He pressed his eye to the thermal imaging camera’s viewfinder and peered into the distance through the flimsy curtains of the house opposite. Satisfied the optic was correctly appointed, he addressed his laptop monitor. Moving blobs of curdled colour. Contour lines of heat seared by the camera’s penetrating photons and thence picked out in pixels on his screen. Stratified clots pulsing and seething, the iridescent masses of two convulsing human beings.
He knew the outline of one of those forms intimately, yet he couldn't discern it from the other at all. They were too amorphous in their shifting stratified chroma. Hotspots (or cold spots) writhed in the centre of the two bodies. Shading into paler at the peripheries. Ectoplasmic as they squirmed and thrashed. Two bloated worms under his microscope. The heart and viscera eclipsed within the dark shades, the flimsy muscle and tendons hollowed out in the lighter complexions. Her dark heart possessed, it was hard to credit it was actually her in the room there.
Light didn’t code for sex, yet here one ranged through all the blue shades of the spectrum, while the other all the reds. Differing wavelengths, Dopplering away one from the other? Yet the two coagulations of colour were certainly proximate to one another. Where discrete fascicles overlay each other, the blue-red didn’t fuse into green. Each preserved its swirling integrity. A curvilinear puce yin and a teal yang. Or vice versa. Was it possible that she was blue with frigidity towards the man in there? Perhaps he was the one callously aloof towards her, but then his own dander raised as he thought of the monster just using her for his own ends. He returned to refocus the camera lens.
He resumed his gaze at the monitor. The heaving shapes looked like agar cultures in a giant square bed of a petri dish. These two bacteria, heaped twin bacillus cultures. Agglomerating. But not reproducing. It was as if another entity was walking through her body, working through it. Emptying it. Slowly eviscerating her. But then the pith hardened and reformed and grew bigger. A burst of passion perhaps, inflating the dark area. The cold-hotspot. He mustn't let his own emotions saturate their respective tints. Adulterating their complexions which otherwise might be far more complementary. The forms looked pregnant with another inside. Pregnant with each other perhaps? Swelling together. No longer possible even to determine dorsal from anterior. An infant’s shapeless painting. No longer human. The beast with two backs. With a single shot he could rupture those chromatic borders, bleed red into blue into red. Dark into light into crowning dark.
But what if she had been similarly hued within his own embrace? He throbbing volcanic shades of red, her all ice-cool blue of detachment? A crystal sapphire of flinty indifference towards him. He had to know. He had to find out for himself. He had to get inside that house, pull the man off her and take his place. Then he would return here and consult the colour chart for her answer. For her true colours.
But what if she had been similarly hued within his own embrace? He throbbing volcanic shades of red, her all ice-cool blue of detachment? A crystal sapphire of flinty indifference towards him. He had to know. He had to find out for himself. He had to get inside that house, pull the man off her and take his place. Then he would return here and consult the colour chart for her answer. For her true colours.
