Have you ever caught a rainbow?
I have.
I thought I could catch it with my hands. That didn’t work. Then I tried catching it with my shirt. That didn’t work too. I tried using my torn-up backpack with a broken zipper. That didn’t work either. It was the zipper’s fault, I was sure.
Good thing there was an empty water bottle on the ground. Now that worked.
When I got it, I ran straight home. I left my friend, Markew, by the alley where we found the end of the rainbow (or was it the start of it?). I’m not entirely sure why I left him standing there, but my heart kept skipping beats when I caught the rainbow. I was so nervous, I had to run home.
Once I got back, I sprinted up the stairs, locked my door, and wrapped the bottle with a towel. I shoved it under my bed. My older brother and sister were a couple of snoopers. They’d ask me to share the rainbow. I needed to hide it. I wanted it for myself.
I didn’t even realize I was out of breath. I slumped over my chair, put my feet on my desk, and, slowly, dozed off.
When I woke up it was an hour past midnight. The city was pitch-dark outside my windows. I closed them and drew the blinds. My stomach growled. Nobody called me for dinner.
I went down to grab a sandwich and finished it with three violent bites. I probably could’ve gotten it in two. Markew could’ve probably done it in one, not that it was a contest.
I reached under the bed and found the bottle. I threw the towel aside, double-checking the curtains to make sure no one was spying. Or worse, snooping.
From inside the bottle, the colors glared at me. They hummed a symphony that I was deaf to—but I felt it—the vibrations through the plastic. The rainbow felt warm in my hands, like I was holding contained fire that knew the meaning of “gentler”.
Then I did something I’ve wanted to do since I got the rainbow in. I popped the lid of the bottle. But I did it steadily, carefully so the colors wouldn’t pour over.
I turned the cap, and thin, small, and slender tendrils of fog flowed from the bottle’s mouth. The rainbow remained where it was, sitting neatly within. I put my finger inside and felt nothing, but the rainbow rose, like water, and more fog poured out. Some color seeped and spilled through the rims of the bottle. But that was all it was.
Then a thought gripped me. If Markew could eat a sandwich in a bite, and it wasn’t a contest to be sure, maybe I could drink a rainbow.
I didn’t give myself time to hesitate. Placing my lips on the cusp, I turned the bottle over and swigged the contents onto my mouth and into my throat. It felt like drinking air—heavier air, though not by much. And air that was a teensy bit warm.
Nothing happened.
I threw the bottle aside, small wisps of color still lingering inside.
I waited there, back straight and one leg bouncing uneasily. Maybe, I thought, drinking it would give me some weird superpower. Like the power to control light, or the power to blast light beams from my hands and laser beams from my eyes. Maybe it’d give me access to like some secret rainbow transportation method. Or maybe drinking it would make me have control over the rain or would make me fly.
I didn’t expect nothing.
I waited there until the sun came and decided to use the last few hours left I had before school to sleep.
When I woke up, my nose was red. The mirror saw it first. It was weird to me because whenever I’d have nosebleeds, the insides of my nostrils would smell of metal and have crusted blood nagging at the edges. There were none of those. Only red, a tame red.
I wiped it away with a tissue, and the tissue became red.
I didn’t have much time left before I needed to leave, if I wanted to be on time for school, so I ran inside my bathroom and took a quick bath. I always pee after bathing, because it was more relaxing that way. When I did it this time around, it was not relaxing at all.
My pee was green. Not a pale green that might’ve been mistaken for some shade of yellow, no. It was the green you saw on forests deep in the wilderness. It was the green of all greens.
I almost lost my footing, but I couldn’t stop peeing. If I did, my bladder would burst. And who knew what that would look like. It’d probably look very green.
Worser still, I felt a sneeze coming. Peeing and sneezing never went well together. But I couldn’t stop it anymore, it was keen to barrel out.
My sneeze smeared the toilet seat in red, the same red that I wiped off awhile ago. What the he—did I just shit myself?
This was my worst fear. I had shit myself. The bathroom smelled of shit. It definitely was shit. But it didn’t look like shit. A shock of violet covered the tiles beneath me like Grimace was inches away from bursting from the ground.
That was when I realized I wouldn’t be going to school today.
It took me about half an hour to clean the bathroom up, and about half the rest of the day staring into my ceiling. Whenever someone would knock on my door, I wouldn’t answer. They all just when away after a while.
Markew got a bunch of calls in too, but I didn’t answer him either. He’s probably too busy eating his sandwich in one bite right about now.
I took another leak at around mid-afternoon. It was still green. The day spent moping around has led me to narrow it down to bodily secretions. My pee was green, that was obvious. My sneeze was red, that would explain why I woke up the way I did. My feces were violet (and also violent, for what it’s worth). That one was the most unpleasant.
My spit was still a normal transparent though, so I guess that was unaffected. I could test for my vomit, but that’d be disgusting, and there was no one in this world I would vomit on command just to see a bunch of BROWN flood out of my mouth.
Quietly, I snatched an onion and a small knife from the kitchen and went back up.
It didn’t take me a long time to cry. My tears were blue, a thick blue. I spent the rest of the day trying to get the blue out of my shirt and sheets.
The next day was Saturday, so there was no school. Good. I was already flunking as it was, and to have all this…color stuff going on. I was bound to flunk even more.
One subject I wasn’t failing on though, was art. I wasn’t bad at painting, not at all. And to hell with my mind and my ideas, but this one was brilliant to the touch. It was brilliant to the core.
The next day I invited Markew over. He came at around noon.
“What happened to the rainbow?” was the first thing he asked me. Not ‘what happened to you?’.
We walked up the stairs. I shrugged. “Not sure. It kind of just, went away.”
“Kind of like what you did.”
“I had diarrhea!” It was the excuse I used to bail on Friday classes, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. When we entered my room, it smelled of flower-scented air freshener, enough to make me sneeze. But I held it in. I pinched my nostrils hard. I grabbed the empty Glade can from my desk and threw it into my trash can.
“What was that?” Markew asked.
“Nothing, nothing.” I went over to the most gracious work of art I’ve ever created, a colorful hillside cottage hand-drawn and painted on a sheet of Oslo paper.
Markew noticed it too. “Wow. That looks pretty.”
“I had some free time on my hands, what can I say?”
“I bet you I can eat it in one bite.”
I’d say the notion surprised me, but it didn’t. He said that of all things, all of the time. “I bet you can’t.” I had to push back, right? Right?
“How much are you betting?”
“I’ll give you a hundred pesos for it.”
His eyes widened. Got him. Hook, line, and sinker. He grabbed the “painting”, the paper crumpling as his hands creased its sides. Then, in one action, he stuffed the entire thing in his mouth.
He did, in fact, eat it in one bite.
That same night, I had to take him to the hospital. It wasn’t anything serious or severe, and the doctors told him he’d get discharged within the day. They suspected food poisoning, and I kinda felt bad not telling them the truth, but they’d never believe me anyway.
I wouldn’t believe myself too.
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