Only My Eyes Can See Red

In art class, the teacher told us to draw the sun.

I picked up a red crayon and dragged it across the heavy construction paper. Just one stroke.

Suddenly, the entire class turned to look at me. It happened in perfect, terrifying unison.

The warm smile on Mrs. Gallaghers face died.

Valerie, she asked, her voice tight. "Why are you drawing the sun red?"

I froze, the waxy stick hovering over the paper.

"Isn't the sun always red?"

The moment the words left my mouth, the classroom plunged into a suffocating silence. Thirty pairs of eyes locked onto me, unblinking, heavy with a bizarre, creeping dread.

01

Up until that Tuesday afternoon, I had always considered myself perfectly normal.

The sun is red.

Blood is red.

The grass is green, and the sky is blue.

These were universal truths, the kind of absolute certainties you learn in kindergarten. But right now, the way my classmates were looking at me, youd think I had just confessed to a brutal murder.

Mrs. Gallagher was usually the most soft-spoken teacher at school. She was always going on about how color was the universes greatest gift to humanity. But now, as she slid my drawing out from under my hands, her fingers were trembling.

On the paper sat a half-finished sun. Just a raw, crimson arch. I hadn't even had the chance to fill it in.

She stared at that red semicircle, all the blood draining from her own face.

"Valerie, what color do you see when you look at it?"

Instinctively, I glanced out the window. The late afternoon sunlight was slicing through the glass. Behind a thin veil of clouds, the sun hung heavy in the sky, glowing like a piece of iron left too long in the forge. Deep, undeniable red.

I opened my mouth.

Under the desk, Rowan kicked me. Hard.

I whipped my head toward him. He didn't make a sound, but his lips formed one exaggerated, desperate word: Green.

The sharp pain in my shin snapped me out of my daze. I swallowed the truth that was sitting on my tongue. "Green," I lied.

But Mrs. Gallagher wasn't going to let it go. She pushed the plastic box of crayons toward me.

"Then why did you reach for the red one?"

I stared at the crayons scattered on my desk. The wrappers had their names printed in neat black letters.

Crimson.

Scarlet.

Vermilion.

Yet, when the rest of the class looked at those harmless little sticks of wax, their eyes were wide with pure, unfiltered terror. They looked at the box like it was a nest of venomous spiders waiting to strike.

"I grabbed the wrong one," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

Mrs. Gallagher looked at me for a long, agonizing time.

Out in the hallway, the sound of hurried footsteps echoed. The heavy oak door swung open, and two people in crisp white lab coats stepped in. They wore lanyards marking them as staff from the district medical office, and one of them carried a sleek, silver aluminum case.

Someone in the back row gasped softly.

Rowans hand clamped down on my wrist beneath the desk. His grip was bruising.

"Don't look," he hissed through clenched teeth.

I didn't understand what he meant.

A second later, the medic popped the latches on the silver case and pulled out a heavy cardstock color palette. There were a dozen circular swatches on it.

The first was forest green.

The second was navy blue.

The third was a searing, violent red.

The medic held the card right at my eye level.

"Valerie. Please state the color of the third circle."

02

A cold sweat broke out across my back as I stared at that red dot.

The truth hit me with the force of a physical blow: The problem wasn't that I drew the sun the wrong color. The problem was that I could see a color they couldn't.

Or, more accurately, a color they had been trained never to acknowledge.

The quiet in the room was absolute. Everyone had stopped breathing, waiting for my sentence.

My mind was racing. If I said red, those people in the lab coats were going to take me away. If I said green, they probably wouldn't believe me. I had already shown my hand.

Just then, Rowan stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the linoleum.

"She has low blood sugar," he said smoothly.

Mrs. Gallagher frowned.

Rowan didn't even look at me. He just reached over and picked up the half-eaten granola bar sitting by my notebook. "She skipped breakfast. Her hands have been shaking all period. That's why she grabbed the wrong crayon."

The medic turned a cold gaze on him. "Please do not interfere with an active Primary Screening, young man."

Rowan held his ground, his expression completely flat. "Im not interfering. Im just reminding the faculty that Primaries exhibit dilated pupils, heightened agitation, and an instinctive aversion to green light when exposed to the Contraband Spectrum. Valerie doesn't have any of those symptoms."

I sat completely still. How did he know all the clinical terminology?

The medic was quiet for a moment. Then, he pushed the color card a fraction of an inch closer to my face.

"Answer the question."

The third circle was practically touching my nose. Up close, the red seemed to shift. The edges vibrated. A sudden, nauseating illusion washed over meit wasn't just a block of color. It looked like an eyelid, squeezed shut.

