Chromesthesia: What if our Voices Came out in Color? by Stacey Murphy

Would my murmured first “good morning” be a mud of flinty brown and moss green, giving way to greyish mist after the first mile of a run? And then, at the end of three miles, would those same words, “good morning,” now show against the sunlit trees as a gold-flecked chartreuse as I call out to the man and his dogs passing the spot where I stretch by the side of the path?

Would we see the avocado in the stories of the cab driver?  Hear the neon orange and banana in the shouts of kids tossing a football at the bus stop?

Do the words of the barista, as he places a mug on the coffee bar, Americano Grande, come out as sable brown, or as a fluttering-but-dirty red, white and blue? 

Meanwhile, in the booth in the corner, would we see the peach glitter haze that surrounds a mother and toddler as she reads him a tale about a bear and a piglet who are best-best friends in the forest of a little boy’s stuffed menagerie? A collection much like his own pile of familiars at home, where he will prattle in a language nonsensical to all but his mother and father and to:

The penguins who answer in the color of morning ice
The dinosaurs who answer in swamp
The ape who chortles back in vine green
The cats who purr back in mischief purple
The doggies who pant agreeably in joyful red
The bears who grumble in the brightest burnt sienna
And the narwhal who responds in rhyming, shimmering turquoise