The Colour of Longing by Leo Oliveira
2500 words, ~12 minutes reading time
Issue 7 (Spring 2025)
Avino’s body still breathes, so I don’t bury him; I lay him in bed, covers tucked beneath his chin. When I leave, I shut the door soft enough not to wake him. It’s better to imagine that he’s only sleeping.
The skiff squeals her complaints as I clamber inside. Somewhere beneath these tepid black waters caressing the base of our cabin’s hill and the veil of death away is a particularly ancient and enmeshed spirit: one of two in the region. Namaygus. The knowledge she contains, borrowed from strategic cleavings of her flesh, are invaluable, if slow. Knowledge is everything. Avino understood that, so why…?
Grey water bubbles up around my boots through minuscule cracks in her hull. If boats had spirits, hers would be waving at me halfway through to the Other Side, but she only needs to survive this one last trip. I push away from the scraping banks. Here, the mouths of three rivers sluggishly mash together—more lake than stream—swollen to the point of bursting around a crescent-shaped island before their contents are squeezed downriver like black honey from a tube. It makes for pleasant rowing. Half the work the current does on its own. I let it carry me a moment and peer over the skiff’s lip, careful. If I fall into the water, I’m not certain I’ll be able to claw my way back out.
All these years in exile, and it’s the small intrusions that sink me. Which parent do I more closely resemble? They kept their bare skin like secrets. I only ever saw their faces once. Stolid, implacable things. A scowl sags down the corners of my ripple-warped reflection. I don’t know what I look like through another’s untainted eyes, but I don’t remember seeming so old.
“You’re not old, you’re well-aged,” Avino would say. He tried explaining his desire for apprenticeship before—spinning monologues about why he left the village, why he chased after me. But he also described the colour blue for hours on end and I could never picture it the same. “It’s like the snow sleeping,” he said, “or warmth in a shallow sea, or fish scales, or sour fruit. It’s the colour of bitterness and tang; toothaches and tourniquets. Come on, Reed. That has to make some sense to you.”
“I see your blue, Avino. It only looks green to me.”
When the living touch the dead, we slip into the Other Side. This is a forbidden thing. But I’d gone over too often and with too little aplomb. As a toddling creature, this was easily dismissed as poor judgment and lax parenting. As a reasoning child, it became a liability. That I partook in these ventures grew into an open, vexing feature. A quirk of my character that, if not dropped, would soon doom me to the careless touch of a more powerful spirit, or worse, consume the weakened essence of the beloved departed.
To touch a spirit within their realm is to touch them with your whole self after all, and whatever is bigger than you will consume you—as is the law of nature, and nature is the only constant.
The skiff wheezes onto the island’s shore. I secure it to a flagpole of flaking iron and begin my march uphill.
We’ve walked this trail a thousand times, enough to snake a well-trod path up the ridge. Not too far from the shore, the trail hiccups into a sharp incline of clay cliffs. I sling the pouches over my shoulder and limp up the wooden rungs we hammered into place. They were a fine idea when we were young: simple to construct, easy to use. Now I wish we cobbled together a ramp.
Sweat sticks my hair to my forehead and drips, stinging, into my eyes. I taste salt on my lips and iron in my throat. Every time I make the climb, I swear it grows harder. The rungs more rotted. The cliff face steeper. I scarcely believe there was a time I braved it daily. I’m ragged and panting by the time the island levels out at the top into a broad, wide circle. It’s mostly flat, save for the shallow bowl hewn into the middle, a ring of balding spruce trees lining it.
“Explain a different colour to me again, but in reverse,” I said once. Now it plays over again in my head, hearing my own words as though I’m speaking them. “Tell me how it makes you feel, then tell me what you call it.”
Every spring the spruces bleed sap from their scars: abstract whorls and racing animals slashed across the trunks by a long forgotten people. Avino once scraped some off with the flat of his knife and handed it to me. The sap oozed down the handle, sticky and sharp smelling. He licked some from his fingers and when the sap grew dangerously close to staining my sleeves, I copied him. It tasted about as pleasant as it smelled.
