Plume Purple
On hearing a red panda
You would expect red.
The name suggests it. But synesthesia does not follow expectation and neither does Duanduan. When she makes her sound, what arrives is plum purple. Deep and ripe, the color of something at the exact moment of its fullness. Warm at its center the way fruit is warm when it has been in the sun. Dark at the edges the way warmth always has shadow somewhere nearby. It is a color that feels slightly surprising and completely inevitable at the same time.
※ ※ ※
Three circles. All different sizes.
They appear the moment the sound begins and they dance without hesitation, the way the red panda itself moves, quick and light and entirely unbothered by being watched. The largest holds the center of the plum purple, warm and grounding. The medium one weaves around it, nimble, tracing paths that feel unplanned and exactly right. The smallest darts between them, faster than the others, brightening the edges of the color wherever it passes, like a small thing that cannot help leaving a mark.
Where the circles overlap the plum deepens. Layered and rich, the way a sound contains more than its size suggests.
※ ※ ※
Duanduan does not know she is being heard.
The sound she makes is not music and not language and not anything that was offered. It is simply the voice of a creature being entirely itself, unguarded and uncurated, the way very few things in the world get to be. And yet it produced this. Plum purple. Three dancing circles. A color as specific and unrepeatable as Duanduan herself.
※ ※ ※
When the sound stops the circles stop with it.
The dancing slows first. Then the smallest circle releases, then the medium, then the largest, each departure taking a little of the plum with it, the color thinning the way warmth thins when the thing that made it has moved on.
And then they are gone.
Leaving only the ordinary world behind.
Adrian Adair