The Gift of Colours that She Brought by Olha Hrybivska

This is the story of Theo, a quiet boy who saw the world

in grey - until a spark of colour changed everything.

Theo had never seen colour.

While the other children asked why the skies were blue and the grass was green, Theo only knew shadows and shades. Light grey clouds. Dark grey leaves. His mother’s pale smile and father’s charcoal silence.

It has always been this way. Doctors couldn’t explain it. Teachers called it “a special kind of blindness”, while kids named him weird.

Despite strange looks, Theo managed to find his peace. It was his sketchbook. 

With only pencils, he drew his world - empty parks, quiet trees, the blurred faces of strangers. All grey, like everything else.

It was always like this - until she appeared one day. 

She was sitting on a bench in the park, legs swinging. She seemed like a little human being with wild curls and golden wings. Theo wasn’t sure if she was real. But when she looked at him, the world shifted.

He blinked.

Behind her, the grass wasn’t grey. It was now a different colour - green. Not a light grey pretending to be colour, but deep, living green. The bench beneath her shimmered into warm brown. Her wings sparkled with lavender and yellow.

Theo stumbled backward.

“You’re bleeding colour,” he whispered.

The fairy grinned. “No, silly, you’re able to see it. Finally.”

He didn’t understand and she didn’t explain. Instead, she stood up and walked up to him, leading him through the trails of the park. She touched things lightly - a stone, a flower, a pigeon. Wherever her fingertips landed - a colour appeared.

He stared, mesmerised.

Red poppies, darker at the stamens. A blue and purple flicker of a grackle’s feather. Yellow beaks of noisy ducks. 

Each colour was a miracle.

From now on, they met every afternoon. 

She never told her name but still called herself his friend. She teased him for never smiling. She dared him to try new things, like painting with coloured pencils.

“They won’t work,” Theo said. “My eyes…”

“They’ll work now,” she said, enthusiastically pushing a box of colours into his hands.

That night, Theo opened his sketchbook for the first time in weeks. He picked up the blue pencil and hesitated. Then, with a trembling hand, he drew a sky.

It stayed blue.

He stared at his creation in fascination.

From then on, he painted every day. Forests. Streets. Animals. A girl with wings laughing in the sun. Colour poured from his hands like water.

But one day, the fairy didn’t come.

Not the next day, either. Or the day after.

He searched the park, but no sign of her. Only grey birds on grey branches.

For the first time in months, he cried. His tears felt like ink on paper.

Then, something strange happened.

As the tears fell onto his sketchbook, the colours remained. They were not faded, not gone. 

Theo flipped through the pages nervously. Every colour he’d painted still there. Still vivid.

And on the very last page, one he didn’t remember drawing, was her, smiling brightly. Her wings open, a hand resting on his shoulder. Beneath the fairy was written a single sentence:

“The colours were always yours.”

Theo stared at it for a long time.

Then he picked up a brush and started painting.

He painted the bench where he first saw her. He painted the skies she opened, the flowers she awakened.

And then the boy painted new things - things he hadn’t dared to imagine before, the pink whales flying through the clouds; a city where houses floated and forests sang.

He painted not just what he saw, but what he felt.

Sadness became midnight blue. Loneliness, smoky violet. Joy - a sudden, golden explosion.

He painted the world not as it was, but as it could be.

Years later, the world forgot about his blindness, now calling him an artist.

They displayed his paintings in glass halls and galleries with white walls. Critics said his work “transformed colour into emotion.”

But Theo knew better.

He wasn’t transforming colour. 

He was capturing the vivid memory of the little fairy who changed his world - the one who showed him that the palette had never been outside him - it had always lived in his hands, waiting for someone to help him see.