The World Isn't Yellow

Quill was twelve and a half and lived with a hundred other one to eighteen-year-olds in a bunker under an ancient suburban neighborhood.

The only information she and the others had of the outside world was through books. The children’s library was full of picture books that depicted a world of a vast variety of yellow things. Some were black and white, or silver, or gray. But their world was a dull one. The filtered light they lived under, and the dull dark walls and floors took away almost all the color. Only yellow rendered true.

All the children knew how to read and write. Their teacher, Marcus, one of the few adults they interacted with, told them that one day they would move to live on the surface and they had to be prepared.

The pictures showed black and white and grey-scale shades of trees, and the houses were an even duller yellow, but the silver stars, those were interesting. She yearned to understand them. Quill was a dreamer. She liked to imagine she would one day fly out among the stars and have adventures she would share in new picture books.

There were eighteen sleeping rooms in the children’s section of the bunker, one per age. Quill slept with the others in bunk-beds five high, and the top bunk had the most room. She created her own universe on the black ceiling.

The older children insisted they rotate each week, so on her first day back on top, she would have to recreate her constellation because the others took souvenirs. She could only hope that they would bore of them soon and forget they were there.

Tomorrow night it would be her turn again, and she needed new supplies for her repairs.

That day, before her turn, during her free hour, she made her way to the supply room. Brian, the seventeen-year-old boy whose job was to monitor the comings and goings as part of his apprentice application, waved her through.

She needed to find a few more pieces of the material she used to cut out star shapes. Brian called it Mylar; Quill liked the word, how it felt in her mouth, and she would practice saying it out loud and slow.

The storeroom contained a world of treasure. Food and other daily supplies stayed in the commissary. This storeroom held the unknown, abandoned, or old, but not ready for the recycler, items. Empty plastic barrels of yarn lined one wall. A whole roll of shelves was dedicated to circuit boards, old disassembled cell phones, and drones. Another row contained extra clothes and odd hats, all yellow or black with icons of the past stitched onto them, “John Deer”, NY, Hawaii, several with a white backward comma that Brian called a swoosh, and other images that had long ago lost their meaning.

Her favorite set of shelves contained repair supplies. Glue, reflective materials like her Mylar, string, paper clips, pens, pencil sharpeners (the pencils and ink long gone), and old coffee cups, many with logos similar to the caps.

No one had space to call their own, but Brian let her store her discoveries and creations on an empty shelf in the back. She was often alone in the storeroom, and she knew it from top to bottom.

The Mylar shelf was empty. Quill wasn’t tall enough to see all the way to the back. Did the janitor or Brian move it? It could have been pushed back to make room for more discarded items.

Quill stood on her tip-toes and extended her arm as far back as possible; her hands tapped the surface to the left and to the right, but nothing was there. Stretching her whole body as tall as she could, she swiped her whole arm back and forth.

She was about to give up and go ask Brian for help when her hand hit a small, hard plastic thing, pushing it. The shelves began to move downward, and she snatched her hand back and jumped away. The empty shelf folded itself against the wall to reveal a square glass, too small to be a door.

Next to the frame was a keypad with a blinking light. She stared at it, her mouth hanging open. Her first instinct was to run out and call Brian.

As she turned to do that, she stopped. She turned back around, and as if someone else had taken control of her body, she reached out and touched the light. It blinked faster, and Quill held her breath, waiting for alarms to go off. Instead, it blinked out, and the window opened from the bottom and up, away from the shelf, into the room beyond.

The dull yellow light from the storeroom cast sepia shadows through the window and illuminated an outline of stairs.

Still in a trancelike state, she climbed through the window and stood in a cool, dark room. The floor was compacted earth, and the walls were brick with dark square shapes lined up along them. The emerging grown up part of her brain insisted she leave this instant and find an older person.

Instead, with slow, deliberate steps, Quill approached the stairs. They were solid concrete; she counted twenty of them. She knew what concrete was; it was the institutional color of all the walls in the bunker.

She stood in front of the first step and looked back again. The storeroom light beckoned, reminding her it was safe. But she wasn’t looking for safe.

She took the first step, then the next until she was standing, frozen, on the small landing in front of a dark door. Light, brighter than any she’d seen before, spilled out of the edges.

