The Color Red, The Country Persia . . .

The Color Red, the Country Persia and the Emotion Sadness got together in an out-of-the-way place. Between planes, and nowhere near an airport. 

Color Red arranged him or herself on a blue silk divan that would have taken up 2,000 square miles in time-space. Red floated above the silk in a stack of shimmering rectangles, from orange through scarlet to violet and back again. The shadings rippled every time C.R. breathed, and pulsed when he spoke. (We call C.R. “him,” for convenience.) Red’s companions could tell he was agitated whenever he displayed traces of milky rose, like calamine lotion or one of your grandmother’s glass vases; milky lines were showing.

Country Persia tried not to notice Color Red’s condition; she didn’t want to disturb C.R. any more than necessary and in any case had her own problems. For the purpose of this meeting, Persia made herself into a sphere completely surrounding her companions. Both Red and the Emotion Sadness could look up or down or around and see only a firmament consisting of a brown parchment map of the ancient Persian Empire at its zenith. Emotion Sadness, a collective personality, were the air throughout this Persian globe, invisible but you always knew Sadness by their lilac fragrance.