The Strawberry Earrings: Part One

Marie was born with caramel-colored skin. She stared at the glaring difference in her baby pictures. It was her, a brown-skinned bundle of newness wrapped in a gray blankie with her two gray parents, smiling with their gray teeth and twinkling gray eyes.

Within the first year of her life, she lost that brownish hue of her skin and became gray as well, just like everyone else that lived in Graytown.

Growing up, everything was gray. Marie sometimes wondered if her dreams used to have color, or if that was just another fantasy of hers.

Children learned the alphabet, but prioritized the letters G, R, A, and Y above all. After these four, it continued the way non-monochromatic students learned, but with these four letters always at the forefront. As a warmup to their reading and writing exercises, they sang in unison, “G, R, A, Y, B, C, D” and so on.

Street signs and advertisements had words and designs in all shades of gray, from a light, pearly hue to a dark, shadowy tinted one. Concrete was their single most valuable building material. All shows and movies had not experienced the mind-blowing shock and delight of watching their characters transform into technicolor.

No one questioned this way of living.

That is, until Marie had to go to the grocery store on her way home from school to pick up a forgotten ingredient for her mother’s dinner recipe that evening.

Standing outside of G-Foods, she glanced at her stone-colored sticky note with “potatoes” written in charcoal. Her mother’s handwriting was always beautiful, loopy and large, and Marie wondered how much it would pop if it were in a different colored ink.

She pushed this thought to the far-off crevices of her mind and entered the store.

She passed oysters, gray owl cheese, and sesame ice cream— delicacies in Graytown, each one a different shade of dull. A line of truffles and mushrooms led her to the produce, their earthy scent, the only thing with depth.

“Gray potatoes! Just barely rotting!” read above four large barrels of spuds that were a few hours away from being thrown out.

Marie grabbed her sack and placed the four most salvageable ones inside, squishy but not to the point of being mush; they would have to do.

Her normal route home had been interrupted, cut off by construction equipment and multiple adults in hardhats.

“Graytonians, we apologize for the inconvenience! Please take Rhino Road as an alternate route! We should have Elephant Lane back open by dusk this evening!” one of the hard-hatted folks yelled on a megaphone.

The route on Rhino added twenty minutes onto a commute that normally took ten. Without much choice, she and several others began their trek on the road, mostly abandoned and rumored to harbor mischief.

Past abandoned houses and vacant fields was a sign that Marie had never seen before in a color that she had never glimpsed before. It was so vibrant it burned. Her eyes screamed against the color, not from brightness, but because it felt… wrong. Like a truth she wasn’t supposed to know. Like seeing the sun after living underground. Instincts begged her to turn her gaze away, to save the pain and discomfort her peepers were experiencing, but she could not. Her feet were drawn to the sign, not only walking directly up to it, but quickening her pace as well.

Broken glass and trash were strewn around the area, forcing Marie to tiptoe closer, like avoiding landmines in a field. With each step, letters became visible on not just the one sign like she previously thought, but two.

On a wobbly-looking piece of lumber were two signs no bigger than Marie’s forearm. One pointed to the left, toward Graytown, and the other pointed right, toward a blank, bland ash-colored wall. The left sign read “GRAY” and the right, which was the bright one, still hurting Marie’s eyes, read “MAGENTA.”

"Magenta?" she asked herself, whispering aloud.

For years, she wished for something other than gray, but had never known what that was. It was like asking someone that never left the mountains to imagine the sea.

This color would have been unfathomable if she were not standing right in front of it. Marie looked around her. Surely, she was not the only one on Rhino Road with burning eyes. No one was there though. Everyone continued walking on their normal paths to home, work, or wherever they were going.

Scratching her chin, she turned back to the magenta sign.

The wall it was pointing at appeared to be nothing more than just that, a plain old wall. Like trying to decipher a code, she glared at it. Then, the tiniest bit of motion appeared in front of her. It was like the wall was moving, almost breathing.

Marie pushed her index finger toward the wall. Unlike any wall that Marie had touched prior, this one gave. Her finger slipped through. Whatever was on the other side of the wall was hot to the touch, warmer than the side she was on. She looked at her sack of potatoes, placed it in front of the sign on a clear patch of ground, and walked through the penetrable wall.

The world of Magenta surrounded her. It was painful, beautiful, and mesmerizing. She spun around to look at where she had just entered from. It was no longer bland, but an electrified lavender with “GRAY” written in the same ash tone that it had been on her original side. Even though it remained difficult to look at, the difference pleased her. She imagined her mother’s handwriting in this color and how it would stand out like no other, exactly as she always wished.

Several honks sounded behind her, making her swiftly spin to face this fresh territory. Fuchsia colored cars zoomed around a busy intersection with people, all in differing shades of electric pink and purples waving and smiling at one another. Marie had walked right into the outskirts of a busy intersection. Above a fountain with amaranth shimmering water spouting out of it was a sign that read “Welcome to Magentaland!”

She could turn around and act like none of this had happened. Return to the life of gray that she was accustomed to.

"I can't just stop now..." Another whisper to no one except herself.

