The sky was a bleak shade of gray, much like any other day. The kind that reminds you of cigarette ash in ashtrays desperate to be emptied, with butts overflowing over the black plastic brim. Or maybe, the kind of gray you get when you mix too much black in with the white paint. Except this time, it wasn't remedied as easily as another squirt of white or even a brand new ashtray. The sun was no where in sight; the grey had commandeered the ship. The gray was now the captain of the skies. A useless captain, perhaps, for there were no men to order to put their hands on deck. The gray had annexed the skies on his own accord, with only his sole willpower. The sky was reflected in the puddles on the side walk of Millson Street. In fact, it was not only the puddles. Everything on Millson Street was as dreary as the sky. It resembled the kind of movies Lua and her grandmother had watched. The kind the girl didn't understand because their worlds were absent of the array of colour she had grown accustomed to.

She had forgotten the color of it all. She had forgotten the shade of blue the sky is on clear summer afternoons, the depth of the brown that used to color the trunk of the tree in her front lawn, and the brightness of the once green grass. Every morning she mourned over the pinks and oranges of the sunrise that was now only a concoction of light and dark grays behind the hill top. She mourned every night over the loss of the deep blue blanket in the sky. Most importantly, every afternoon, when the clock struck12, she shed a tear for the loss of the sun. Every day she went through these motions, letting tears slip from her once honey brown eyes for the void of color, until the day that changed everything.

Lua woke up that morning with a glimmer of hope in her heart that today would be the day the color came back. She danced out of bed and flew to the window like a butterfly. Yanking on the curtains, she stretched the once purple material away from the clear glass. With wide eyes, she expected a cacophony of vibrance rising from beyond the hill top. She was met with the same mundane blur of grays and blacks and whites. Her face fell in disappointment. Lua was almost too saddened to leave her house, but she decided it was best not to break tradition. At 11:30 AM, she grabbed her belongings, stuffed them in her once orange bag, and made her way out the door. She made it to the park a few minutes before noon, right on schedule. As she walked down the twisting path, she watched the children play in the park, feeling sorry. How she wished that these young souls had once seen the color of the sand they ran upon, or the red of the monkey bars they hung from. But they had not, for they were born into a world where the colors had run out. Perhaps they were the lucky ones, she thought, to never have seen the world in all it's beauty, for they would not long for it as she did. Distracted by the laughter of the children and the pity she felt for both their ignorance and her own experience, Lua did not notice the body beside her as she sat on the bench that had her body shape molded into it's wood. Instead, she stared into the sky, waiting for the bright white sun to make its appearance at the highest point. The person next to her was a girl with bright gray eyes that watched Lua with full interest and intent, as she appeared to be staring into nothing. Though Lua resembled some what of a lunatic, staring at the white ball of fire in the sky, with no apparent reasoning, the girl next to her did not, for a second, question her actions. She just started curiously, counting how many times the girl next to her blinked. She watched her for a full 5 minutes until Lua dropped her gaze from the sky and tears began to fall from her eyes. The girl next to her was no stranger to this sort of behaviour, as she was known for doing the exact same thing on many occaisons in the past. "I liked it better yellow, too." She voiced aloud, jolting Lua out of her trance. At first, she was quite startled, then embarassed that she had been so lost in her head as to not notice someone had been in her presenence as she cried for the color. Then, Lua turned to the girl beside her and looked into her eyes. "I'm Lua," she said, reaching a hand out to greet the curious new girl. "Tegan." She replied, and though she felt sympathy for the crying girl beside her, she could not help but smile as their skin made contact. In fact, her smile was uncontrollable and soon enough she was almost giggling to herself. At first, Lua was confused at the giggling girl beside her, but soon she found it was contagious, and she began to smile and laugh too. This continued until their shy eyes met eachothers gaze and suddenly Lua stopped laughing, and her smile turned into a an half open frozen mouth. Before she could even voice the words, tears began to overflow out of her eyes. "What's wrong? Why are you upset?" Tegan worriedly asked, afraid she had further saddened the girl. "Your eyes. Your eyes are blue."

The next morning the girl awoke with a start once more, except this time it was due to the pressure of another's lips upon her own. Tegan had kissed her mouth and her cheeks, and by the time Lua opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the fleshy pink of lips hovering above her. For the first time since the colors seeped through the soil, Lua smiled.

Today, she didn't notice that the familiar gray in the puddles were beginning to dissapear. She did not bother to examine a puddle before she demolished it with the force of her sunshine yellow rainboots. Unlike the rest of her and the world around her, they were the color of the sun that had gone missing years ago. She wore them to remind herself that it once existed-- that the color of lemons was once present in the sky, and that it had returned to her. She knew that with the help of Tegan, they would all soon return. Slowly but surely, they would. It had started with the color of eyes and skin, and progressed into the recreation of the yellow. She ran down the side walk, her boots sending her flying, destroying everything in their path. Destroying. Today she did not count her steps, avoid cracks in order to save her mother from being condemned to life in a wheelchair, or pluck stray dafodiles. The girl ran through the puddles in her yellow boots, yelping and skipping and spinning like a ballerina. The bottom of her purple dress tagged along behind her, floating and dancing with the wind, but still grasping onto her tanned skin. As she ran past the grass, it was painted. She was a human paint brush, bringing color to all the emptiness. Once she had ran to the end of the street and back to her house, the colors had fully returned. She basked in the glory of the rainbow, of the light, for longer than time could portray. She drank in the beauty with her eyes. But Lua was not satisfied, for her greatest love, the sky, was still gray. Although it no longer cast it's color upon the world beneath it, her thirst for the beauty had not been quenched. She knew that she was incapable of completing the painting on her own. She needed the inspiration for the artwork. She dashed inside her home, and grabbed hold of Tegan's soft hand. No words were spoken as she followed Lua through the hall and out the front door. Together the pair ran into the middle of Millson street with their necks craning up toward the bleak sky. "Please, please, come back." Lua begged to the captain, over and over again. Once more, Tegan dropped her neck and stared at the girl in front of her intensely. Again, she counted the number of times she blinked, studied the honey flecks in her brown eyes, and imagined the way her eyelashed would feel against her cheek. When Lua finally noticed the gaze of the girl in front of her, she was swept off her feet with suprise once more. When she opened her mouth to laugh nervously, Tegan took hold of her face and kissed her. The two were far too deep inside a new, exciting, world that they didn't notice the transformation of the sky until they felt the burn of the yellow sun on their closed eye lids.