On nights like this, when Nathan was at his father's, the apartment felt silent and small. How a place could feel smaller with one less body inside of it was a conundrum, and she thought that maybe it was just the quiet that made the apartment feel more like a coffin. Marina put on the kettle until it screamed, and she played some French synthpop on the little CD player that was crammed up alongside the coffee maker in the shoebox kitchen. She opened the windows that overlooked the Diamond District, and she let in the sounds of Gotham at night. Chaos was a lullaby to fill in the empty space, better to penetrate the clouds she walked in lately. But even with the windows opening, tonight was quieter than other evenings.

Everything was gray. Even with all of the plants in her dining room, all of the leafy things that she watered on a schedule every morning, the room felt gray. She'd thought it was the quiet, like sound carried colors with it. Police sirens could be blue and red, alley cats could be orange. Rumbling car engines could be purple.. but her home still felt gray, and now she knew it was the loneliness all along that drained the colors away.

At the small table in the dining room, Marina tisted lids off of all of the bottles one by one. White caps and orange plastic, white labels with milligrams and her name and symbols and 1x, 2x, 3x a day. A blue pill to keep her calm, a green pill to keep her from crying, a peachy pill to make hr normal, and a white pill to make her sleep.

In the flat gray quiet, Marina counted out the colors and swallowed them one by one.