurred gray smudge. Yet she walked with such confidence, even tilting her head slightly to inhale the aroma of her coffee, a look of quiet pleasure on her face.
I am the one who is sick. I leaned against the cold brick wall, squeezing my eyes shut, repeating the mantra internally.
The self-doubt spread like poison. I began to believe that the gray paperclip I now held had always been gray—that my memory was playing a chemical trick called "delusion."
I remembered the medical term: solipsistic hallucination.
If the entire world was coherent and I alone was dissonant, then I was the erroneous variable.
I entered the tube station. The escalator groaned with its mechanical, monotonous rhythm. I stared at the safety stripes on the handrail—once bold warning colors, now resembling the dirty gray-white scales of a dead serpent.
But beside me, a blind man ran his fingers along the same rail, his movements practiced and natural.
"Don't think about it, Elias," I muttered to myself, the words swallowed by the roar of an approaching train.
I had to get home.
Home had Claire.
She was the clearest, most real, most logically consistent presence in this world. Just seeing her, hearing her say my name, confirming that the world through her eyes was still vibrant—this sudden nightmare of fading color would evaporate like morning fog.
I stepped into the carriage and sank into a swaying seat.
I looked down at my hand. The cut from the paper was still seeping.
I stared intently at the wound. In my vision, the fluid welling up was clear as water. I began to wonder—was I misremembering even the sensation of pain? If my blood ran clear, did that mean the hemoglobin in my veins had vanished too?
This was absurd. I must be dreaming. Or suffering some severe form of psychosis brought on by exhaustion.
"It's alright, Elias," I buried my face deep in my hands, hiding from the world growing unfamiliar.
"Once I see Claire, everything will be fine."