The door looked like wood, rare and expensive. Only adults were allowed wood, and only for special occasions. Yet here was a full slab of it, twice her width and more than twice her height.

She reached out to touch the door, expecting it to be smooth, like the round wooden door handle that was the only example they had in the children’s center.

She rubbed.

And snatched her hand away with a cry of pain.

Blood trickled down her palm. It looked wrong, like a shade of yellow she hadn’t seen before. She held it up to the bright light sneaking through the cracks around the door. A piece of wood had stabbed her. She pulled it out, examined it closely, then stuck it in her trousers pocket and squeezed the wound until it stopped bleeding. It throbbed, but not so much that she couldn’t ignore it.

The wooden door had a round handle, cold and metallic. She placed her uninjured hand around it and pushed. It didn’t budge. She pulled; she pushed again. Her hand slipped off, and as it did, the handle turned slightly. She turned it hard right, and with a click, the door opened.

It led to another set of stairs. And more light—bright, piercing light. She squeezed her eyes shut and could feel the light on her eyelids.

It was too much. She didn’t understand; nothing in her experience had prepared her for that much light.

She turned and stepped away from the brightness, and the door creaked as she shut it behind her.

She stood on the landing, looking back at the storeroom, and waited for her eyes to adjust again to the dim before slowly descending, loath to give up so easily.

Before she could go back, she needed a plan. That was her way. She never embarked on an adventure without a plan, and she wasn’t going to start now.

Quill climbed back through the window and closed it. When it clicked into place, she expected the bright yellow light on the keypad to come on, but it stayed dark.

She jumped down to the floor and then tried to put the shelf back up, but it was too heavy. A large, dull yellow barrel that smelled of cooking gas stood nearby, and she rolled it in front of the window. It looked out of place, but it was the best she could do. Even Brian rarely ventured in.

Her secret should be safe.

Remembering why she’d come to the storeroom in the first place, she searched the other shelves, but there wasn’t any more of the shiny mylar material. She found a round, plastic thing, bright, reflective yellow. Yellow would work okay; the picture book said it was the color of suns. This could be her Sun until she found more Mylar and hoped she might find more among other treasures in the room beyond the door.

That night, she tossed and turned, knowing she would have to go through that second door but being terrified of what she might find.

She was up before lights-on, dressed, and in line with the older kids for breakfast. She rushed through her chores, cleaning up after breakfast, and following the dust robot, picking up the trash it missed. After her chores, she shoved her lunch of reconstituted noodles into her mouth and walked as fast as she could without attracting attention to the storeroom for her break.

Brian didn’t look up when she walked up to the counter. He was reading the textbook, “Best Practices for Supply Chain and Logistics Management.” Most all the children read it multiple times; it was the only book in the children’s library that wasn’t a picture book. The rumor was that the adults’ bunker had a full library—and windows. But Quill didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe most of the stories the older kids whispered to each other.

Quill didn’t care much what the books were about; she read and reread them every day. She’d tried the best practices book, but she had several years left, and it was too boring. Secretly, she’d been making up her own stories and telling them to herself and to her younger charges during vespers.

There wasn’t a rule against it, but she loved being subversive, one of her oldest favorite words—she loved how it sounded and how it rolled around in her mouth, like a secret room.

The children were required to read the picture books in a prescribed order: the alphabet, then the animals, then the poems about naughty children and what happened to them, then they studied their fractions and finally, the colors, which had several words for yellow--blue, red, purple, indigo, green. Once she’d tried to get her caregiver, Claire, to explain to her why they needed so many words for yellow. She said it was because yellow came in several shades.

Claire’s answer was unsatisfying, but Quill had to let it go after she was sent to the corner for asking too many times. She knew there had to be more than black and white and silver and yellow.

The characters in her made up stories were named after the colors. Indigo was wild and often ran away from home on her own adventures. Emerald and Ruby were a king and queen who ruled over a vast valley of green grass and trees and multi-colored flowers. To Quill’s eyes, the trees and grass were shades of yellow, but she tried to imagine something different, colors who would smell like the expensive wood on the small yellow tree that stood in the center of their common room with several of the monochrome LED lights pointing at it.

Brown was a mossy blanket that covered the earth under the tall trees from her book about frogs. Crimson and Scarlet were the twin daughters of the king and queen, and best friends with Indigo and who always bailed her out of trouble. These characters kept her mind busy while she followed the cleaning bot.

