The fluorescent lights in the conference room hummed their usual monotonous note when I first saw the yellow glow around Isidora's head. She was stumbling through her quarterly presentation, and there it was—a pale aureole hovering just above her dark hair like heat shimmer off summer asphalt.
I rubbed my eyes. Figured it was eye strain from too many hours staring at spreadsheets.
But then came the thought that wasn't quite mine: Yellow is fear. She's terrified.
At twenty-two, I'd never believed in psychic phenomena. I had a business degree and a sensible apartment and a girlfriend who planned our weekends in color-coded Google calendars. I was not the kind of person who saw auras.
After the meeting, I pulled Isidora aside. "Hey, are you okay? You seemed a little nervous in there."
She looked at me for a long moment, then her face crumpled. "I have such bad performance anxiety. I thought I was hiding it better."
The yellow shimmer faded as she calmed down.
Two weeks later, my boss walked into the office surrounded by deep purple light. I stared at it, transfixed, until the not-my-thought came again: Purple is pain. Migraine coming.
"You should take the day off," I suggested. "You look like you're not feeling well."
He laughed, but left early when the headache hit.
When my girlfriend showed up at my apartment with golden light pooling around her stomach, the voice was almost gleeful: Gold means new life. She's carrying a child.
The pregnancy test was positive three days later.
At first, I thought I'd developed some kind of gift. The colors appeared and the voice would explain them. Blue is sorrow. Green is envy. Red is danger. I became the friend everyone came to for advice, the one who always seemed to know what people needed to hear. The voice was never wrong.
My sister brought her new boyfriend to dinner. Dark red energy clung to him like smoke. The voice turned urgent: This red is violence. He will hurt her, and you must warn her.
I pulled her aside, begged her to leave him. She trusted me—I'd never been wrong before. They broke up that night.
Months later, I learned he'd been planning to propose. Just a nervous guy who'd never hurt anyone.
When I questioned it, the voice only whispered: "Red is red is red is red."
But there were other predictions I didn't think much about at the time. Small things that seemed irrelevant. I told a stranger at a coffee shop that I sensed "gray static" around his briefcase and suggested he back up his files. His laptop died two days later—hard drive failure, everything lost. I mentioned to a coworker that I saw "silver movement" near her apartment and she should check her locks. Someone tried to break in that weekend, but the deadbolt held.
These I barely remembered. They didn't fit the pattern of fear and pain and death the voices usually predicted, so I dismissed them as lucky guesses. Background noise in the symphony of delusion.
That's when the doubt crept in. Did my boss really have a migraine, or did I plant the suggestion? Was Isidora's anxiety already obvious to anyone who cared to look? My girlfriend had been talking about wanting kids for months—had I seen what I expected to see?
I couldn't tell anymore which predictions I'd actually made and which I'd caused to happen.
The colors got brighter after that. Walking through crowds was like swimming through neon soup. The voice narrated constantly: Green—jealousy. Blue—depression. Yellow—fear. Orange—creativity. It wouldn't shut up.
I wore sunglasses everywhere. People started avoiding me.
Then the voice changed its explanations.
My neighbor's pink aura developed black veins, and the voice said: Black is death approaching. Give it two weeks.
She had a heart attack fourteen days later.
The barista's green energy grew gray spots. Gray is impact coming. Metal and glass.
She had a car accident a month later.
I locked myself in my apartment. Even through the door, I could see the delivery driver's colors. The voice would describe each one—red anger at his job, blue sadness from divorce, yellow fear of poverty. I stopped answering the door.
The bathroom mirror was worse. My own aura had turned completely black with tentacles of darkness reaching outward.
The voice sounded different when it explained: You are the infection. Everyone you read, you poison. Your sight spreads sickness.
My mother called. I could see her aura through the phone screen—soft pink shot through with black veins. Multiple voices spoke now, overlapping: You did this. Your infection travels through connection. She's dying because you looked at her.