By Jason R. Chun
I liked Green alright, but it was expensive, just to be able to look at trees and grass and I dunno, cucumbers, so I canceled my subscription to Green. It was 60 bucks a month just to see Green. It was 40 bucks for Blue and 25 for Yellow, so I got creative with my Blue and Yellow subscriptions and I mixed the two. But then Yellow went up to 45 overnight, so I was like, ‘screw Yellow, give me Green again’. And for awhile it was really pretty whenever I went outside, big Blue sky and rolling Green pastures, real storybook shit, almost like how you’d see it when you were a kid. Only, everything had this grayish tint, and I couldn’t tell why the light looked that way, till I remembered I canceled my Yellow subscription, and I was like, ‘duh, no sun’. And I kinda just ignored the graylight at first, and I bought lightbulbs that were more Orange because I was subscribed to Orange. Orange was only 20 for some reason, so I had the subscription. I got some really weird looking sunsets, where the light would change all of a sudden from graylight to this burning Orange for a few minutes, but then it went darkgray, almost black, because I wasn’t subscribed to Red (it was the holidays, so Red was 100 dollars). I didn’t really miss Red, except when I walked by these rosebushes that I used to love as a kid, and now all those roses were darkgray. But I started to miss Yellow, because there was this one finch that would peck at my window some days, and it kinda made me happy to see it perching there. And I missed Yellow when I looked at bananas and lemons, and I even missed the way a schoolbus made me sort of happy when it went by, and yeah, I guess the fucking sunlight made me happy too. So I renewed my Yellow subscription even though now it was 55 dollars. And I canceled Green again and went back to mixing Blue and Yellow, and I thought I was real smart to be getting Blue, Yellow, and Green all for 95 bucks. I thought I was really sticking it to Big Color. But then a couple weeks later, Big Color started cracking down on all the mixers, and they were like, ‘violation of Color copyright law’ and ‘detrimental to the Color industry’ and blah blah blah. So I couldn’t mix Blue and Yellow anymore, which meant now I had to pay 155 dollars if I wanted Blue, Yellow, and Green. So I was like, ‘screw all that, cancel all my subscriptions, even Orange, Big Color can go suck a fat gray dick.’ But then all I had was gray, and the gray got really fucking boring, and somehow things were getting even more gray, till I didn’t want to look at anything at all. So finally I just subscribed to Purple. Purple was cheap, only 15 bucks, because I guess there aren’t a whole lot of things that are Purple, other than lavender and plums and sometimes grapes. So I guess things could be worse. And I guess that means they’re going to jack up the price of Purple pretty soon.
Jason R. Chun is a Chinese American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently based in New York City. He holds an MFA in fiction from The New School, and his fiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Nashville Review, and The Offing. He can be found on Bluesky: @searchlightsoul.bsky.social.
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