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Writer's pictureRob Johnson

“Forty-Nine Shades of Gray” – FWG Flash Fiction for 8/17/2024

In a gray world, the palest color is a revelation.


The prompt is:

 


 

FORTY-NINE SHADES OF GRAY



The car sat on the sidewalk as if someone was running into her shop for just a minute. But it had been sitting there as long as Elise could remember. It started out as drab as the rest of the city, and the world, where she had lived her whole life. By the time the weeds grew up around the tires, she decided no one was coming back for it. That’s when she claimed it for her own.


The first addition was the rooftop planter. A wooden box loaded with dirt and seeds that sagged the tiny car’s luggage rack. When the plants sprouted, the magic started, though few noticed until the first flowers bloomed.


In Elise’s world, there were forty-nine words for various shades of gray, ranging from stark white to the deepest black. The green foliage could easily be mistaken for a fiftieth shade, but for the flowers that popped out, there were no words in her language. Reds and pinks, and the occasional yellow, made passersby stop and stare.


Inspired, Elise mixed forty-nine different shades of gray paint and decorated the cute little car with all manner of swirls and curlicues and spirals. The magic wasn’t just in the flowers on the roof. Those shades of gray became a riot of colors. People stopped in Elise’s shop to offer their names for them. “Blue,” they called what Elise had already named “Cerulean” and “Azure.” “Red” covered many shades—what she dubbed “Fuchsia,” “Cerise,” and “Scarlet.”


Once the car’s magic brought color to the brush, a dip of that brush transformed the paint in the can, as well.


Soon, people were buying Elise’s gray paints, dabbing them onto the car, then into the bucket to transform the paint, their drab world, and their lives, with color and hope.



THE END

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