Andrew McNabb, Honorable Mention for the first MMM Flash Fiction Online & in print Contest

Extraordinary Whiteness

       Before little Charlie was born, if you had asked Elsie McCain if she was a color what color would she be, she might have said rainbow, and for many good reasons. Had he been asked the same question, her husband David would have laughed. It was a question he had faced in a job interview one time. For him the right answer was muted red. But that was business, a controlled persistence.

       When they had first moved to Portland, Elsie started getting up to watch the sun rise. It wasn’t long before she knew, from any particular pre-dawn shade of gray in the sky, just how long it would be before the sun would emerge and burst through the empty branches of the poplars outside her windows, bringing the baker’s yellow of the kitchen walls into full bloom. She would sit and sip her coffee and watch the light’s progression through the kitchen, down the tea-green hallway, and on into the sitting room, oriental jade.

       Their house was a twelve room Victorian in the West End, a section of the city that could have been a lot of different places if you were dropped right down inside it; Westmount outside Montreal, Beacon Hill in Boston, Park Slope, Brooklyn—all places she and David had lived together. Portland was some of the things those places were, but more, and just enough less—it was why they’d moved there, to start a family. They had talked endlessly about the type of house they wanted, and they got it. It was a dream, the brocaded entry, the mahogany staircase, the sculpted ceilings. She and David decorated with passion. They picked their colors carefully, staying within the period scheme outside, a classic flat olive, accented with coriander and gray while inside was their opportunity for expression, each room a creation, mauve and eggplant and pale-fire red. And when they were done they breathed in deeply. It was the living palate they had always hoped to be consumed by.

       But then through Elsie’s pregnancy things started to bleach. David asked what was wrong and Elsie just shrugged. Sometimes at night she would walk through the house while David slept, attempting to evoke that first feeling she had had when deciding on the clean lines of the Farmer’s Table from the Mission Valley catalogue, or that first excitement she had had upon discovering the pleasing folds and tawny sheen of the mustard curtains that had once hung in the display room at Rue Charlemagne. Sometimes it worked, if only until morning.

       And then Charlie came. Under the sterile, gleaming lights of the hospital room, they could hardly believe their eyes. The word for what he was popped into Elsie’s head, but she popped it right back out. He’s just very white, she told herself, extraordinarily so. Before he was born she had thought of the reasons she would tell him he was special—your mommy and daddy love you, Charlie; you’re kind, and you’re brilliant, and God loves you, too—but she had never considered having to tell him he was also special because of his condition. It was occulocutaneous.

       Of course, she had a mother’s love, but at first there he was, a little suckling bandit, an alien on her breast, pinkish eyes closed to keep out the light. When they brought him home, they smiled like they should have, but everything was out of place.

       There was a string of doctors and consultations. The marriage counselor told them it was a condition that affected not only Charlie, but her, and David, too. Knowing very well what he meant, Elsie said anyway, Well, you’re right about that. We’re both carriers or Charlie couldn’t have it. We just have the recessive genes. She saw David squirm, as if to deny it. The counselor folded his hands and said, Maybe you had sensed it in each other and that’s what drew you two together. But Elsie looked at David as if to say, Is that what I saw in you, latent albinism?

       Time went on and they adjusted accordingly. That wasn’t all that hard to do; Charlie was a blessed little thing, crawling, and then running through the rooms of their house, a little beacon. So many times, the three of them together, enveloped by the peach or the cream or the Mariner’s blue, it was glorious. And outside, too. But there would always be some little thing, like David bundling Charlie up for a walk, even on the warmest of days, or she herself, with the straight-ahead gaze she’d perfected for Story Hour at the library and her glazed mind to match. It wasn’t shame, you could just get tired of all those eyes.

       Elsie was pregnant again now, but she wasn’t looking for anything particular in the sun that morning as she sat in the kitchen, and she wasn’t looking to see what it did to the colors of her house. It was just pigmentation. Now, she just liked to concentrate on the facts; that David would be down soon, still looking so much like the man that, even as a little girl, she knew she would marry; and that soon after that Charlie would be up, white and extraordinary, but hard, sometimes, to look in the eye, and what it was was a rainbow of things, that looking at him reminded her of what she and David were, which was obvious, or translucent, or just too caring, wanting a normal life for their son and to keep all those eyes away, but most of all, it was that they had the whiteness, too. And she tried to remind herself of that every day.