I once knew an orange girl.

I sometimes think everybody I see now is orange but perhaps it is just the underground lighting.

The fluorescence does strange things to your eyes. Shadows begin to look green. Lichen and moss inhabit the depths of hollow eyes, orange eyes. This is just the trick of the light.

That is just the way we see these days. But I did know a orange girl once.

The orange hue from her skin would practically radiate. Her name was Matilda, and she would glow.

The people now around me do not so. They only watch, and i alone observe the amber smeared on their skin.

Matilda worked, sporadically. She would visit us in the laboratory, supposedly everyday, more like once a week.
I thought she would have been worth a screw, perhaps in a back-alley, against a wall, nothing more, but not a bad looking girl.

Others of us in the laboratory would speculate on why she was yellow, so. It was as though she had used an artificial sun lamp for too long, and never noticed just how orange she shone.

I mention the back alley because she was that type, she was the type to drag men into the back-alley, only to come back minutes later, wiping her mouth.

Some thought she had some illness and this was a terrible side effect of some awful treatment, that in a fatalistic panic she had to consume as much dick as possible at a voracious rate.

Some even considered it was a side effect of working in this laboratory.

She never consumed me, maybe it's regret that I now feel, regret that there is now nobody. Matilda would now do. I now ache to be in that back alley. Love for her to be wiping me off her cheek. I dread to think of prettier girls, sexes and genders seem to have merged in these catacombs, men and women just stare as I go by now.

We found out why.

No terminal disease gripped her organs; her voracious appetite for men did not allow her time, or indeed desire, to use a sun lamp. No one guessed, no one even joked upon the answer, some debate arose at the shape of the reason, people laughed, and said that perhaps it was all she could do.

She ate carrots, only carrots.

Carotene had claimed her blood and stained her eyeballs. No one ever knew her, other than her name, the way she would wipe her mouth when returning from the alley (perhaps the men were feeding her carrots back there?), that she died of a terminal illness and her name was Matilda.