If you open up your front door and stand outside, you’ll be able to smell me. Not in a literal sort of way, but in the mind. In the whistle of the wind. I’ve always believed that the whistle of the wind can make sensory interchangeable, and maybe the color you hear when you stand outside can prove that.

A Correction

that sound is not the birds.

First, a proper introduction. Maybe forget that part about the birds and listen. Smell. Taste. See yourself walking alone down a dark city street with no name. The pavement is cold beneath your feet and the rain is pitter-pattering onto the glossy windows in the building around you. Nothing but that sound and the caw of a distant crow and the toot of a train whistle miles behind you.

Unsurprisingly, a breeze, though unlike any breeze you’ve felt before. Because those previous breezes have been there simply to pass by like a city stranger, smiling, greeting, and going along their merry way. However, this particular breeze is darker, more familiar, maybe with a taste of an ulterior motive. This breeze doesn’t just breeze by, no. It pulls. It makes you wonder if it is even a proper breeze at all.

And it pulls you down the tear-washed road, causing scrapes and trickles of blood to appear on your feet and legs. You could be wondering a multitude of things right now, including, “gee, how do I escape this breeze that isn’t even a proper breeze at all.” Unfortunately, that is the only question with an answer, and the answer is: you can’t.

Soon, an alleyway, not as wet as the street but basically as wet as the street. And the rats are in overabundance, nuzzling through the overgrown trash piles. Without light, suitable air, unbroken glass, this alleyway seems hardly the place for a breeze to take you, and hardly a place for a person to be.

But the breeze took you there, and there is, in fact, a person in there. A woman in a black coat much like the coat of danger that death might wear. And she has a stern complexion that matches her flat-lined walk. Her hair is too red to be contained but too contained to be visible in all its beauty, and her eyes are like spinning hurricanes in the dusk air of the south Atlantic. She greets you with an odd smile that makes you feel safe and in danger all at once, and she removes something small and cylindrical from her coat pocket.

Suddenly, you feel the breeze again, as it is no longer masquerading as a breeze, but a vacuum, which opens up behind the woman’s tiny yet curvilinear figure. But the vacuum isn’t so much sucking you in as it is giving you a choice to be sucked in or to turn around and escape. Your future is up to you now, in theory, but there really is no choice. You are there for good, and both the woman, the vacuum, and yourself know that it ought to be that way.

The woman, still holding the cylinder, does not beckon you forward, but you take a step closer anyway. At first, you feared this alley’s draw, but now, you long for it. Practically scraping delicate knees, you beg to hold the cylinder. Without hesitance, the woman hands it to you, and when the lense flashes in the dim night air, you realize that it is a kaleidoscope.

You take it from the woman’s hand and eagerly hold it up to your face as the rain begins to fall harder.

Now look inside.

Tell me who you see.