The Wrong Green

The thread spools came in a box the size of a microwave, all jumbled, and Maya's grandmother said sort them by color before you leave or you don't leave.

"Easy," Maya said.

They were not easy. There were maybe forty greens.

Soren lined up a row on the counter, dark to light. Maya reached over and moved one.

"That one's not with the greens," she said.

Soren looked at it. "It's green."

"It's the wrong green."

"Wrong how? It's next to the other greens. It matches."

"It doesn't feel green," Maya said. "It feels like a four."

Soren put down the spool he was holding. This was the kind of sentence he wrote down. He got out his notebook and wrote, feels like a four, and underneath it a spool.

"What does a four feel like," he asked.

"Green," said Maya. "Fours are green. That's why the spool is wrong. It's the green of a four but it's supposed to just be a color."

"Fours are green," Soren repeated, carefully, the way he said things when he was checking whether the room had tilted or he had.

"And sevens are yellow and threes are that reddish one, hold on." Maya dug through the box and pulled out a rust-colored spool. "That's a three."

"Maya. What color is the number eight?"

"Purple."

"Every time? Or just today?"

"Every time. It's always been purple. Eight is purple, why are you looking at me like that."

Soren was looking at her like that because he did not see numbers as colored, and he had assumed no one did, and now he had a piece of information that did not fit into the shape of the world he had walked in with.

"Numbers aren't colored," he said. "They're black. They're printed in black."

"Sure, and eight is still purple."

"Those are two different things you just said."

"They're not, though." Maya frowned. This was the part she hated, when a thing was completely obvious to her and completely locked to everyone else and she had to build a bridge out of words she didn't have. "The eight is black on the page and it is also purple. Both. Like how you can know a song is loud and still hum it quiet."

Soren wrote: two colors at once, one real one not, but she says both real.

"Prove it," he said. Not mean. Interested.

"How."

"If eight is really always purple, I can test it." He tore a strip off a paper bag and wrote a big number on it, hidden, then held it face down. "When I flip this, don't think. Just say the color you get before you say the number."

He flipped it. A five.

"Blue," Maya said instantly. "Five is blue."

He wrote it. Flipped a six. "Orange." A two. "White, sort of. Bad white." A nine. "Green again, darker than four."

He went through fifteen numbers, fast, out of order, some of them twice without telling her. Every time she said the same color for the same number. Six was orange the first time and orange the second time, and there had been eleven numbers in between, and she hadn't hesitated once.

Soren looked at his page. Fifteen numbers. Not one contradiction.

"You're not deciding," he said. "I kept thinking you were deciding. You're not. It's already there when you look."

"That's what I keep saying."

"No, but I didn't believe it. I thought you meant it like a game. Green for four, yellow for seven, like a code you made up." He tapped the notebook. "You can't make up a code and remember it perfectly with eleven numbers in the middle. The two was white before you had time to remember anything."

Maya sat down on the stool. "So it's real."

"It's real for you." He said this slowly, because it was the strangest part. "The spool is the wrong green because your brain hands you the color of a four whether you ask for it or not. And I hold the exact same spool and it's just green. Same eyes. Same light. Same spool."

"Then what's different?"

"You. The inside part." Soren pressed his hands flat on the counter. "There's a thing your brain does between the number and you seeing it, and my brain doesn't do it, so I never knew the step was there. I thought everyone got the number plain."

Maya was quiet. Then she said, "How many people get it plain?"

"I don't know. Most, maybe. But not you." He looked at the box of forty greens, the one wrong green sitting off by itself where she'd moved it. "You've been reading a different page than me this whole time. Same page. Different colors coming off it. And neither of us could tell, because it all looks like just the numbers to whoever's holding them."

"I thought everyone knew eight was purple," Maya said. "I never said it out loud because it seemed too obvious to say. Like saying water's wet."

"That's the part that gets me." Soren's voice went up. "There could be a hundred things like this. Things somebody's brain hands them automatically that they never mention because they think everybody gets them too. Whole extra senses, sitting there, invisible, because nobody thought they were worth saying."

"How would you even find them."

"You'd have to say the obvious thing." He almost laughed. "You'd have to say water's wet and eight's purple and wait to see who looks at you funny."

Maya picked up the wrong green and turned it in the light. To Soren it stayed one green among forty. He watched her hold it, knowing she was holding a number, and that he would never once see the purple in an eight no matter how long he stared, and that she would never once not see it.

She set the spool down alone at the end of the counter, in its own group of one.

"That's the fours," she said, and reached into the box for more.