Six Little Words

Prologue

BARDY

I was adored once, too.

She was a golden yellow.

That luminous tone that sits between the glistening hue of honey and a wheat field caught in the slanting rays of an August evening.

He saw it as soon as he met her. He wonders sometimes if he glimpsed it, turned to the glow, even before she walked into his classroom: dull-red exercise books held in the crook of her arm, spines nestled against her hip.

She had introduced herself—Miss Anderson . . . Hana—a new teacher, like him. She laughed at his name. Most did. Then she left for her own classroom, his life changed forever.

He dips into the memory of the color like the painter he isn’t.

She was the artist, had taught him so much about color.

But she never quite understood when he tried to tell her how he saw certain people.

Instead she laughed and later—weeks, months later—had turned her head toward him on the pillow and asked if he experienced things in color.

He smiled and shrugged a nod. Sometimes.

“Sex?” she asked, stretching like a cat beside him.

He just reached for her, unsure if she would laugh at him again.

But he knew that sex with her started with the blue of a Slovenian lake made turquoise with the richness of lime, that it strengthened to ultramarine until there was a purple so deep he was lost in it.