The Boy Who Collected Colours

One Tuesday in October, the world woke up grey.

Not cloudy-grey. Not rainy-grey. Everything-grey. The kind of grey where all the colour has simply gone missing, the way a sock goes missing in the wash — here one moment, nowhere to be found the next.

The grass was grey. The sky was grey. The flowers, the birds, the fruit in the bowl on the kitchen table — all of it: grey, grey, grey.

Jasper's mother stood at the kitchen window. "Something is wrong with the world," she said.

Jasper came to stand beside her. He looked at the grey garden. He looked at the grey sky.

Then he put his hands in his pockets.

And he felt something.

His pockets were still full of colour.

The piece of sunset he'd picked up on the beach in summer (deep orange, warm as a coal). The handful of green he'd gathered from under the old apple tree (the darkest, richest green, like the forest has secrets). The square of sky-blue he'd found on the highest point of the hill, where the air tasted clear and cold. The particular yellow he'd saved from the field of dandelions on the walk to his grandmother's house.

He had so many. He had been collecting for years.

He picked up his coat (grey now, like everything else) and put it on and went outside.

He started with the grass.

He reached into his left pocket and pulled out a handful of green and scattered it across the lawn like seed.

The green spread. It moved through the blades of grass like warmth through cold hands, travelling from root to tip, until the whole lawn glowed.

Jasper looked at it and felt something very large and warm in his chest.

He kept going.

He gave the roses their red back, a deep burning red that made the grey morning feel properly October. He gave the sky its blue — first pale, then richer, then the full reaching blue of a clear day. He gave the blackbirds their glossy black, and one patch of gold to a particularly sad-looking yellow finch who looked quite wrong in grey.

He walked down his street scattering colour from his pockets. The orange of brick houses. The silver-bright of puddles. The particular red of a postbox. The brown of turned garden earth. The violet-going-to-purple of lavender that had somehow held on past summer.

People came to their windows and watched.

Children ran after him, picking up stray bits of colour and putting them back where they belonged — blue on the bluebell by the fence, yellow on the butter-cup by the gate, white on the white cat on the wall.

By mid-morning, the whole street was full of colour again.

By afternoon, Jasper's pockets were nearly empty.

He reached in one last time and found the smallest thing — a fragment of rose-gold he'd saved from a particularly lovely sunset, the kind where the whole sky goes pink and the clouds glow from the inside.

He waited until evening. He walked to the top of the hill. He let it go into the sky.

The sunset that evening was the best anyone in the town had ever seen.

That night, Jasper went to bed with empty pockets.

He lay in the dark and thought about all the colours out there in the world — glowing and growing and being themselves again.

Tomorrow he would start collecting again.

There was always more.

He fell asleep smiling.

The End.