Don't look. Rowan's warning echoed in my head.

I blinked hard, and when I opened my eyes, I let my gaze unfocus, shifting slightly to the left.

"Gray," I said.

The medics eyes flickered.

"Gray?" Mrs. Gallagher asked, her voice trembling with relief.

I nodded. "It looks kind of muddy. Like an ashy gray."

The medic slowly lowered the card and snapped it back into the silver case. "Status: Observation Pending."

I could hear the collective exhale from the classroom. But before the medical team left, one of them peeled a small, neon-green sticker off a sheet and slapped it onto the back of my student ID hanging from my bag.

It read: Suspected Primary. Re-evaluation mandated within 24 hours.

When the final bell finally rang, nobody rushed the door like they usually did. They stayed glued to their seats until the medics were long gone. Only then did the whispers start.

"Did she really draw the Banned Hue?"

"Is Primary-sight contagious?"

"I heard that if you see red, your eyes split open in the middle of the night."

I gripped the straps of my backpack, my heart pounding so hard my ribs ached.

As Rowan walked past my desk to leave, he dropped a single sentence into the space between us.

"Don't go home tonight."

03

I didn't listen to him, of course. I had to know if my parents were in on this.

On the walk home, I really looked at my city for the first time. I mean, really looked at it.

Every billboard lining the highway depicted the sun as a bright, cheerful green. The childrens hospital had a massive banner draped over its entrance: Protect Viridian Vision. Keep the Contraband Spectrum Away.

On the bus, the little TV screen played a PSA on a loop. A little girl in a sterile white room picked up a red balloon. In the next frame, thick black liquid was oozing from her tear ducts. A warm, maternal voiceover chimed in:

Parents, monitor your childs optic health. At the first sign of Primary tendencies, contact the Verdant Initiative immediately.

A deep chill settled into my bones. These things had always been there. It was like living with a smudge on your glassesyou eventually stop seeing it. My brain had been automatically ironing out the absurdity of the world to make it livable. Until I dragged that red crayon across the paper, the thin membrane of my reality hadn't torn.

When I unlocked the front door, the house smelled like garlic and olive oil. Mom was at the kitchen island, slicing tomatoes.

The sharp blade cut through the flesh, and bright crimson juice bled out onto the wooden cutting board.

I stared at that puddle of red. "Mom," I asked, trying to keep my voice casual. "What color are tomatoes?"

Her hand stopped in mid-air. She turned her head slowly.

"Why would you ask that?"

I shrugged, dropping my backpack on a dining chair. "Just talking about color theory in art class."

She studied my face for a few agonizing seconds. Then, a bright, artificial smile stretched across her lips.

"Green, sweetie. Obviously."

My stomach dropped.

She scraped the chopped tomatoes into a white porcelain bowl. The red juice slid down the sides, vivid and striking. She acted like it was entirely invisible.

"Didn't Mrs. Gallagher teach you that? Most fruits and vegetables fall under the Viridian scale."

I forced a tight smile. "Yeah. She did."

Dad got home right before dinner. He worked as an archivist at the City Observatory and was a man of very few words.

I poked at my pasta. "Dad, the sun looked a little weird today."

The clink of his fork hitting the edge of his plate sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room. He looked up.

"Weird how?"

Mom stopped eating, her eyes darting between us. Suddenly, the recessed lighting in the kitchen felt blindingly harsh.

I picked up my water glass, hiding behind it. "Just... greener than usual, I guess."

Dad stared at me for a long time.

"The sun is green, Valerie," he said, his voice heavy with warning. "Stop reading that garbage on the internet."

His tone was sharp, final. Mom immediately jumped in to smooth things over. "She's just making conversation, Richard. Don't snap at her."

But that night, when I crept out of my room at 2 AM to get a glass of water, I saw a faint, warm glow seeping out from under my parents' bedroom door. It wasn't the harsh white of a lamp. It was red.

I held my breath and tiptoed closer. The door was cracked open just an inch.

Dad was sitting on the edge of the mattress, holding a rusted vintage tobacco tin. Inside the tin were a few scattered items. A faded crimson hair ribbon. A Polaroid of a sunset. And a red crayonthe exact same brand I had used in class today.

Mom was sitting beside him, her face buried in her hands.

"She's seeing it again," she whispered, her voice breaking.

Dad closed the tin, his jaw tight. "I'll take her to the Verdant Initiative in the morning."

04

I didn't sleep. I just watched the digital clock on my nightstand shift from 3:00 to 4:00 to 5:00.

Just before dawn, my phone buzzed on the mattress. A text from an unknown number.

If you see red, go to the third floor of the old library.

