My job was to document good things and bad things. To tally points for judgement day. I was there when a human hit their significant other, or treated a dying person. I kept tally of the big things. After the meeting, I was going over my notes. The lists were scrawled with red. Stealing, murder, rape. The list went on and on. Green marks were a rarity, things like mission trips to give foreign aid, and developing a plan to end world hunger.
I never spent much time on earth. I mostly observed, but I had to understand why everyone had abandoned doing good. So, I took a physical form, and went to observe.
I landed in New York, one of the most red cities on my maps. I had millions of robberies and murders marked for this place. This would be a good place to observe.
First, I went to one of the poorer neighborhoods, where my lists practically soaked in red ink, and sat in a small coffee shop. People came and went, but I did not see anything bad happening. People were just going about their day. This obviously wasn’t the best place to observe. I stood to leave and find a better place when a man burst in the door holding a gun. I could feel a familiar radar ping in my head. Red.
“Everybody on the ground!” He screamed, and while I was immortal, I complied. “Open the register!” He yelled at the cashier. She shakily moved to open it.
It was so faint, I barely noticed it. A less familiar tingle at the base of my skull. Green. How could something good be happening right now? I ignored it. A fluke, surely, and continued watching the man with the gun.
“Shhh. Keep quiet, okay honey?” I turned my head. There was a woman with her arms around a little boy, laying on the ground. “I know you’re scared. But you’re gonna be just fine.”
Something like this had never popped up in my notes. I dealt in big things, with real impacts. This was faint, barely there, but good nonetheless. A mother consoling her child? That was just normal.
“I wanna go to my new mommies.” The boy whispered, eyes filling with tears. A quick look into his mind found that he was a foster child, and this woman was a social worker, bringing him to meet his new family. They stopped for hot chocolate.
I peeked into the woman, and found red. Stealing when she was young, getting arrested, the list went on. But there, in a little corner of her head, was green. Faint, but it was there. In that small corner I found smiling faces, little kids being taken from bad situations. These were small things, tiny instances that never popped up in my notes. I stopped my analysis when I felt another tingle, and turned to see an older man on the ground, flowers in hand, and eyes shut tight.
He was very red, older ones always were. He was in his fifties, and had been witness to murder, had run over a child while drunk, had been convicted for domestic violence against his husband, arrested numerous times. How could this man have even a shred of green? He disgusted me, human and flawed, he had caused pain.
But still, that little spark of green was there, and I delved into it. Inside, I saw a woman, bound in a wheelchair. She had a baby today, against all odds. He was going to congratulate her. She wasn’t his daughter, or a relative of any kind.
She was the girl he ran over. She survived. A little deeper, and I found him emptying his pockets to pay for her treatment, doing his time for what he had done, going to AA because he knew he had gone too far. He was a horrible man, bathed in red, but he did little things to fix it.
All of my observations had taken a nano-second. I was reeling, trying to understand what I was seeing. And I felt it. So faint I barely felt it, so quiet.
It was him. The shooter. He was glowing a red like few I had seen at his age. He was 20 at the most, but he had done bad things. Bad things, so many, gong back to ten years old. He was a bad man, how could he have even a hint of green?
I was sucked in involuntarily this time. I saw a boy, young and helpless, on the streets. He had nothing, barely a cent. I saw a teenager, and a baby that his girlfriend didn’t want. I saw a young father, single and poor, and doing everything he could to take care of his daughter. I saw hospitals, and a desperate man who couldn’t pay for his dying child. He was doing a bad thing. He was robbing, threatening lives.
Because he had no choice. He was doing a bad thing but it was for a good reason.
I has never thought of it like that. Far away from earth, things were black and white. There was no gray, there was no good reason for bad things. Were humans really this complicated? How could this man, bathed in red, be anything but horrible?
With a flick of my hand, I found myself doing something I didn’t think I ever would. His phone rang. He kept his gun trained on the cashier, and pulled it from his pocket. I knew what the ID said. He answered.
“Hello?” There was a pause, and his eyes widened. He slowly lowered his gun, and I could see the green glow a little brighter. “Who?” The gun dropped, and he glowed a little brighter. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up, and looked at the cashier. “My name is Christian Matthew Young. If you want to report me, that’s the name.” He glowed brighter. “But I have to go. I won’t resist if they arrest me.” He picked up his gun and fled.
An anonymous donor had just payed for his daughter’s treatment. Choosing not to do something bad was not a category on my list.
A walk down the street found tiny bits of green in everyone. Even those who glowed blood red. Tiny things, holding a door, dropping a few bucks in a cup. Why did I never see these things? I had never known that humans we’re so complicated. They did bad things, all of them. But I did not see one person without at least a speck of green. Bad things are always big. But good things can be as small as making amends, saying sorry, dropping a gun.
And when I stopped to look at streets filled with red, and I let all of the good melt together, people brushing past, walking quickly and slowly, if I let all the green of every person combine, it overpowered the red in a way I could never imagine.
They were good. Maybe not individually, but as a race, they were good.
On a hunch, I flew back to the clouds, and I looked at the entire planet. I let myself see the green specks, and what I saw made me realize mistake.
It was overpowering, the planet was bathed in it, glowing brightly. I had just never let myself see it. I had spent eons separating humans and looking at individual acts. But when I let all the good things add up…
The entire planet was green.
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