The sky has been gray for as long as I can remember. Not the gray of clouds, not the gray of fog - even the sun itself had turned into a dim white speck, like a dead eye.
My father said that it was because the dust thrown up by the nuclear explosion was still floating in the atmosphere. He said it would take decades or even hundreds of years for these things to be cleared away. My father talked a lot about the old world, which he called the "Blue Age."
I had never seen blue, except for the picture tucked away in his notebook—a postcard of an old-world seascape. The sea was so blue that it was dazzling and unreal.
"The sea really looks like this?" I asked my father.
"It's bluer than this," he said, "but not everywhere is blue. Some places are dark blue, some places are green, some places..."