Tentative steps led Marie to the middle of the square. The cobblestone below her was hot pink and seemed to glow a bit with every step that she took. A sweet fruitiness had engulfed the air and filled her nostrils, making her stomach growl with desire. Just as she stopped to try and take everything in, a gaggle of children leaped out of a store with hot pink gushing from their smiling mouths, immediately stealing all her attention. Whatever they had just stopped gorging on was from a place called “M-Stop.” The sweet scent intensified as they passed Marie. Their lingering eyes zeroed in on her differing hues of gray before simply nodding and continuing along.

She followed the sweetness in the air through the store's front door.

A bell dinged as she entered, pingy and friendly, and made Marie jump, knocking over a pile of cerise tulips.

“Oh dear, are you alright?” a woman who was wrapped in a large glittery apron asked.

Marie’s hand, which was scurrying to pick up the flowers, hovered over the one she was reaching for. So much for slipping in unnoticed.

“You’re from Graytown...”

Satisfaction was in the woman’s eyes while Marie just stared, bug eyed and still speechless.

The apron woman laughed.

“Well, you came to the right place. We have sweets, treats, and some things offbeat. It can be your one stop shop here before you go home. Unless… you plan to stay?”

“No! I’m going back home!” Marie had not meant to yell this.

“Well, stay as long or as little as you like! I’ll pick these up. You go explore!”

It was not that folks in Graytown were rude, but they were never warm. One of the earliest lessons learned in Graytown public education was that "warmth is limited in hues of gray and shade." This strange woman's kindness made a bead of sweat form along Marie’s hairline, like she was suddenly wrestling with a nasty fever.

“Thank you.”

The woman nodded in response and Marie began perusing.

There was so much she’d never seen— stone-like things called beets, strange glowing “salt lamps,” and pens topped with fluffy orbs instead of the usual charcoal tips. Her fingers itched to grab one, just to feel how it wrote. Every item was a little rebellion.

M-Stop was an amusement park.

In the very center of the store was a display with the words “FREE TO EAT” written on it. Containers were filled with small, plump things labeled “berries.” There were all sorts of these berries; strawberries that resembled little hats, raspberries like even tinier hats, and pinballs called cranberries, redcurrant, and lingonberry.

The children that she met before came to mind, their smiles and glee, knowing that this was what they had feasted on. She wanted to feel what they felt, wanted to taste what they had savored. She rubbed the strawberry’s dimpled skin, cool and soft like velvet. As she bit in, juice burst across her tongue, honeyed, wild, and impossibly fresh. Syrupy satisfaction erupted on her tongue. One taste wasn’t enough. She devoured them all.

With a belly full of berries, she knew these flavors were something she would crave for the rest of her life. The craving scared her more than the taste. What if gray no longer satisfied? What if everything she’d known now felt… empty?

She tossed a half-eaten piece to the side and turned toward the front door.

Just as she was about to ring the bell to leave, trying to move faster than her legs would allow, the apron woman called after her.

“Hey, gray girl!”

When Marie turned to face the woman, she placed something small and hard in her hand.

“Just a little something to remember your time here.”

She opened her hand and found dangly earrings with strawberries hanging at the bottom of them. They were rose gold and reddish pink, like nothing she had ever worn before.

“They’ll add a pop to your clothes.”

The woman pulled back her light pink apron and showed a small gray pin of a cat.

Unable to adequately thank the woman for what she had just experienced, Marie once again resorted to a nod and left, holding her new earrings inside of a tight fist.

When she went back through the wall, the gray was now just as painful to look at as the magenta had been. Nothing was quite right, but then again, she was not sure that "right" was how she would have labeled Graytown to begin with.

Her potatoes remained, waiting for her, and smelling even more rotten than before, but she continued home and did not mention any of this to her mother.

Why I Wrote This

My husband and I have been digital nomads for the past year, working remotely while exploring new places.

Still, when we told someone about our lifestyle recently, he called us “professional bums.” That moment stuck with me — not because it hurt, but because of how wrong it was. So, I’ll clarify to avoid any assumptions that might leave me wanting to push my middle finger in the air towards folks: we both spent years building our own companies to get to this point (I run a therapy private practice and he operates a tutoring company).

We’ve been lucky enough to travel to more than fifteen cities in that time. While most of our destinations were in the US, a large chunk of that time was spent in the Yucatan in Mexico. I started this story before going there, but I feel it so deeply in my core after my time abroad. Mexico has the forbidden fruit and vibrant colors of this story. We’re often taught not to go outside of the very thick lines that we’re presented in life. This lesson is reinforced with messages centered around getting married, having kids, getting a job that you stick with for decades, buy a house in a city that you never leave, etc.

I don’t want that. I’ve never wanted that. I don’t think we have to want that to be fulfilled. Fulfillment is whatever you find for yourself that works for you, truly works for you and doesn’t leave you constantly wondering what life could be like.

If being married with kids in your four bedroom house is what makes you pop at the seams with joy, go off! If it doesn’t, I think it’s important to be like Marie— unafraid to access color outside of whatever lines you were born into.

-Bri