Red

Red tells the story of graphic designer Alice who wakes up one day and finds she can see only in black and white. As her world crumbles, she continues to dream in colour and in her dreams meets a girl, Mary, who has been locked in a black and white room for her whole life. Red appears in Thought X: Fictions and Hypotheticals, ed. Ra Page and Rob Appleby, Comma Press. Also available as an audiobook.

Reviews

“‘Red’ by Annie Kirby takes the famous ‘Mary’s Room’ experiment and turns it into something genuinely new.” Samantha Dolan, Shoreline of Infinity

“Chatty and surreal.”  Holly Powis, Disclaimer Magazine

Excerpt from Red

I had this dream, and when I woke up the world was black and white. First thought: I was still dreaming. Laurel lying grey beside me. But warm, snoring. Not a dream then. Rainy outside, perhaps, but sunlight creeping round the curtain edges, bedroom still grey. Switched on the lamp. Useless energy-saving lightbulb. Closed my eyes, the insides of my eyelids legitimately grey.

            Downstairs, Laurel making breakfast, crash clatter bang. Kitchen grey, not yellow and blue. Laurel cooking grey stuff in a pan. What is that? I asked her. Laurel laughed. Bacon, doh! I think you need some caffeine. Sunk into a chair that used to be antique pine. Laurel, there’s something wrong with my eyes.

Optometrist, ophthalmologist. Nothing found. Brain doctors. No stroke, no tumour, no epilepsy. Mind doctors. Yeah. Tell me about your dream, Alice, the one you had right before you lost your colours. I described the dream using colours I didn’t remember. I knew they were the colours in the dream, but what those colours looked like, I could only imagine.

            A highway, with fields of giant tulips, brightly-multi-coloured, either side. Sky-blue sky. Naked men, silvery-pale, falling from the sky, scarring the blue. Falling in slow motion, dozens of them, arms and legs outstretched in circular contraptions, glittering gold. Circular prisons, not flying machines. They fall into the tulip fields. Their faces all the same, like my father’s, waxy white. Tulips sway above my head. Push my way through a forest of stems, stench of green in my face, to a clearing with a claw-footed bathtub. Lie down in the tub. Dusk falls, bathing me in red at first, then leaching the colours.

Woke up to a black and white world.

Weeks, months, a diagnosis. Psychogenic achromatopsia. Put less kindly, hysterical colour-blindness. Pills to fix my mind, not my eyes. I refused. Laurel cried. I took them. Her tears had no colour. Were tears always colourless? You’re like Mary, the neuroscientist in her black and white room, my doctor said. I looked Mary up online.

            The doctor was wrong; Mary’s the opposite of me. I’m real and she was a story invented by philosophers. I lost my colours; Mary’s were concealed from her. She was imprisoned in a black and white room. I’m free in a world full of greys. She was smart, studied science, learnt all there was to know about how the brain and eyes see colour, but never saw a colour herself. I have a lifetime of colours, a C in GCSE biology and an undistinguished career in graphic design. She had a destiny – to emerge from her black and white prison, see a red rose and give the philosophers something to debate. My destiny, if I have one at all, is to drown in seas of grey wondering how any of this happened. Mary and I are nothing alike.

 © Annie Kirby, 2021