When I was young, my hair was very orange—the color of the brightest fruit and of the four-winged tropical bird known as The Golden Orb—and I had (and still do) the sensitivities of people with that color of hair, ones doctors still don’t understand, though they think it is an old gene that evolved when our ancestors lived partly in the sea for the food there, swimming in another color of light.  In our world, in its duller land and air, what purpose can orange hair possibly serve?  Will we ever know?

    Like others with orange hair, I have unusual responses to different kinds of pain—from feeling almost nothing at a knife blade’s cut to falling to my knees and whining over a pin prick—and my hands (and sometimes more than my hands) tremble, visibly tremble, when I’m excited, whether from joy or fear. 

     When I was in superior school, at seventeen, on a hill overlooking the sea, a boy with the same color hair began to follow me. He wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t afraid of him. He was just an oddity, like me. Why was he following me with that skinny body of his, and hair I knew so well? Did my orange presence in the world make him feel less alone? Did that presence make him shake less and feel less pain, or did it make him shake even more?  Did he simply want to know if schooling was as hard for me as it was for him (since orange hair doesn’t make it easy)?  Was he searching for love, in a way neither of us understood?  So many of the questions I asked myself about him were silly, of course, but which were silly and which were not, I couldn’t have said.  Are we ever able to know?

     One day the boy—his name was Joziev—and I talked in a school hallway, and it was a mirror that wasn’t a mirror.  A mirror warped by heat and blurred by shaking.  He wanted to come to my home—I could tell—and finally I invited him. He said “Yes!” And when he visited, we sat in the room I slept in and didn’t know what to say. He was as shy as I was. I wanted to ask him about his pains, and I wanted to know whether he was shaking but hiding it from me. 

      Finally, after a painful silence, he took a breath and said, “Are you happy?”  I didn’t know how to answer—the words I needed just weren’t available to me—but he smiled to tell me it was all right, as if he knew what it was like not to have the words. Perhaps, I sometimes tell myself, his question wasn’t even the one he wanted to ask, but those words were the ones he could find.

     That was the only time he visited, and we didn’t talk at school after that, though he continued to watch me, which was all right. I watched him, too.

      One day, a classmate, a girl—one who viewed me, like so many students did, as odd, but who was nicer to me and who was a wonderful artist, insightful in her portraits of people our age—whispered,  “They say he likes boys, not girls.”  

“Why would that matter?” I said quickly.  “Why would it, Aforge, when what matters is having hair like ours?” 

She did not know what to say, and had already turned—called by a friend, another girl, who, I could tell by her eyes, loved Aforge very much, though the artist girl couldn’t see it—and was walking away. I often saw too much and said too much when I did say something, which wasn’t often.  

         Later, for my post–superior degree, I realized that women of a certain ethnic group—one from a continent across the ocean whose seashells are often orange, but where orange hair is even less common (except in a tiny section of the northern province of the old country), and where the women often married outside their group—liked me beyond the statistics of chance. I liked them, too, full of life and lively talk as they were, their wiry hair like dark bushes that wouldn’t behave. My orangeness, I sometimes thought, perhaps promised (like a dream) a world more interesting than the world they knew, but I may have been wrong. All I really knew was that orange hair was as rare to them as a four-winged tropical bird.  

      Usually, these women, after the hardship their families had suffered in their old country, knew what they wanted and simply took it—I’d noticed that too and felt wonder—but my hair for some reason made them less bold. I certainly wasn’t going to initiate things myself, nervous as I was—as orange-haired people often are, afraid of their own shaking. I didn’t know how to kiss, though I did kiss her back when a girl (just one) put her lips on mine first during my three post-superior years. She didn’t seem to care that my hands, which I placed like awkward paws on her front as we kissed, not knowing where else to put them, were trembling, that my lips couldn’t quite stay still, and that my left knee, which was touching hers, was shaking too. What mattered to her was that we were kissing.

At some point, over the years, my hair became less bright, and even white in places. When I tell people I once had very orange hair—down to my shoulders because the times I lived in when I was younger demanded it—they do not believe me.

They don’t see how much I still shake—I hide it well—and if I cry out loudly when I barely hit my arm or leg on furniture, they think I’m being melodramatic for humor’s sake, and I encourage this.  When I tell them about the boy, his orange hair, and how we watched each other though we never talked, they think my memory is playing tricks on me, or I am lying, or I was medicated back then, which I was not.

     I never tell them about how the women of that ethnic group acted toward me. I don’t because my wife of thirty years (the girl who kissed me that day because nothing else mattered to her) is one of them. Once she wanted to dye her own hair orange to see what it was like (“Love demands it, does it not?” she said with a laugh)—but I told her (sounding awfully serious, I am sure), “No, Mehya.  That won’t help you understand.” 

     “I know,” she said, serious too.  “I know it can’t.”

     Another time I said to her, “Didn’t my hair scare you?”

     “A little,” she answered with that sharp little laugh I have come to love, “but not enough, Andur.”

     None of our three children have orange hair—for which I feel sadness at times, but at other times a great happiness.

     The other day I received a postcard without a return address, from a country I did not recognize. The picture is of dark trees, a peely-bark kind not find in my world, and, in front of them, as if pasted there, a perfect little meadow with orange flowers. They aren’t bright, the flowers, but they are indeed orange, not red or yellow. In an adult’s handwriting the card reads only, “I do hope you are well.” I think I know who sent it, though how he found me this many years later, I cannot say. Whether it is the question he really wants to ask me, I also do not know.

      Those women, the ones I never kissed, come to me in dreams at night to tell me who I was to them. “We saw your hair when it was that color and couldn’t look away,” one says, her hair especially wild. “It was who you were then,” another says, her face in shadow, but her voice full of life, like my wife’s, “and who you are still, though it is less bright now.” And then in a single voice, like a song, three of them say, “It held us then like the strangest of lights in the night we lived in and always will.  Do you understand?”

      I nod, saying, “I believe so….”  I say:  “If he has not, as so many orange-haired people do, killed himself with medication meant for another purpose, a stone bridge, a fiery oven, an old weapon his uncle once owned, or the sea itself, please visit him, that boy, the one who followed me in school.  If he is alive, which I think he is, he must be dreaming, too, just like me, and I know he would want to hear you say this.” Then I add, doing my best to make them understand, to find the right words, “And if you do find him, please give him my love.”

Bruce McAllister’s short fiction has appeared over the years in literary journals, national magazines, “year’s best” volumes, and college readers; and won or been short-listed for awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hugo, the Nebula, the Shirley Jackson Award, NARRATIVE magazine, and others. His most recent novel is THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC; his most recent collection, STEALING GOD AND OTHER STORIES. After a peripatetic childhood in a Navy family, he lives happily now near an  ocean.