Yellow and the Perception of Reality: A Tor.com Original

By Maureen F. McHugh

"Yellow and the Perception of Reality" by Maureen McHugh is a science fiction story about a woman who delves into the mystery of why and how her twin sister, a physicist, has been brain damaged in a lab accident in which two of her colleagues died.

I wear yellow when I go to see my sister. There’s not a lot of yellow at the rehab facility; it’s all calm blues and neutrals. I like yellow—it looks good on me—but I wear it because Wanda is smart and she’s figured it out. She knows it’s me now when she sees the yellow.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250759757

Maureen F. McHugh

With her groundbreaking novel, China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. She is the winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee.

Book preview

I wear yellow when I go to see my sister. There’s not a lot of yellow at the rehab facility; it’s all calm blues and neutrals. I like yellow—it looks good on me—but I wear it because Wanda is smart and she’s figured it out. She knows it’s me now when she sees the yellow.

The doctors say that Wanda has global perceptual agnosia. Her eyes, her ears, her fingers all work. She sees, in the sense that light enters her eyes. She sees colors, edges, shapes. She can see the color of my eyes and my yellow blouse. She can see edges—which is important. The doctor says to me that knowing where the edge of something is, that’s like a big deal. If you’re looking down the road you know there’s a road and a car and there is an edge between them. That’s how you know the car is not part of the road.

Wanda gets all that stuff, but her brain is injured. She can see but she can’t put all that together to have it make sense; it’s all parts and pieces. She can see the yellow and the edge but she can’t put the edge and the yellow together. I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.

Today she’s sitting on her single bed in her room, cross-legged, her narrow knees like knobs in her soft gray cotton sweats. She croons when she sees me, Junie June June.

She is tiny, my sister. Before the accident she was always a little round. Chipmunk cheeks and Bambi eyes and soft breasts. Now, food is all mixed up for her. Like, she has all the pieces, the crispness or smoothness, the heat or cold. But she can’t put it all together. For her, a sandwich is a nightmare of crisp lettuce and melted cheese and soft bread, green and spongy and the smell of something