The Quest for Magenta

Three strangers on a mission to feed their printers

Image generated by Midjourney

A hundred-foot-tall wave spun Peter to the far side of the beach. The air shrieked like a siren as he raced through the sky.

After flying for minutes, he landed on his back, creating a body-sized depression in the sand, and surprising the young woman next to him, who was studying a map.

Peter twisted to the left, dug his elbows into the sand, and gave the cross-legged woman a quick once-over. Although the temperature was in the mid-eighties and sunny, with not a single cloud anywhere, she wore a puffy blue parka with a fur hood. A pair of mittens rested on the sand to her side, and a compass dangled from a lanyard draped around her neck.

She held a National Geographic map between her outstretched arms, its creases worn from folding and unfolding dozens of times. She tapped the center of the circle drawn around Antarctica in a yellow felt-tipped marker with her nose and then shifted her eyes to the left, where a thick-lined yellow circle surrounded New York City. 

She addressed Peter, saying, “According to my fortune teller, there was supposed to be a cache of yellow cartridges in Antarctica, frozen and preserved like seeds in that vault in Norway. 'All you have to do is thaw them out when you get home,' Madame Bridgette said. She told me about a passageway to Antarctica behind the third pillar inside the Lexington Avenue IRT tunnel at 86th Street. Madame Bridgette was wrong. The passageway didn’t take me to Antarctica. It transported me here.”

“When did you arrive?”

“A minute before you fell from the sky.” She dropped her map on the sand and covered her face with her hands. “My husband said printing could wait and that I could order one on Amazon, but I didn’t listen to him. Cal and I were going on vacation, our first trip in four years, but we had to print the visa application first and bring it to the Vietnam Embassy. We planned to stay at one of those exotic over-the-water huts at Phú Quốc.” 

She then unzipped her parka, shook it off, and eyed Peter’s soaking-wet sweat pants and 49ers t-shirt. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know.” Peter drew in several long breaths of air, willing his heart to slow. “Damn it! I should have listened to Lyn.”

“Lyn?”

“My wife. She said, ‘Peter, it’s 9 p.m., you don’t need to work. Let’s watch a movie. You’re going to burn out if you work every evening.’ I knew she was right, but I replied, ‘I’ll just print the report I wrote, and then we can watch a movie.’ Only the printer wouldn’t print because it was out of magenta. I then said, ‘I’ll run to the 7-Eleven, return in ten minutes, print for a minute, and we’ll have plenty of time to watch a movie.’ But the 7-Eleven was out of magenta. Can you believe that? 7-Elevens are supposed to have everything. 

“After I left the store, a man in a tan trench coat and fedora lurking under a street lamp walked over to me. I thought he was about to rob me, but he said, 'If it’s magenta you need, you’ll find some there.’ He pointed to the dark alley to the store’s left. A voice inside me warned, ‘Don’t be stupid. Don’t listen to a stranger who tells you to go into a deserted alley at night. But I desperately wanted to print the annual financial summary, so I followed the man’s instructions. Three steps into the alley, a force flung me over the water and onto this beach.” Peter wriggled his fingers and shook his shoulders. “I’m amazed I didn’t break anything.”

“I’m Yui from New York City.”

“Peter from San Francisco. Nice to meet you.” He extended his hand. 

“What now, Peter?”

“I need a moment to think. Magenta for me, yellow for you—”

A foreboding scratching interrupted them. The beach between them swirled, sifted, and rose like sand in a dust storm. Peter and Yui skidded back to make room for whatever was emerging from the depths.

A head belonging to a woman with short, blonde hair and round, wire-frame glasses popped up. The woman could not move, except for her blue eyes, which aimed first at Peter, then Yui. “Can you help me out of here?! I can’t breathe.” 

Peter and Yui dug with their bare hands, tossing the sand every which way until they freed the woman's upper body. She pressed her palms against the sand, tightened her arms, and hoisted herself out of the hole. 

“Are you okay?” Peter asked. 

“How in the hell did I end up here?” Without waiting for either stranger to reply, she continued, “I was searching through a shopping bag next to the hot water heater in my basement. I found a birthday confetti popper, shoelaces, cat food, Celestial Seasons Black Cherry Berry, and scotch tape, but no cyan. I was sure I had bought a cyan printer cartridge when I went to Costco last weekend. I couldn’t possibly have ignored the printer popping up alerts on my phone every five minutes. It had to be somewhere in that bag, but it wasn’t.” 

She groaned. “I needed to print the report on my cat, Twinkie’s, health for the vet, and the printer wouldn’t print until I put cyan in it. Stupid, stupid. Who invents something like that? It’s like preventing you from making a hamburger because you don’t have Velveeta slices. Do you get what I mean? A hamburger is perfectly edible and fine, even if your original plan was to make a cheeseburger. Why couldn’t I print black without cyan? I had plenty of black ink. Who heard of cyan while they were in school anyway? Plenty of black ink….” Her voice trailed off. 

She flopped onto her back and stretched out her legs and arms into a snow angel. “I fell all the way into the shopping bag. The next thing I knew, I was buried in the sand.” She sat up. “Wait, who are you?”

“I’m Peter on a quest for magenta.”

“I’m Yui, searching for yellow.”

“My name is Alice. I have magenta and yellow, but I don’t have cyan.”

Peter’s face brightened. “And I have both cyan and yellow.”

Yui clapped her hands. “Cyan and magenta—I’ve got them!”

“Fantastic,” Alice said. “If we share, we can print in black and white.”

“That’s brilliant. Let’s do this,” Peter said.

As the trio stood, a low rumbling filled the sky, and a dark cloud rose above the horizon. Peter, Yui, and Alice froze as  the shapeless gray cloud morphed into an ink-jet printer, its paper tray grinning maniacally. The cloud raced toward them and when it was  overhead, transformed into a tornado. They held each other's hands tight, digging their feet into the sand like anchors, but the wind separated them and hurled them back to where they came from: Peter to San Francisco, Yui to New York, and Alice to Kansas City. 

Lyn sat on the sofa, flipping through Netflix’s offerings. “Did you get the printer cartridge?”

“They were out of magenta.” 

“I see. And now? Are you going to try someplace else or watch a movie with me?” She glanced at the Seth Thomas pendulum clock on the wall and sighed. “Nevermind. I’ll watch by myself.”

Peter ran his fingers over his phone in his pocket. Maybe there was a software tweak that could force his printer to work without magenta. He hadn’t thought about that before, but it sounded plausible. There’s all sorts of techno-wizardry on the internet, and there had to be a workaround. I’ll just Google it…

Lyn leaned back against the sofa, propped her feet on the coffee table, and dipped her fingers into the bowl of popcorn on her lap. 

Peter plopped onto the couch beside her. “What movie did you have in mind?”

---

If you enjoyed The Quest for Magenta, I think you’ll also like my story, Escape to Crylauyttu.