Colors from Elsewhere

Excerpt

The wand was in her vagina. She had a vagina. She had hands, legs, lungs, a face with features that changed depending on her emotional state. A womb, containing an embryo she had been gestating for nine weeks and four days. Her husband, a regular man, stood at her side. The image of her uterus appeared on the screen, black, white, and grainy, like footage from the moon. And there, inside it, was the baby—though they weren’t calling it a baby yet—in a position as though lying in a hammock, a spectral reverse silhouette. It reminded her of Casper the Friendly Ghost, a cartoon she’d watched as a child. She had been a child.

“If I’m silent,” the doctor said, “it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.”

Silently the doctor moved the wand inside her. Silence didn’t mean anything was wrong, but she thought to herself, silently, that something did seem wrong.

A minute later the doctor confirmed it. Not only was something wrong; the most wrong thing had happened: the baby’s heart had stopped beating.

Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. With friends, she teaches creative writing in a collective called The Dream Side. She lives in Los Angeles. Her story collection, My Dear You, will be published by Knopf in April 2026.

Will Allison on “Colors from Elsewhere”

I enjoy stories that upend my expectations, and this month’s story did it again and again. As Rachel Khong’s “Colors from Elsewhere” opens, a young Chinese-American woman learns that her unborn child’s heart has stopped beating. The next few pages—by turns heartbreaking and hilarious—explore the difficulty of losing a child, the ways it affects one’s self-perception as well as how one is perceived by others.

But just as I was settling in for what was shaping up to be a brilliant story about the aftermath of a miscarriage, I came to this scene, the protagonist’s follow-up visit with her doctor:

“Any other questions?” the doctor asked.

Her discharge had seemed strange. She figured it was the result of putting eight pills in her vagina to expel the “products of conception.” The color of the fluid she produced had been shocking: green one day, violet the next, eventually cycling through all the colors of the rainbow.

“My discharge is yellow,” she said, which was true: it was yellow at the moment. She didn’t mention that, last night, it had been indigo.

The protagonist’s colorful discharge is the first hint that things aren’t quite what they seem, and sure enough, seven pages later, the story serves up an even bigger revelation, which I can’t describe here without spoiling things. (Tip: hold off reading the Q&A below if you want to avoid spoilers.)

Suffice it to say, what begins as a realist story becomes something quite different, and what begins as a story about losing a baby ends up being about so much more: what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be different from other people, which differences really matter in the grand scheme of things, and, ultimately, what it means to be human (sort of).

If that all sounds a bit heavy theme-wise, fear not. In Ms. Khong’s deft hands, the story wears its themes with casual assurance, keeping its focus squarely on the mystery of the protagonist’s condition. So sit back and prepare to be intrigued. Prepare to be entertained. And most of all, prepare to be transported in ways you probably aren’t expecting.