Somewhere Between Sky and Earth

Author: Ayşe Zehra Ulamış ( 9 years old)

Translator: Nefise Karaduman (12 years old)

Illustrator: Sümeyye Erva Tozlu (13 years old)

Tikory tickory tack… Zrrrrrr! Mira sat up in his bed with the ringing alarm bell.  A cold drop of sweat was trinkling down her forehead. She saw the same nightmare again. The nightmare of the day colors stopped coloring.  “Even the day I'm entering age of 10?” She said to herself.

It was impossible to forget that day. It was six years ago. The night before her birthday, she was too excited to sleep. Her mother was baking cookies with honey, and her father was decorating the living room with pastel-colored decorations. Her birthday dress sparkled with pink glitter. But when she woke up in the morning, the world was changed. Everything, absolutely everything, was gray. The world that had been as vibrant as a box of crayons just the day before. It seemed like someone had wiped it away with a giant eraser.

In the early days, the hope of people who thought this was a temporary weather phenomenon was dwindling day by day. Hope is fragile like glass because it needs a color to strengthen itself. Scientists had spent long periods of time working day and night to explain this event. Finally, they named this phenomenon 'Gray Reflection.' Excess carbon particles and microscopic pollution accumulated in the atmosphere had disrupted the refraction that separates the colors in sunlight. In the beginning, they struggled so much that there was chaos everywhere. Traffic was terrible, warning signs became useless, the decoration and fashion industries collapsed, food lost its appeal, the art world changed completely, Since the new generation had never known the concept of color, words like blue, red, and green had become meaningless, consumption habits had changed, it had become harder to convey emotions on television and in movies, depression rates had increased, and life seemed to have turned into a boring storybook with its pictures erased. So how could the colors possibly come back? After school, Mira walked to the riverbank she visited every day. Even the river now seemed like a shadow. She looked at the small crystal in her palm—the crystal her brother Riam had placed in her hand that morning before leaving the house, saying, “This is yours now sis. I-ı don't think it will help but... whatever. Just take care, okay?” Its clarity was still astonishing. Mira held it up to the water. As the light passed through the crystal, for just a moment, a vibration resembling red appeared on the surface of the water. Was it real? Or just a trick of her mind? At that moment, she remembered the notes in her science notebook in her bag. It wasn't just pollution that disturbed the color refraction in the atmosphere; it was also the micro particles that had accumulated over the years. These particles were thought to form a curtain that trapped sunlight.

The crystal, on the other hand, could refract light in its pure form thanks to its surface structure. Mira closed her notebook and held the crystal up to the light once more. The ripples on the surface of the river appeared again. So the light was still there, she thought; the colors didn’t disappeared, they were just hiding. She squeezed the crystal in her palm. ‘Maybe,’ she whispered, ‘everything starts again by finding the right light.’ In the distance, the voices of children could be heard. The sky was still grey. The world was still the same. But Mira saw a light seeping through the darkness. Maybe the beginning of a discovery, maybe just a dream. At that moment, a sentence ran through her mind: ‘If the colors have disappeared, they can be found again.’ And Mira kept walking. The crystal in her hand glimmered faintly in the pale light of the day, almost imperceptible. Nothing had been solved yet. But something had changed. There was hope now, somewhere between sky and earth, sometimes in the heart of a crystal…