Summer had met its demise. Flowers had had their time to grow up and become something beautiful, boasting all possible colors of the rainbow; now they were withering away, their petals curling up like the claws of a bird. The air was turning crisp and the woods orange, as if it were on fire.

   Did you know there are hundreds of colors the human eye cannot see? We recognize the main spectrums of red, blue, and green and see derivatives of those, like purple, but there are so many spectrums we have not experienced before ever in our lives. Imagine a sunset, glowing gentle shades of lavender and fuscia. Now envision the same scene with an added spectrum of some color you could never detect, nor conceptualize; how beautiful would the derivatives be?

   In Aunt Edna’s garden sat a crow. He came often to feed on the insects crawling around the plump red tomatoes. He liked to eat tomatoes, too, but he was especially fond of the bugs. I visited him every day and spoke to him. When I was younger, I didn’t think it was strange that I spoke to a crow. I go to school now and they tell me animals don’t speak, let alone listen – but still I communicated with the bird every day after I got off the bus one stop early at my Aunt Edna’s home. I told the crow that he needn’t worry about his dull black color, because black was just a cover-up for the hundreds of thousands of colors we cannot see. There was probably a combination of green and purple called obligia, and there was probably a blend of orange and yellow called flamation. The crow would fly away at some point, and I’d marvel at the sleek way his body erupted into the air and caused the light blue sky to spurt his own color of ink. I’d wonder what shade the crow would have if the human eye could see past the darkness and witness a more broad spectrum of color.

   One day I decided to follow the bird. The lovely black animal took off when it had finished its feast of worms, and I succeeded after him. I imagined its feathers to be obligia and its beak and claws flamation. I also decided to rename the sky not blue but orphate, because it was doubtlessly not a lighter shade of blue but something much more rich, like the difference between good and bad coffee. The grass became humik, a mixture of green and orange and blue. The autumn leaves could no longer be just orange and red, so I called them saphium.

   The rush of obligia chased the clouds and I ran. There were woods behind Aunt Edna’s house, and though I had been scared of them as a child, I had somewhere along the way found the pleasure and thrill of making those woods an adventure.

   The crow pivoted around the tops of trees and I could swear he looked down at me once, seeking the origin of the crackling leaves. Perhaps he thought I was a large insect. The crow flew higher and higher still, and then he stopped, and his wings flapped once more before he settled for a thick branch at the top of the tree. I asked him if he had a nest up there. He let out a squawk. Somehow, I interpreted it as an invitation to climb to the very top of the den.    So I threw my shoes onto the earth and I did.

   Step after step, I heaved myself up into the unknown domain at the top of the world. I could see Aunt Edna’s house from here, and the street in which she lived, and I could see my neighbor Annabelle’s bicycle, painted a shade of hyserose blue, in front of their garage.

   The bark was rough under my fingertips, and I started to bleed from just beside my pointer finger where the tree had scraped it. I continued my journey. When I was nearly at the highest point of the large shrub, I imagined the crow peering at me from its thin eyes with a genuine look of awe on its dark features.        

   However, when I finally hauled myself onto the fat branch on which it had been sitting, the bird had vanished. Worse yet, there was no nest. The crow had probably taken the bunch of twigs and leaves the nest was made up of into his proud beak and continued onward. I climbed down, feeling guilty and bored. Step after step. I didn’t look up much, not to the sky, not to the clouds, but one time when I did, I saw the crow—it had taken its nest and was dropping the contents of it onto earth, consequently painting a streak of obligia, flamation, orphate, humik, saphium, and hyserose blue in the sky.