Quill ruminated, another favored word, on her characters, and it reminded how her hand had looked; the bright blood a color she’d never seen. Today, her hand throbbed with pain. She considered telling Claire, but then she’d have to reveal her discovery, and she wanted that for herself a little longer.

Brian nodded and grunted in response to her “hello.” He turned the page of the tome and bit into a cookie; she walked into the storeroom, unnoticed and unhindered.

This time she’d brought a pair of sunglasses found during one of her rummages. Brian told her they were from the emergency kits that lived on a half shelf in the storeroom. He only knew because he’d just read about them in his lessons about the last age on the surface, when the sun was so hot and so bright that people couldn’t be outside for more than an hour without severe burns.

Quill ignored that part of the story; those lessons were almost as far in her future as the test, and the last thing she needed was reasons to be afraid.

She put the glasses on top her head so she could see, and double checked her small shiny black plastic backpack: a candy bar, a screwdriver, a flashlight, she probably wouldn’t need, but you never know, and a six-ounce container of water.

Quill was relieved to see that no one had disturbed the yellow drum. She rolled it away from the shelf, and hesitating for only a second, pushed the glass away from its frame and climbed through.

Her hand still throbbed, but after she’d wrapped a tight bandage around it, it was more of a dull ache. She was careful this time not to touch the surface of the first door; wood or not, it wasn’t pleasant.

Quill wrapped her uninjured hand around the metal ball, it was cool to the touch and hard. She turned and heard a click, pushed, and stepped onto the small landing between the doors and purposefully closed Door-one behind her.

Five steps up was Door-two. Even with the sunglasses, the light flooding from the edges was sharp. The fifth stair was shallower than the others, and she was forced up against the door. It wasn’t wood. It was a cool, metallic, and Quill’s best guess—the color gray.

It had the same round, metallic handle as the wooden door. She squeezed her eyes shut behind the polarized lenses as she gripped and turned and pushed.

Her hand tightened its grip on the handle as she stood on the threshold without moving for several seconds, listening and feeling. The air was still; gone was the background hum of the massive fans that cycled their atmosphere. She sniffed. It smelled like newly opened, but decades old cereal boxes. And underneath was a smell like the back of the kitchen. She’d had to work there once, during clean-up. The compost made her gag.

With a single half-lifted eyelid, she attempted to figure out where she was, but the light was blinding. She forced her eye opened until it watered, then closed it and opened her other eye. She did this several times until she could keep them both open without as much discomfort.

Keeping her grip on the knob, she took a single step. The ceiling was broken, and searing light pushed through the cracks, and the windows looked out at an impossible thing. She took another step into the room, and the knob slipped out of her hand. Before she could react, the door slammed shut behind her.

Quill turned in panic to clutch the knob, but she was too late; her hand closed over empty air into a fist. This side of the door was a solid piece of gray metal, with no knob.

She ran her hands over the surface, frantically trying to find a way to open it. She pounded and screamed, then remembered she’d decisively closed Door-one. Not only did no one know about this passage, no one knew she’d entered it, no one knew she was gone, and no one would care.

Only adults were real persons. She hadn’t picked a skill yet. Claire warned her again and again that she had to take the test soon, before her thirteenth birthday. Most of her cohort had already taken their aptitude tests, available to all of them on their twelfth birthday. She’d had her first orientation and didn’t go back. There was a whole year to live first; being an adult wasn’t appealing and she intended to put it off as long as possible.

Quill forced herself to listen to the in and out of her breath like Claire taught her, and turned back to the room to evaluate her situation with surprising calm.

The room was a kitchen; she was sure of it. The floor was a cold, hard surface. Several small doors and drawers covered a wall, and next to them lay a cracked sink. An arched doorway led into another room exposed to the world outside where a wall should have been.

Quill took a tentative step towards it, stopped, then shrugged and strode with confidence out of the kitchen. The light was still painful, but she forced her eyes to stay open behind the tint of the glasses.

She looked back at the metal door that led her here. It stayed closed and implacable.

The world was wild, like her Indigo. Leaves grew on long, twisting wood that crawled upward and devoured the walls. So this is what green really looks like. Beyond the vines, tall gnarled trees and an open field covered with flowers of more colors than she could name. And none of it was yellow.

Quill ran.