My first thought was Rowan.

My second thought was that it was a trap.

But staying in my bedroom meant a one-way trip to the Verdant Initiative. When I heard Moms footsteps approaching my door to wake me up, I had my backpack strapped tight. I slipped out the window, quietly dropping onto the fire escape of the vacant apartment next door.

We lived on the third floor. As I scrambled down the rusted iron grating, my foot slipped. I caught myself, but the jagged metal sliced my palm open.

Blood welled up immediately. Rich, bright, terrifying red.

I hit the alleyway just as an old woman out for a morning walk rounded the corner. She saw me, her eyes dropping to my bleeding hand, and physically recoiled.

She wasn't scared that I had fallen. She was staring at the color.

"She's leaking the Banned Hue!" she gasped, her voice rising in panic.

My heart stalled. I took off sprinting.

Behind me, her shrieks echoed down the street. "Primary! We have a Primary! She's contaminated!"

The security guard at the end of the block blew his whistle and started chasing me. I threw myself into the morning rush-hour crowd on the sidewalk. People were wearing headphones, drinking coffeebut the second they heard the word Primary, the crowd parted like the Red Sea.

Drops of my blood hit the pavement.

For the first time, I realized the sheer magnitude of the citys phobia.

People yanked out their phones to record me. A man in a suit pulled a can of green aerosol spray from his briefcase and aimed it at the blood on the concrete. The mist settled over the red droplets, instantly neutralizing them into a dull, muddy brown. Like it was eating the color.

I ran until my lungs burned, slipping through alleys until I reached the back gates of the high school.

Rowan was leaning against the brick wall. When he saw my hand, his casual posture vanished.

"Are you insane?" he snapped, grabbing my wrist. "You're bleeding in broad daylight?"

I couldn't even speak, just gasped for air. He pulled a roll of thick tape from his jacketolive greenand quickly wrapped it around my palm. Once the crimson was hidden beneath the drab green, the suffocating panic in the air seemed to dissipate.

"You sent the text?" I asked, catching my breath.

He nodded. "Come with me."

I didn't move. "Why are you helping me?"

Rowan looked at me. Then, he reached up and pinched a contact lens out of his left eye.

His natural eye was a pale, striking hazel. But ringing the very outer edge of his iris was a distinct, glowing circle of crimson.

"Because I see it too," he said.

05

The old municipal library had been condemned for years. The city claimed the foundation was failing, but Rowan had picked the locks a long time ago.

He led me through the back doors, past rows of rotting, dust-covered bookshelves, and up to the third-floor reading room. Heavy blackout curtains were nailed to the window frames.

In the center of the room sat an ancient, humming film projector.

The walls were completely plastered in photographs. And everywhere I looked, I saw it.

Real, unapologetic red.

Sunsets, blooming roses, old American flags, stop signs, blood. The color hit my retinas so hard it almost physically hurt, like a muscle unclinching after years of being locked tight. Tears pricked my eyes. It was overwhelmingly beautiful.

Rowan handed me a paper cup of water.

"Don't cry," he said quietly. "Tears make the Bleed more obvious."

"The Bleed?"

He pointed to his left eye. "When you can see the Banned Hue, your eyes start to reflect it. It forms a red ring around the iris. That's how the Verdant Initiative spots us in crowds."

"But why?" I asked, wiping my face. "Why are they so terrified of a color?"

Rowan flipped a switch on the projector. A grainy, pixelated news broadcast flickered onto the blank wall. The timestamp in the corner read seventeen years ago.

A news anchor was standing outside an observatory, speaking frantically.

...reports globally confirming an anomalous reddening of the solar body. Meteorologists are attributing this to a severe atmospheric refraction event. Officials urge the public to remain calm and stay indoors...

The camera cut to the sky.

It was a massive, blood-red sun. It was heavier, darker than the sun I had drawn. It looked oppressive. It looked like something behind the light was trying to peer through.

The video abruptly cut to static. The next slide was a sterile government graphic.

WARNING: Visual exposure to the Crimson Spectrum causes severe neurological decay, aggressive psychosis, and mass hysteria. For your safety, the Verdant Protocol is now active.

Rowan killed the projector. The room fell into shadows.

"After that day, history was scrubbed. The archives were wiped. They declared the sun was green, and red became illegal. Anyone whose brain still processed the true spectrum was labeled a Primary."

A cold dread coiled in my stomach. "So... the entire world is brainwashed?"

"It's more like a blindfold," Rowan said, leaning against a desk. "Their optic nerves are still receiving the red light. But their brains have been violently conditioned to reject it. They edit it out in real-time."

