The Veritas Gale

The blue vanished from the sky first, sucked away like paint up a vacuum hose. Then the green bled out of the grass, leaving the world looking like a charcoal sketch. Vincent looked at his wife, terrifyingly certain that when the wind hit her, she would turn grey, proving their marriage was dead.

Vincent gripped the steering wheel of the leased SUV until his knuckles turned the color of milk. The car cost eight hundred dollars a month. It was money they did not have, but appearances were the currency of the neighborhood, and Vincent was a man deeply in debt to the eyes of strangers. He hated the smell of the treated leather. It smelled like a lie. Beside him, Abigail tapped on the glass screen of her phone. The light from the device washed her face in a pale and artificial glow. She did not look at him. She had not looked at him since they left the garden party at the Miller estate, where the champagne was warm and the conversation was thinner than paper.

He knew she was texting him. The other man. Vincent did not have a name for the lover, but he had a feeling. It was a heavy and wet feeling that lived in the bottom of his stomach like spoiled meat. He imagined a man who did not worry about lease payments or the rising cost of heating oil. A man who was real.

The radio sputtered. The weatherman had been talking about a low-pressure system, but now the voice was tight with a panic that professionalism could not mask. He spoke of a Veritas Gale. The words meant nothing to Vincent, but the old folks in the valley spoke of wind that ate lies. They said the air would strip the paint off a fence if the wood underneath was rotten. They said it turned the world into a photograph developed in acid. Vincent thought it was a superstition for people who were afraid of the dark.

But outside the windshield, the world was dying. The rich oak trees lining the highway lost their deep brown bark and turned into pillars of ash. The yellow lines on the road bleached white and then faded into the grey asphalt. It was not night. It was simply the absence of light’s favor. The color was being harvested.

“Vin,” Abigail said. Her voice was small. She dropped the phone into her lap.

“Don’t,” he said. He kept his eyes on the road, which was becoming harder to see. The grey was everywhere. It was a fog that was not wet. It was a dryness that sucked the moisture from his eyes. “Just tell him you’ll be late.”

She looked at the dashboard. Her hands were trembling. “I wasn’t talking to anyone.”

“Liar,” he thought. He did not say it. He wanted the storm to say it for him. He wanted the wind to peel back her skin and show the hollow space where her heart used to be. If the legends were true, Abigail would dissolve. She would turn into mist, and he would be free of the wondering. He pressed the accelerator, but the engine did not roar. It whined. The SUV shuddered against a gust of wind that hit the side panels like a physical blow. The hood of the car began to flicker. It looked like a television losing its signal. Vincent watched in horror as the metal emblem on the hood turned translucent. He could see the grey road through the engine block.

Vincent pulled the wheel hard to the right. The gravel shoulder was waiting for them, stripped of its brown dust and looking like crushed bone. He wanted to watch her disappear. He had the list ready in his mind. It was a ledger of small betrayals he had collected like stamps. The time she laughed too loud at the waiter’s joke. The Tuesday nights she spent at a yoga class that never seemed to make her flexible, only distant. The way she looked at the window instead of the mirror. He was ready for the wind to take her. He was ready to be right.

But the wind had other appetites. The roof of the SUV, which had been polished to a mirror shine that morning, turned into the consistency of cellophane. Then it was gone. The rain didn’t hit them because there was no rain, only the wind that smelled of earth and old iron.

Vincent looked down. The leather seat, heated and stitched with precision, turned to smoke beneath his thighs. He fell two feet to the asphalt. His ass hit the cold road. The car was gone. It had been a vessel of debt and pretense, a thing borrowed to make neighbors jealous, and the gale had swallowed it whole because it wasn’t true.

“Get out!” Vincent screamed, though there was nothing to get out of anymore.

Abigail was on the ground beside him. She scrambled backwards, her heels scraping against the grey pavement. She looked small. The wind whipped her hair across her face, but her hair was still brown. It was the only brown thing in a world that had gone the color of an old television set.

Vincent stood up. The wind pushed against his chest like a bouncer clearing a bar at closing time. He looked at the woods bordering the highway. The oaks were gone to grey, but the pines were screaming with color. They were a green so deep and violent it hurt to look at them. They were real. They had roots that went down into the bedrock and drank water that hadn’t seen the sun in a thousand years. They were trees that didn’t care who was watching them. They weren’t pretending.

He looked back at the empty space where eighty thousand dollars of German engineering used to be. There was nothing left but a smudge of oil on the tarmac. The lease papers in the glove box, the heated steering wheel, the illusion of safety—it was all just vapor.

Vincent reached for Abigail. He told himself he was saving her, but the truth was colder. He was afraid of blowing away. He grabbed her arm. The fabric of her coat felt thin. The world was high-contrast now, shadows black as ink, light stark and blinding. He held onto her, waiting for the judgment to pass from the car to the flesh. He waited for his wife to turn into smoke. She looked at him, her eyes wide and wet, and for a second he thought he saw the grey creeping into her irises. He tightened his grip. He needed to see it happen. He needed the universe to tell him that he wasn’t the only fraud on the side of the road.

The ditch was a scar in the earth running parallel to the road, filled with dry weeds and discarded beer cans that had long since lost their labels. They tumbled into it. The mud was grey. The weeds were grey. It felt like falling into a black-and-white newsreel from a war that happened before they were born. Vincent pressed his back against the clay bank. The wind roared over their heads. It sounded like a freight train made of air. It sounded like judgment.

Abigail curled into a ball. She had her hands over her head. Vincent watched her. He was waiting for the rest of it to go. He looked at her ears. She wore diamond studs, small and sharp, that he had purchased three years ago. He remembered the day. He had forgotten their fifth anniversary because he was busy worrying about a promotion that never came. He bought the earrings on a credit card he kept hidden in a shoebox in the garage. They were not a gift. They were a bribe. They were payment for silence.

