The Color Merchant

Everyone that lived underground knew the sky belonged to the rich. You could sell your soul, your house, your gold mine, and the souls of your mine workers and still not have enough for a ticket to the surface— if there was even a buyer in the first place.

Luckily, there were other ways to see the sky. Like stealing it.

The Color Merchant was, at best, a thief. At worst, a demon. In fact, one of the leading theories surrounding him is that he actually isn’t human. How could he, when he carves little pieces out of the sky to package and sell underground? So for the surface dwellers, the Color Merchant was a demon. Evil as that. For most undergrounders, he was a demon, but a compassionate one. Others say he’s just a bored, mischievous god. A very small minority maintain he’s as human as everyone else.

But none of the theories can explain how the Color Merchant gets places. He simply appears, popping up in a lonely corner of town square or a dark back alleyway. It’s like he phases through earth. Sometimes he’s a peddling merchant. Sometimes he’s a food vendor. Sometimes he’s a doctor.

“A doctor.”

That’s who Elijah met. The boy halted in his tracks and turned around. He hadn't thought much of it when the stranger first sat down next to him on the bench he was resting at. But now, as he was about to leave, Elijah could feel the skin tingling on his back.

"A doctor? Who?"

"Me. I'm a doctor."

Elijah scrutinized the man a second time. Medical practitioners were extremely rare in the Underground. Elijah envisioned most as gray-haired, hunched, hook-nosed men, scurrying about with strange concoctions. Now that he was looking closer, this stranger fit the archetype in a sense. He wore a long white coat and muddy leather boots. His face was sculpted by time, rain and storm carving valleys into his forehead and cheekbones. A pair of round spectacles hung at the sharp ridge of his nose and glinted with a dull sheen in the glow of a nearby street gas lamp. The man looked back at the boy with inscrutable eyes. They were a pair of eyes that had seen the blooming and withering of countless gardens.

Elijah’s gaze drifted up and he stared at the old man’s blue helmet. He couldn’t make sense of it. The color. It was so vibrant. It was the color of a cool updraft wind from the mines, free and deep. The color of his grandmother rising from her seat after a long day of work. The color of a promise.

Unconsciously, Elijah lifted a hand to feel the surface of his own helmet. It was already cratered and chipped from all the rocks that occasionally fall from the cave ceiling. He looked back at the man’s helmet, which was smoother and shinier than the back of a freshly forged shovel. Strange.

“You aren't duping me?”

“You're too poor to dupe, boy.”

Elijah’s scabbed fingers tightened around the straps of his bag. They contained groceries from the market that he would have to bring home soon. The man before him looked rather well-off based on his clothes, so the likelihood of this whole incident being an elaborate set up for a robbery was pretty low. But you couldn’t ever be too cautious, not Underground at least.

“Well? Then how good are you?”

“I can cure anything in the world.”

This sounded more and more like a scam. Elijah hadn’t lived a decade and a half for nothing. He took a step back and glared at the man. “Liar.”

“I really can.”

“Prove it.”

“I’ll cure you.” He raised a slender finger and pointed it straight at Elijah.

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“Me? I’m not sick.”

The man smiled. Almost like he was amused. Almost. “Everyone Underground is sick.”

Underground. Was this a Surfacer? Elijah twisted his retort into a question. “Oh really? From what?”

The man’s smile grew teeth. “Blindness.”

He said it so convincingly, so charismatically, Elijah had to blink a couple times just to be sure that he really wasn’t blind. “What are you talking about?”

The doctor suddenly took something out of his coat pocket. “The fact that you can’t see that you’re blind proves your blindness. Luckily for you,” he held out the object towards Elijah, “I have just the prescription.”

It was a small, circular glass jar no thicker or taller than the width of Elijah’s thumb and capped with a thin, black lid. Inside the jar was a single, sight-searing color. Elijah stumbled forward like a starving man to a feast, all reservations forgotten, and picked the jar up with shaky fingers.

At first, he thought the item inside was a suspended, frozen candle flame. It was certainly the color of one. A kind of orange-red, but richer, fuller, more indefinite. But a closer look threw him into more confusion. It wasn’t anything, really. It had no texture, no shadow, emitted no light despite being so vivid and bright compared to the surrounding darkness. It’s as if the object was simply a color, infinite within its confines.

“What is it?”

“It’s a fragment of the sunset.”

Elijah nearly dropped the jar. He looked back up at the old man and no longer had the courage to doubt him.

“You—You’re the Color Merchant!”

“I’d prefer it if you could call me ‘Color Doctor’ instead.”

Elijah’s gaze darted between the Color Merchant and his “prescription.”

“I can’t,” he said. He held the jar back out to the Merchant even as his stomach twisted and every instinct screamed at him to keep it. “I’m not trading you my soul to cure a blindness that I don’t even think I have.”

“I told you, I’m a doctor. Not a merchant.”

Was it Elijah’s imagination, or did he sound annoyed?

The Color Merchant sighed and said something no merchant would say. “This is free. A doctor is meant to heal, after all.”

“Who are you trying to fool? We both know nothing’s ever free.”

“Well, of course there’s a price, but you won’t be paying me. Originally, sunsets belonged to us all anyway.” The Color Merchant shook his head, put his hands in his coat pockets and looked up at the city cavern’s stone ceiling. What was that look in his eyes? Elijah wondered. He must be comparing the Underground’s stone sky to the real one above. What was he seeing beyond the darkness? Elijah wanted to see it too.

The merchant continued, “You can choose whether you want to use the jar or not. You won’t know what the price of sight is until you have sight.”

Elijah looked at the jar. It was so tiny in his hand. So delicate. His eyes fixated on the shard of sunset. He didn’t understand how it would cure him. He didn’t understand how he could possibly be blind.

And maybe that was the issue. The subtle, nagging force in the back of Elijah’s mind took hold of him. He knew it was more than curiosity that pushed him to carefully take the lid of the jar between his fingers and unscrew it. More than his wish to see the sunset, the sky. It was a type of thirst, a type of despair, that only hope could bring.

Elijah opened the jar.

Everything became orange. The boy could no longer see the buildings around him, the Color Merchant, or himself. He couldn’t see at all, actually, for his eyes had become a part of the orange too. The boy was a floating soul. And the orange was so deep, so ripe. This must be what true fire looked like. The kind of fire that belonged in a god’s hearth. And the Color Merchant had given it to him instead. The boy was going to drown in it, he was sure. But it was warm. And the warmth hugged the boy like a rind. And the warmth was the boy. And the boy could sleep here. And the boy could dream here. And the boy realized that he didn’t mind drowning here. And the boy—

Elijah blinked. The orange shattered and fell into oblivion around him. He was standing on solid ground in the alleyway again, the bag of groceries leaning against his feet.

The Color Merchant was gone.

The world had shifted, somehow. It had fallen. Elijah could feel it: the void in every shallow breath, the missing colors, the missing possibilities. Their absence seared themselves into his memory. The cavern’s stone ceiling loomed above him, higher than anything he would ever reach. Elijah could still feel the shard of sunset tickling his skin, seeping through the space between his ribs, filling his lungs.

Elijah looked down at his trembling hands and wondered if it was all real. A wail bubbled up in his throat from somewhere deep, ready to burst. He curled his hands into fists, watching the shadows of every crease in his skin deepen and fold, before suddenly looking around in a panic.

The glass jar, where did it go? Elijah had wanted to inspect it. What if some color remained inside, unescaped?

But he couldn’t even hope. The jar had disappeared too.