I thought of Mom slicing the tomatoes. She wasn't blind to it. She was lying to herself. Or maybe, her brain was lying to her to keep her safe.

06

Rowan explained that the school ran hidden screenings every year. The kids who failed and got sent to the Verdant Initiative rarely came back the same. If they did, they were quiet. They didn't laugh too loud, they never got angry, and they wore entirely beige or gray wardrobes.

"They call it a 'Successful Alignment,'" Rowan said bitterly.

He pulled a manila folder from a filing cabinet and handed it to me. It was a list of names.

At the very bottom, I saw my own.

Valerie. Status: Extreme Risk of Secondary Awakening.

I stared at the black ink, my blood running cold. "What does a secondary awakening mean?"

Before Rowan could answer, the floorboards out in the hallway creaked.

We both froze. The library had been boarded up for years. Nobody came here.

The footsteps stopped right outside the reading room door.

"Valerie. Sweetheart, come out."

It was Mom.

My heart hammered against my ribs. Rowan instantly shoved the projector under a tarp and pulled me down behind a massive oak bookcase.

The heavy door groaned open.

Mom stood in the doorway. She looked exhausted, her hair messy, the dark circles under her eyes stark in the dim light. In her hand, she held the red crayon from my desk.

"I know you're in here," she said softly. "Don't listen to Rowan. He's going to get you killed."

Rowans grip on my wrist tightened.

Mom took a step into the room. She didn't look toward the bookcases. She was staring at the walls, at the hundreds of photographs bleeding red.

"These things," she whispered, her voice shaking, "they lie to you."

I couldn't stop myself. I stood up from behind the bookcase. "What about you, Mom? Why were you hiding this exact same crayon in a lockbox last night?"

She flinched as if I'd hit her. Slowly, she turned to me, her eyes welling with tears.

"I hid it so you wouldn't remember, Valerie."

"Remember what?"

A tear spilled down her cheek. "When you were six years old, you looked right at it. The Red Sun. And it looked back at you."

A sudden, sharp spike of pain drove through my temples.

Flashes of memory, disjointed and bright.

A rooftop. Searing red light. Mom screaming, holding me down. Dad yelling at me to keep my eyes shut.

"They almost took you away that night," Mom sobbed. "The Verdant Initiative... they saved you."

Rowan let out a harsh, cynical laugh, stepping out from the shadows. "They severed a piece of her visual cortex. You call that saving her?"

Moms face twisted in rage. "Shut your mouth!"

She raised her hand, pointing the red crayon at him.

The moment she did, the wax tip of the crayon began to glow. A deep, unnatural luminescence. And on the walls around us, the red in every single photograph began to physically bleed. Wet, crimson lines dripping down the wallpaper.

07

Rowan grabbed my hand and yanked me toward the fire exit.

Mom didn't chase us. She just stood amidst the bleeding photographs, screaming my name.

"Valerie! Do not go to the observatory!"

I hesitated, my sneakers skidding on the dust, but Rowan pulled me harder.

"Don't listen to her! The Initiative has her wired!"

We burst through the emergency exit and tumbled out into the overgrown alley behind the library. The moment we hit the street, the citys emergency sirens began to wail. A low, synthetic voice boomed from the PA speakers mounted on the streetlights.

Alert. Suspected Primary active in Sector 4. All citizens, maintain Viridian Focus. Do not engage with anomalous light sources.

We sprinted toward the high school campus. On the football field, the faculty was already lining the students up. Everyone had their heads bowed, holding up translucent green visors to their faces, filtering out the world.

Mrs. Gallagher was standing at the front of the sophomore line. She looked terrified, her face pale and drawn.

She saw me running across the periphery. Her lips parted. I braced myself for her to scream, to alert the guards.

Instead, she deliberately opened her hand. Her green visor dropped into the grass.

On the back of the plastic shield, she had written two words in black marker:

WEST WING.

Rowan saw it too. "She used to be an oil painter," he panted as we ran. "She must still have a trace of the Bleed left in her."

We changed direction, sprinting toward the school's west wingthe old science and photography labs.

The campus was crawling with people trying to stop us. Security guards brandishing aerosol cans of green fog. Medics with silver cases. And the 'Aligned' students.

The Aligned kids were the worst. Their eyes were vacant, flat, but they moved with terrifying, coordinated speed.

One of them stepped directly into my path. It was Chloe, the junior class president. She was usually bubbling with anxiety about college apps. Now, she just stared at me, her face a blank mask.

"The old sight only brings pain, Valerie," she recited monotonously. "The cure makes it better."

She lunged, her fingers curled into claws, aiming straight for my eyes.