Color Thieves

My favorite color didn’t belong to me. The best ones never did. Every piece of the color pie had some oligarch’s finger stuck in it—corporations or families who’d run the color racket since Venetian dye merchants first peddled their royal purples. 

Sure, we could paint the blandest rainbows with shades in the public domain. If you had the dough, you could even flash some cash for licenses that lent your work some extra pop. But those rarest hues were guarded for singular purpose. Soda cans. Professional sports teams. Designer sneakers. Those colors were off limits to everyone else. Or everyone too timid to steal them.

My hoodie drawn, I punched the access code into the parking garage elevator. Petey dedicated the top three floors to his legitimate business—charging $30 an hour for courthouse-side parking—but on the bottom floor, he engaged in more… colorful activities.

The doors opened on a subterranean story, its walls muraled and graffitied into a vibrant jungle of forbidden hues. Comforting bric-a-brac of spray cans filled my ears. The twisting halls once reserved for cars were now filled with industrial mixers, a paint chip analyzer, and green-screen photography studios.

Petey’s den of iridescent iniquity didn’t look so busy today. Just some kids glamming their streetwear and an Indian couple shopping shades for Holi. So, it hardly took long for Petey’s furious gaze to catch me. 

“What are you doing here, Sarah?” Petey stomped toward me, his face redder than the dyes in his hair. His XXXL tee flapped with his gait, tie-dyed with a blasphemous blend of Cadbury purple and John-Deere green. “You’re supposed to be in prison.”

I shrugged. “Probation. The ACLU wrote some brief, and the judge went easy on me.”

“In case you forgot, you’re banned. How am I supposed to trust you after the crap you pulled?”

“Come on, Petey.” I shot him the same puppy eyes I’d given the judge at my sentencing. “You were the one who taught me how to tag. Heck, you taught me how to finger paint. Aren’t you at least a little proud of me?”

“I am proud of you. Of your work. Brightening blighted neighborhoods with colors they’re not supposed to have, it’s a noble idea. But painting isn’t performance art. Tagging with corpo colors, wearing an illegal pink hoodie, the same shade you sign your tags with, no less. How could you be so stupid?”

“It’s my favorite color,” I said, twirling the hood’s drawstring around my finger. “Besides, I wear it better than Barbie.”

“The copyright boys from the FBI questioned my customers like they were looking for the zodiac killer. None of that helped your art. Color thieves don’t last long when they’re famous.”

“You know what you are, Petey? A peacock afraid to show his feathers.”

“I’m a peacock who stays out of prison.”

“Then I’ll take this elsewhere.” I flashed him a coy smile and patted my backpack.

His glare morphed to a gradient of suspicion and curiosity. “Take what?”

I revealed my phial of forbidden pigment. Dusty crumbles, the blackest black could get. Pure bottled night. Reflections of light-anathema specks swelled in Petey’s eyes as he examined them.

“Is that…?”

“Vantablack,” I said. “Heard it’s rare. Absorbs 99.9% of light or something. Only licensed for a luxury car and bath towels that cost almost as much.”

“How did you get this?”

“Fame has its perks.”

Petey shook his head, a fish in denial about the hook in his mouth. “If you’re donating, fine. But you’re not getting a can.”

“Can I at least stick around while you do your thing?”

He waved a defeated gesture as he turned back to his workshop. “If you take that hoodie off.”

I stashed the jacket in my backpack and followed Petey onto the catwalk. Just like old times. The soft hum of the paint mixers hit me in the nostalgia like a lullaby. In the vat below, a nice phthalo blue was taking shape.

Petey got to work with his color engineers. They filled an empty mixer with clear slurry, measuring a precise quantity of titanium white powder for the base. Then they dumped in some crushed marble for filler—Petey’s signature. Finally, the piece de resistance, the purloined pigment of vantablack, thickened with the workshop’s own darkest shades.

My sample was condensed, but I worried they wouldn’t have enough for a full batch. If anyone could pull it off, it was Petey.

Half the workshop gathered around the mixer as the color took shape. With each rotation of the blades, it grew darker. Darker. And darker still. I’d never seen a color so cavernous. By the time the pigment diffused, the mixer resembled a hole burrowed into reality. A shade of infinity.

“Beautiful, eh?” Petey joined me on the scaffold. “Sorry I chewed you out, Sarah, but these people rely on me.”

I punched his shoulder. “Once I got out of jail, I visited the Heights. Remember when we used to stargaze on the roof?”

“You could see the Milky Way.”

“Not anymore. They put up a billboard.”

Petey grumbled. “Slumlords.”

“I was thinking, if folks can’t see the night sky anymore, maybe someone ought to paint them one.”

Petey flashed me a long, stony stare. That’s right, little fishy. Keep on wriggling. “And how many cans might this endeavor require?”

“Oh, for a professional of my talents, just three, I reckon.”

An hour later, Petey returned with three freshly bottled cans of vantablack spray paint. I flashed him a wide smile, but he stopped before dumping the cans in my outstretched arms.

“Promise you won’t sign this one,” he said. “And that you won’t wear that darn hoodie.”

“Fine, but could you do me one more job?”

His mouth hung open as I handed him my unzipped backpack. “You sure, Sarah?”

~

I left Petey’s workshop, my new gear in tow. A color wasn’t properly stolen until you used it somewhere people could see. Our old stomping grounds sure needed it. Sunlight had almost blanched all the orange out of the Heights’ cracked brickwork.

The eyesore billboard loomed above. A toothpaste advertisement featured a giant closeup of a woman’s smile. Her pearlescent teeth blinded me even in the dusk light. You didn’t see that shade often. All the public domain’s were off white. Like the hoi polloi didn’t deserve white without a little dirt in it.

I shimmied up the creaking fire escape and got to work. Vantablack fountains spewed from my double-fisted spray cans. Once I’d coated the entire billboard in swallowing darkness, I stripped flecks of masking tape I’d stippled across the canvass.

There. The too-bright smile fractured into the Milky Way’s stars. I’d left smudges here and there. Happy little accidents I turned into nebulae and comet tails. Bob Ross would be proud. Hopefully, Petey too.

With my high-contrast galaxy complete, my hand hovered over a can of my signature Mattel pink.

“Sorry, Petey. It’s just too perfect not to sign.”

I approached the billboard to add my final splash of color. Strobes of all-too-familiar red and blue invaded my guerrilla workspace. A police siren squealed.

“Drop the spray can,” boomed a loudspeaker voice.

Two cops left the patrol vehicle. One posted beneath the fire escape while another stormed the building.

I abandoned my backpack and darted toward the roof’s edge. The five-story drop would break my ankles on a good day. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to jump.

I flipped up my hoodie, sat down, and dangled my feet over the roof’s edge. No probation or ACLU now. Just the twenty-year sentence that I’d barely wriggled out from last time.

The roof door flew open, and the cop ruffled through my backpack. I held a quivering breath as his flashlight lingered on me.

There was a pause.

His radio beeped. “She’s not up here.”

I hunched, still as Rodin’s Thinker, while the cop swept the roof again. Then, he lugged my backpack downstairs. Once the patrol car sped off, I propped myself on quivering legs and crept down the fire escape.

Can’t believe that worked.

A giddy laugh escaped my lungs as I stopped to admire my work and unfathomable luck. The reflection in the tenement window smiled back, while my hoodie blended into the night like cuttlefish camouflage.

This new color just might work for me. A little less peacock, a little more crow. Plus, I had to admit it. I looked good in vantablack.