You are listening to a Clarks World magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarks World Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you well.

It is our fourth story for the month of December. There's not really any news to report so I'm just

going to jump right into the story. The piece is titled Blue-gray Blue and is by Yuki Ogaawa.

Yuki Ogaawa lives in a small town in Tokyo,

where she writes in English but never speaks the language.

She so wonders why it works that way.

Her fiction has been published in such places as fantasy and science fiction,

strange horizons, and included in the year's best science fiction and fantasy 2014 edition and the Apex Book of World SF4.

So I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

No one knew exactly when or how it had all started.

But there was a time he could think of specifically.

It was three or four years ago when a girl of around ten came to the shop,

which sold practical eyewear for the locals.

The girl said she needed a pair of glasses because something was wrong with her eyes.

You'd like to see a doctor first, Sey you had told her, crouching to meet her mosaic-like rainbow eyes, so out of place in her tan barely colored face.

I did, she had said, and they found nothing wrong with me, but something is going wrong with my

parrot, and mother and father don't see it, so it must be my eyes.

Your parrot? She'd nodded defiantly. He's got a part of his

feather just like my eyes around his chest. That was why we got him in the first

place. But that part is fading these days, as many colors still, but they all look a bit weaker.

Sir Yeh, never found out what happened to her, or the parrotrot afterward because the girl never came back after he told

...