The Judge

I liked to believe I was a good judge of character. 

I liked to believe that it had nothing to do with what I saw in people and just because I was a good person. I liked to believe that the glowing auras around a person had nothing to do with how I viewed a person. I liked to believe that I didn’t immediately judge a person based on the color of their aura.

I liked to believe most of that.

But I didn’t.

I really didn’t know people. I was increasingly judgmental because I could see who a person was before they even opened their mouth to talk.

The mixed colors of auras had become such a normal thing for me that I stopped questioning it and just immediately dismissed everyone. I isolated myself because all of the auras I saw – they were a mixture of red and yellow and green – rage, cowardice, and jealousy and a whole host of other things.

Each aura was never one singular color. Each person was full of emotions, but the main color was their dominant trait and most of the time, that main color was negative.

The first different color aura that I had seen happened when I was five. It must have happened when I was younger than that because my mother had taken me out in public dozens of times, but the first distinct time I remembered was the first time I truly saw my father.

Now, my father was a traveling businessman. Always moving, always out, never at home, or whenever he was at home, it was when I was asleep. Because if I had seen the color on my father when I was younger, I would have fled from him in terror. 

It had been a sunny afternoon, I remembered that part the most because it made everything seem so surreal. I had been playing with the toys in the living room, nothing strange. My mother had been in the kitchen, cooking and humming some ‘70s song. 

That was the thing about my mother. No matter how shitty our life got, she still sang.

But that afternoon, my father came home during the day. The front door crashed open. It was one of those large oak doors that had too much weight when it swung one direction so maybe he hadn’t meant to throw it open, but it sure as hell sounded like he did. 

Being a young child, I had immediately flung myself into the foyer to see who had come in and then proceeded to scream in terror. A violent red radiated from him. Being a child, I thought he was covered in mist, like I saw on the grass sometimes in the mornings. But this didn’t just float over him like mist did, the red mist had saturated him until he was cloaked in it. 

My mother had sprinted in to save me from whatever horrible monster had befallen me and saw my father. My mother, completely opposite of my father, was cloaked in gold. Of course, her gold was interspersed with red and green and yellow and blue, but mainly, her aura was gold and she had immediately swarmed the room with warmth. 

“Oh, Richard, you’re home early.” My mother did her best to console me. My mother’s color soothed me and distracted me from the violence of my father. 

“Get her to shut up. I don’t have the energy to listen to her scream,” he had snarled. The sun filtered through his red aura, casting red shadows on the ground. He left no room for argument and he was on edge. Even at my young age, I knew that pushing a man at this point would spell disaster.

“He’s red, mommy,” I remembered whimpering. She ignored me.

“You startled her,” my mother tried to argue. I vaguely remember my mother catching the blow in the face and me being squished against the wall as she tried to catch her fall.

“I told you, Eileen,” he roared, “get her to shut up!” It wasn’t the first time that had happened, but it was the first time it had happened in front of me and that was the last time I saw that man. 

Over the years, my mother would bring home men. Each man had a dark aura, maybe not red like my father’s, but dark nonetheless and I would have none of that around the golden glow of my mother. But with each man that came through the door, the bluer the golden glow became. 

Oh, she put a smile and she sang her songs in the kitchen and she took me out for ice cream and she never let me see her cry. But I could tell. Her aura used to be gold but, as the years wore on, and our situation got worse and didn’t change, that aura became the color of the ocean at sunset, deep and dark, but slashed with oranges and golds and reds. Her aura only started to become gold again when I graduated from college and got my first career job and I had done that for her. I had made her glow again. 

Not that, she knew that. I never told my mother about the auras. I didn’t want her to think her daughter was crazy. She had enough on her plate as it was. I wanted to make it easier for her. 

She died with that golden sun shining through her again.

Through my years, I quickly associated the colors around people with their character. A little boy in my kindergarten class had an aura that was mainly green. He stole my pencils, my erasers, my pencil bag, and even my lunchbox. He threw a fit when someone had something better than him and wanted everything. 

In first grade, the girl that sat next to me was violently yellow. She never spoke to me. She cried when the teacher asked her to do anything and she never tried to speak to anyone or anything. Half-way through the year, she was pulled out of school and I never saw her again. 

The world was a blur of color and light. Sometimes it overwhelmed my senses, causing my head to pound and during those times, I hid myself away. 

I thought I could get over the auras, that they really didn’t mean anything because they could change over time. I had seen my mother’s change, so others changed too. But reality struck me a blow in high school. 

Ninth grade, there was a boy who was older than me, a junior, who was covered in purple and blue, softer colors, not as dark as the blue that my mother had started to get in her golden hue. I had started to become much more adjusted to the colors, or auras, as I had started to call them. I had accepted it as a part of my life. 

So, this particular boy, Tyler was his name, asked me out. His aura immediately put me off, but like I mentioned, I thought I could get over the aura of a person. Just because his colors were off didn’t mean he was not a good person. My friend at the time was saturated in greens and yellows and she was decent enough. 

I quickly realized that I should trust my eyes. Tyler tried to rape me in the bathroom after a high school football game. The color of his aura shifted in front of my eyes, turning a dark maroon as red and purple clashed together like fireworks. He wasn’t successful and I moved schools within the next two weeks. 

The strange thing about these auras was… I could never see my own. I looked in the mirror and saw the same boring brown eyes and blonde hair, but never any sparks of color. I saw nothing around me. 

Maybe I was just a sociopath. I had seen people like that before, but even still… they had a flicker of color, mainly red, but sometimes flickers of green and orange.

But everyone… everyone had a flicker of color… except me. 

And that was fine. I had come to accept that. I was a successful human being. I had graduated from college. I had become a lawyer. It was great. 

I glanced in the window of a passing restaurant, assessing each aura and ignoring them. They didn’t matter much anymore. Unless I was speaking to a person, their aura did not matter. And I froze. There in the back of the restaurant was a man. Crisp black suit, slick backed hair, and a wicked smile. 

And he was aura-less. 

He had nothing. 

No color. 

He tilted his head, beckoning. I stumbled inside, drawn to him. As I neared, I searched for any hint of color. Sometimes people were white. It was very rare, but it happened. I stood five feet in front of his table, staring at him. He tilted his head, raising a brow. He was completely at ease. 

“Who are you?” I croaked.

“Why, child, I am the one who gave you such a powerful gift and you have used it so well, but your time is up,” he murmured, yet it seemed as if he whispered it right in my ear.

“My time?” I whispered. 

“Yes,” he grinned and his eyes flashed red and my last thought was panic as he snapped.