The Color That Wasn't There

Soren's grandmother kept a jar of clear soap on the windowsill, the kind that was nothing but a faint amber liquid, almost water. He had walked past it a hundred times. Tonight, with the sun going down behind the apple tree, he stopped.

The soap was blue.

Not painted blue. Not dyed. It had been amber an hour ago. He picked up the jar and turned it, and the blue slid around inside like it was caught between the glass and his eye. When he held it up against the lamp instead of the window, the same liquid glowed faintly orange.

"You're letting the milk go warm," his grandmother said. She was at the stove, not turning around. She had her own ideas about how a kitchen ran, and a boy holding the soap up to the light was not part of them.

Soren set down the soap and looked at the milk. He had poured it into a glass for himself and forgotten it. White. Solidly, ordinarily white.

He pressed his thumb behind the glass. He could not see his thumb. The milk gave back no thumb, no shadow, just white, the way the soap gave back blue and the window over the sink gave back the last of the sky, which was also blue, going purple at the edges.

Three blues. No. Two blues and a white. And not one of them had any color in it that he could find.

He held the milk to his nose. It smelled like milk. He looked at it close, his eye almost against the cold glass, and there was nothing in there to look at, no flecks, no specks, nothing he could point to and say, that is the white part.

That was the thing that stopped his breath a little. White is a color you can usually find. Chalk is white because chalk is white all the way through. But milk was mostly water, and water was clear, and the fat and the rest of it floating in there was, his science teacher had said once, almost too small to call anything at all.

So where was the white coming from.

He took the soap jar and the milk glass to the window and lined them up. Behind both of them, the sky.

He tilted the soap. Blue toward his eye. Orange toward the lamp.

He looked at the sunset through the glass over the sink. The part of the sky right above the apple tree, where the sun had just gone, was orange and red. The part straight up was deep blue.

Same liquid, two colors, depending on whether the light came at you or went away from you.

Same sky, two colors, depending on whether you looked at where the sun was or where it wasn't.

His hand went cold around the milk. The fat drops in the milk were tiny. The bits of soap in the water were tiny. The bits of air and dust the sunlight had to swim through, all the way down through the sky to the apple tree, those were tiny too, and there were a lot of them, and a lot of them, and the light had a very long way to come.

Soren got his notebook out of his back pocket and wrote sky milk soap, and under it, all of them clear, and under that he drew a little eye, and an arrow coming at it, and an arrow going past it.

"Grandma," he said. "Why is milk white."

"Because it's milk," she said, stirring. "Set the table."

"But there's nothing white in it. It's fat and water. Fat's yellow. Water's clear."

She paused, the spoon still. "Huh," she said, which was the most honest thing anyone had said to him all day. "I never thought about that." Then she went back to stirring, because dinner does not wait for a boy to finish being amazed.

Soren held the milk up one more time and thought about the size of things. Small enough, his teacher had said, and you stop seeing the thing. You start seeing what the thing does to the light.

Blue light was the small, quick kind. It got knocked sideways the easiest, bounced off the tiny droplets, scattered everywhere. Red light was the long, lazy kind. It went straight through and kept going.

That was why the soap was blue when he looked at it sideways. The blue had been knocked off the path toward his eye. And it was orange held to the lamp, because the blue had all been scattered away by the time the light came out the far side, and only the long red kind made it through.

The sky straight up was blue for the same reason the soap was blue. The sun's light came in, and the air knocked the blue out of it in every direction, and some of that scattered blue rained down into Soren's eye from the whole dome of the sky.

And the sunset was red because that light had to come the long way, low across the whole world, and by the time it reached him every scrap of blue had been knocked out of it somewhere over somebody else's town.

The milk was white because the droplets in it were a little bigger and a little more crowded, so they scattered all the colors at once, every direction, until it all piled back up into white.

No blue in the sky. No red in the sunset. No white in the milk. Just clear things, and small things, and light deciding which way to turn.

Soren put the milk down very carefully, the way you put down something that turned out to be heavier than it looked.

The whole blue sky outside the window was a glass of milk that happened to be ten miles deep.

And he was standing inside it.

"Soren," his grandmother said. "Plates."

He got the plates. He set four of them down even though there were only two of them eating, and didn't notice, because he was watching the window go from blue to purple to the gray that comes when there isn't enough light left for anything to be knocked sideways at all.

The soap on the sill had gone gray too. He picked it up and gave it one last tilt toward the lamp, and the orange came up out of it, faint and certain, like a coal under ash.