“Well, it looks like violet to me.”
He was never good with colours. Or, at least, that’s what I thought early on. In time, I began to realise that he did tell colours apart and had no problem at all recalling their names. He just didn’t want to say them.
“It’s periwinkle. Like the flower. The ones in our porch.”
The colour he was more stubborn to recognise was salmon. “Bring me the salmon dress”, I would say, and he would play dumb. He would leave calmly and come back smiling with the grey dress from my cousin’s wedding. He would always wait for me to frown before adding: “Salmon grown in fish farms is this colour, did you mean something else?” Then he would run away before I could catch him. I would chase him across the whole house before ending up kissing on the couch.
Coming back home from the funeral, my mother wanted to cheer me up. She stopped at the porch and said:
“I have always loved these flowers. They’re periwinkles, are they not?”
As my eyes filled with tears, I replied:
“They look like violets to me.”
Originally written for FlashFicFeb 2022 and translated from Galician for inclusion in the Flashbang! A Collection of Very Short Stories | Volume III and In a Flash anthologies.