When the Sky Forgot Its Color

People in the town of Darwan woke up to a sky that had no shade. Not blue, not gray, not even black.

It was empty, like a canvas wiped clean. At first, no one spoke. They just stared upward, mouths open, as though the heavens had been stolen in the night.

Children tugged at their mothers’ sleeves, asking if the sun had hidden behind a trick. Farmers stood in their fields, their crops bowing under the weight of silence.

And the old imam at the mosque whispered a prayer louder than usual, though even he did not know if anyone was listening.

Amina was twelve when it happened. She had always loved the sky, loved to count the stars one by one until her eyes shut. That morning, she felt cheated.

She stood on the roof of her father’s shop, fists tight, staring at nothingness. She wanted to scream, but what use was a scream against something as big as the sky?

The days that followed were stranger still. Time moved, but without color above them, people felt trapped in a dream they could not wake from. The market was quiet. Weddings were delayed. Even the birds seemed confused, circling lower, unsure where to fly.

But Amina noticed something no one else did. On the third night, while everyone sat indoors whispering fears, she climbed to her roof again. In the center of the sky, faint and trembling, was a dot. It pulsed, not like a star, but like a heart.

She told her brother, Tariq, but he laughed. “You see shadows where there are none.” He preferred to believe the sky was only sick, that it would heal on its own. But Amina could not ignore the pulse. Each night it grew larger, brighter.

One evening she carried her grandmother’s old telescope, dusty and cracked. Through it she saw something impossible. The dot was not a star. It was a door. A door slowly opening.

Amina’s chest tightened. Who could build a door in the sky? And what would happen when it opened completely?

She tried to warn people. The shopkeeper, the imam, even her father. But they shook their heads. Some said she was dreaming. Others said children should not disturb elders with wild stories. Only her grandmother listened, eyes clouded but sharp inside.

“My child,” the old woman said, “color is not gone. It is being kept. Perhaps to test us, perhaps to remind us that we do not own the sky.”

Amina wanted to believe that. Yet each night the door widened. On the seventh day, she saw a hand stretch out. Long, silver, glowing like moonlight. It reached into the emptiness and pulled. And with every pull, a ribbon of blue spilled out, flowing like water.

The next morning, people gasped when they looked up. A single stripe of blue ran across the blank heavens, thin but alive. Children clapped. Women wept. Men bowed to the ground. It was proof the sky still remembered itself.

But Amina did not cheer. She had seen the hand. She had seen the door. She knew the ribbon was not a gift freely given. Someone—or something—was deciding what the world could see, and what it could not.

By the tenth night, half the sky had returned. Clouds drifted again. Stars flickered. Life in Darwan began to feel normal, but Amina’s heart was restless. What if the hand chose to stop? What if it closed the door forever?

One dawn, when the sky was half blue and half blank, Amina whispered a promise to herself. “If the sky can forget its color once, it can forget again. I will be its memory. I will not let it vanish without a witness.”

She wrote down everything she saw, filling pages with sketches of the door, the hand, the ribbons of color. Perhaps no one would believe her. Perhaps one day they would.

But even as the sky healed, the fear lingered. People learned to smile again, to trade, to laugh. Yet in their hearts they carried a quiet truth: the world could change in a single night, and nothing above their heads truly belonged to them.


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Final Thought

Amina still watches the sky each evening, waiting for signs, waiting for the door to open again. And though colors have returned, she knows deep inside that they are borrowed, not owned. Because once, for a week, the sky forgot itself. And forgetting is never the same as losing.