The wind dipped into the ditch. It touched Abigail’s ear. The diamonds did not sparkle. They simply ceased to be stones. They turned into grey dust, fine as flour, and streamed away into the gale. The gold settings dissolved into mist. Vincent felt a grim satisfaction settle in his chest. It was a cold and heavy comfort. See, he thought. It is all rot. We are decorated with nothing.

He watched the wind pull at her coat. It was tearing at the seams. He knew what would happen next. The wind would strip the coat, then the dress, and then it would strip the woman. It would prove that she was just an assembly of habits and polite lies. He could let her go. He could pull his hand back and let the gale carry her off like a dry leaf. He would be alone, but he would be right. He would be the man who knew the truth.

Abigail looked up. Her face was wet with tears that had no color. She looked terrified. She reached for him. Her hand was shaking.

Vincent looked at his own hand. It was dirty. It was the hand of a man who pushed paper and signed leases he couldn’t afford. He looked at her fingers. If he grabbed her, he was tying himself to a lie. If he held on, he was accepting the fraud. But looking at her eyes, he realized that being right was a cold way to sleep at night. He didn’t want the silence. He didn’t want the empty house. He wanted the mess.

The wind shrieked. It tried to lift her out of the dirt.

Vincent lunged. He didn’t think about the other man. He didn’t think about the phone. He grabbed her wrist. His grip was hard, painful. He felt the bones shift under her skin. He anchored himself against the mud bank and pulled.

“I know!” he screamed. The wind tore the words from his mouth, but he shouted them again. “I know you don’t love me! But I’m not letting go!”

He squeezed her hand until his own muscles burned. He waited for her arm to turn to smoke. He waited for the weight to vanish.

The wind stopped howling and began to scream. It was a high, thin sound that vibrated in the molars. Vincent squeezed his eyes shut. He braced his shoulders against the mud. He waited for the release. He waited to feel her wrist turn to powder and sift through his fingers like dry sand. He knew it was coming. He knew that when he opened his fist, he would be holding nothing but the storm.

But the hand did not dissolve.

It grew hot. It pulsed. It was a knot of living bone and muscle that fought against his grip. It was heavier than it had been a moment ago. It was the heaviest thing in the world.

Vincent opened his eyes.

The air in the ditch was a swirling vortex of grey dust and dead leaves, but in the center of it, Abigail was burning. She was not grey. She was a violent explosion of pigment. Her dress, which had been a dull navy when they left the party, was now a blue so deep and rich it looked like a bruise on the atmosphere. Her skin was flushed with the pink of sudden exertion. Her hair was a copper wire fire.

Vincent blinked. The color assaulted him. It was impossible. The storm had stripped the bark from the trees and the paint from the road, but it could not touch her. She was solid. She was the most real thing in the emptiness. The suspicion that had rotted in Vincent’s gut for six months turned into a hard, cold stone. She hadn’t been cheating. She hadn’t been lying. The distance he felt was not her walking away; it was her standing still while he retreated into his own bitterness. She was glowing with a truth that was absolute.

He gasped, the air tasting of dry soil. “Abby?”

She did not look relieved. She was staring at him with a horror that made her hazel eyes wide and terrible. She wasn’t looking at the wind. She was looking at his arm.

Vincent looked down.

His jacket was gone. The silk tie, the starch-stiffened shirt, the cufflinks—they had vanished into the gale. He was bare to the waist. But that was not what made Abigail scream without sound.

His arm was grey.

The skin from his shoulder to his wrist was the color of wet cement. It was desaturated. It looked like a photocopy of a limb. He watched, paralyzed, as his own chest began to fade. The pink of his flesh was draining away, sucked out by the wind, leaving behind a sketch of a man. He looked at his legs. They were turning translucent. He could see the mud of the ditch through his thigh.

He was the lie.

He was the one who had checked out. He was the one who had built a fortress of debt and resentment and called it a marriage. He had projected his own hollowness onto her, terrified that she was the one leaving, when all along he was the one who had already gone.

Vincent wept. The tears rolled down his cheeks and dripped onto his chest, but they were not clear. They were droplets of liquid lead. He tried to pull his hand away. He felt light, porous, as if a strong breeze could scatter him across the county. He did not want to touch her. He did not want his nothingness to infect her brilliance.

“Let me go,” he whispered. The words were thin. “I’m not real.”

Abigail did not let go. She reached out with both hands and grabbed his shoulders. Her fingers sank into the fading charcoal of his skin. She pulled him forward, dragging his weight against the gravity of the storm. She did not look at the grey mist that was claiming his body. She looked at his eyes. She kissed him. It was not a gentle thing. It was a desperate anchor dropped into a churning sea.

Heat spread across his face. It started where her lips touched his skin. It was a flush of red. It was not his blood. It was borrowed life. The color bloomed on his cheekbone, a stark crimson stain against the grey, and it held fast.

The wind stopped. It did not fade away slowly; it simply ceased, as if the earth had suddenly remembered how to be still. The silence that followed was heavy. The world remained stripped. The grass was still the color of ash. The sky was a flat, dead slate.

Vincent knelt on the pavement. He looked at his arms. They were still the color of old newspaper, dull and flat. He was a shadow of a man. But on his shoulders, where Abigail’s hands were gripping him, there were bright, five-fingered marks of vibrant peach and rose. He watched them. They were the only color on him. He understood then. The pigment would not come back because he wanted it. It would not come back because he was sorry. He would have to earn it. He would have to wake up every morning and weave the color back into his skin, thread by honest thread.

He leaned into her warmth. He was a grey man holding onto the only real thing he had left, and for the first time in years, he was terrified of losing it.