“Sweet and sour,” he said. “Memory and haze. Sunrise and sunset. Warmth. It’s the colour of longing.”
I traced the shiny trail the sap left behind: bold as flame. “Pink.”
“Orange.”
I remove a knife from one pouch and use it to slice an open smile into the other, spilling a generous clatter of dried salmon scales onto the dirt, almost as pink as the sap.
Avino and I spent long hours hiking to the spawning grounds to gather fish for fleshing, waiting for their white bellies to come bobbing to the surface. Despite our departure from society and its common standards, killing for access to the Other Side never struck me as preferable to less obtrusive means. Scales can be dried and kept. They are small and portable, and relatively few are necessary for the task. Besides, I long suspected Avino had no stomach for killing, either. We buried whatever was left in pebble cairns.
I coax the scales into a pile at my feet, edge up my gloves, and rest my bare wrists upon them.
I shut my eyes on the island. I open them underwater.
Namaygus waits, as always, winding around me on the Other Side. A trout the sinuous shape of a giant eel, painting the river black with her reflected hide. She does not swim because she is too large. She squirms through the muck, countless fins like cilia disturbing the ethereal shores.
I rub my gloves together, raise my scarf into a mask. Water infuses my lungs, warm as tea and nearly as comforting.
“It feels like we’re about to drown when we’re over there,” Avino said after the first time I brought him over.
“We won’t.”
Avino practically glowed with nerves those fledgling months. He shied from violence like a wolf shies from flame. My stomach is made for sterner things.
I plunge the knife into Namaygus’ side, right under one of her thousand fins. The flesh gives way like it’s rotten. Blood mushrooms from the wound, coppery on my lips, pink churning the water brown around it. Already I’ve cut deeper than I ever have before. Not a strip, not a delicate sphere; I sink down to my covered knuckles, my wrists.
Namaygus’s scales ripple, then bulge. A shudder for her is a thrashing for me and I yank back, but the blade holds stubborn. Stuck. On what? A plaintive whine squeals from my throat. I plant my feet on her coils and pull, slash, and pull again. Again. Her meat is solid as rock elbow-deep, where the muscle cords bunch and flex.
I’m trapped.
Like how Avino was this very morning, shoulders flat against the wall. “I did something terrible yesterday, Reed. The kind of thing I can never take back.”
Namaygus bucks and sends me flying. Flailing, more like. My arms wrench in their sockets, my palms chafe from the death grip I have on the knife. My muscles, nerves, and tendons all burn with searing pain. She slams against my back, or my back slams into her, and my spine bends like a blade of straw. I choke around nothing. Namaygus spins.
“I met with Gidika. He doesn’t speak, you know, but sometimes I swear he tries to communicate. I’ve never seen him so adamant. He crooned at me like a bird, hooked his claws into his chest and unlocked his ribcage. Just twisted, swung it open, like wings. I didn’t know what to do.”
Avino’s memory of the god cascades around me in a resounding crash, twice as loud as it’s been all day. I hear him telling the story, see him experiencing it, and all at the same time I’m living a similar version myself, if far less amicable. Avino loved Gidika, in a way. While I carved slivers of Namaygus to absorb, he convinced Gidika to hand those memories over. Avino could convince a starving bear to spare him. I fear Namaygus despises me.
My arms bend backward, sideways, forwards, creaking and testing the joints of my elbows. Ice tingles my veins, frazzled numb where they rub against skin and bone and little clusters of each other. Tiny sunbursts pulse in my fingertips.
In his memory, Avino cried out, racing toward Gidika’s opened cavity, catching like a breath the silver glitter of a pearl heart in the spirit’s chest.
“The oldest spirits form a pearl at their core, a root,” Avino said to me today, and now, and every day forever and ever since. “It contains everything that they are, everything they know, and I touched it, consumed it, I—I made a mistake. I understand that now. I understand it because Gidika’s memories showed it to me. We’ve been killing them, exploiting them, trampling on their harmony. There is no peaceful way to slip into their lives. We are not curing them of loneliness and apathy. All we’ve done here is spread misery.”
