When the colors first started disappearing, no one noticed. After all, the first to go was chartreuse, and no one ever used chartreuse. Almost no one even knew what chartreuse was, most people thought it was a purplish-red color anyway.

So when a few bottles of French liqueur went grey, no one could tell, it might have been a trick of the light and the glass. A particularly terrible shade of salmon, popular for a brief period in the mid-40s was next to go. But most examples of that were already buried beneath years of garbage, or hidden behind five layers of wallpaper.

But when mauve went, word spread quickly. For goodness sakes, a life without mauve was a horrifying prospect. It didn't seem to be an issue with eyes, or something blocking the color in the air. All the tests, all the scientists, nothing came back. The religious and the mad, they had their theories too, but theories didn't matter when on a single day both aquamarine and noble purple disappeared from the world.

People took to the streets, some in anger, some in fear. The world went mad, and like in plague times, people scourged themselves, seeking to pull reds, blues, blacks, and purples from their own body. There was no rhyme, no pattern to how the colors went, but every day the world got a little greyer as the colors drained from the world. Where could they have gone?

Some people tried to make new colors, dazzling or terrible new shades, some tried to break well-established colors into smaller and smaller distinctions. Reds became brick and maroon, and all the rest. But one day, the colors would all be gone, on this most people seemed to be certain. What that meant, what happened then, no one could say. Or would even guess.

That day is coming soon, and I am scared, very scared./