A terrible ripping sound bubbles through the water, accompanied by fresh pink curls. With a shudder and a jerk, the knife wrenches down Namaygus’ length, carving a trench. Split curtains. Her thin bones gleam, a white forest in bloom, and at the heart of it all rests a glittering, black-knotted pearl.
At Avino’s confession, my fists clenched. The roof of my mouth swelled with bitter, bloody jealousy. Contempt. I couldn’t stand that he knew more than I did, that he’d rub it in my face. But I didn’t want him to preach his findings, either. I didn’t want him to have a say over me in anything. A muscle in my cheek twitched. “I’ll need to find Namaygus then and see this for myself.”
“No!” Avino yelled, facing his palms towards me, pleading.
I scowled. “You went to Gidika.” And if he did, why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I, unless he was hiding something from me, planning on stealing every spirit’s memory for himself, planning on changing all the world by himself, planning on stealing my mission and my purpose, my everything that I sacrificed my place in life for, leaving me as a forgotten scrap of a mention on the side.
If what he claimed was true, he had now experienced hundreds of lives, maybe thousands. Did he see an opportunity to depose me, like a spider eating its mate, or a student proving their worth by killing their teacher? Was that the truth at the core of his monologues, his reasoning? Whatever is bigger than you will consume you, but even a shark pup hides in the shallows before it grows large enough to compete with the adults. I’d allowed Avino to mature. I’d harboured my own end.
I crawl inside Namaygus’ flaps, sinking down past my feet. I abandon the knife for my gloved fingers. I wrest handholds from arteries and ribs, rungs from fibre and sinew. In this world, I’m younger, faster, stronger. The root is the only thing I see.
“I can’t let you—Reed, what are you doing?” Avino’s voice trembled with fear as I split a pouch of scales at our feet. “Reed? Reed!” He struggled. It didn’t matter.
I dragged him down by the sleeves and buried our fingers in death. We plunged into the Other Side, the wooden walls creaking, the warm lights of the fireplace cooling to green. Our supper boiled above it, never to be eaten. And we crouched together, vulnerable, uncovered, fit to be absorbed by anything larger that came us by, or we by it.
But it was only Avino and I there.
I lunge at the root, grabbing like a child teetering off a ledge, thrashing desperately for something to cling onto. It practically falls into my hands. It belongs there. A chill heat emanates from it, bleeding through my gloves and up into my palms. I twist and pull, tearing slivers of grasping sinew. Impossible pressure beats at my ears, threatening to cave in my skull at the temples. Deep, deep, screaming—Namaygus’ dying wails.
The root dislocates with a sickening pop, and I spin free. I lose all direction. Everything is up, everything is down. Sky or riverbed, eyes shut tight, I spin into forever.
“The life I’ve lived,” I spat at him, reaching fingers grasping for his face, “is worthwhile only for this, and you will not take it away from me!” ‘You will not take all I’ve struggled for and deny me taking it too. You will not claim that you got there first. You will not get to experience perfection and everything the world has to offer, only to keep me back at arm’s length, like you’re better. I will take your memories if you won’t share them, I will not be deposed.’ I thought of adding all these things, but my throat clenched around my rage, and there was not enough time to anyways.
I open my eyes on the island, flat on my back, dust caked in my hair. The river shivers around me. It’s losing something it will never grow back.
I recall my mother’s face, pale and drawn, severe cheekbones and a hooked nose. Beautiful. Cold. She’d hugged tight my youth-thin frame, stooping down low because I was shorter than her when they exiled me at last for keeping dead birds and rotted clams. In my head, I’m still that small. “We failed you,” she whispered in my ear. “I failed you. If you’ll promise me one thing, Reed, it’s that you never fail yourself.”
Consuming Avino’s spirit didn’t give me his blue or his orange. It didn’t give me his presence, nor the living entity of his evolving mind. My face is a blur, indistinct. It didn’t even give me whatever he learned from Gidika, dooming Namaygus to a similar fate. He didn’t give me anything but the precious moments I stole, forever dripping setting sunlight, saturated with meaning coded in a language too tender for me to understand.
And so the sky is still green. And the sun is still pink.
