Kissa da Fighting Fish

You never quite know what you have until it is gone.
It was yet another dull day in the small town of Eve, Ohio. I walked down the dusty road to school, wondering how I couldn’t bypass the headmistress outside the gate and sneak off into the woods to entertain my time daydreaming. I knew thought if my mother heard that I skipped school again, that I would never hear the end of it.
“Daphenie,” I heard screamed in my general direction before I could even make a feeble attempt to go into the woods. “Drats,” I thought to myself as I gathered all the strength not to charge head-on into the woods. It was too late, Headmistress Cole already saw me, if I ran now I would be disowned or sent to government school. I couldn’t think which was worse; I was weighing the latter as the worst when I heard my name yelled again. I walked slowly towards the gate, keeping my mouth pressed together in attempt to not say anything stupid as I passed through the gate.
I sat down at my desk, my other classmates staring at me. Why was I the only rebel in the whole state of Ohio? Hadn’t any of my peers wanted to just run away, not listen to what the teacher taught us? Apparently not since the stares that my peers gave turned to scoffs and then to disappointment as our teacher Ms. Windsor snapped everyone to attention and started class.
“Open your text books to page 184 and follow along as I read,” she said in her low gruff voice. I always imagined Ms. Windsor would be a really good dungeon torturer, no prisoner would be safe from her wrath. Also if the torture didn’t work she could bore your brain into a pulpy mush, maybe which would be a better, to die of boredom then die or the hands of someone else. I tried to pry my mind from morbid thoughts and concentrate on the lesson in front of me. Today’s lesson was on how the great war of Tyranny was fought.
The great war of Tyranny was a war against anything and everything that went against the Book. This Book was passed down from father to son till it became the basis’ of our country today. It caused many a war, because its content isn’t the same for all. As my grandmother used to tell me that the contents of the Book are translated differently to different people. I always wondered about this. Ms. Windsor’s voice broke through my daydreaming. She was now talking about the day they outlawed color. Now mind you I have never seen color before but I was always told that it wasn’t a thing to be played with. It corrupted the mind and damned the soul for all of eternity. There were armies of people who fought to keep color legal, but the government was too big and soon overtook them. Art museums were torn down, theatres burned; whole sections of towns and their population came up missing almost overnight. The government said that they were threatening the wholesomeness of our fair country. People who stood by the idea of color soon became a myth, kind of like Unicorns. Ms. Windsor insists that the government just asked the people to move to a different place, but I don’t know.
I must of fallen asleep or was far gone in my daydreaming because before I knew it the last school bell rang. Had I gone through school like a zombie all day?
I pushed all of my stuff into my backpack and started down the corridor to the front gate. The Headmistress stared me down as I walked out of the gate. The old bird needed a new hobby other than making sure I wasn’t making trouble. I walked down the lane the colorless decaying trees around me put a spark of foreboding in the air. I walked past and the trees seemed to have shadows moving among them. I quickened my pace just a bit, afraid of what I might find if I stayed in this area too long.

I was almost to the bridge when I saw something in my path. It was a piece of fabric but its tone was something I had never seen before. It was almost Angelic in quality and hopeful in style. It made my eyes dance as I looked down at it. It was mesmerizing the greatest thing, seriously since I first was born. I bent down to grab the fabric. The fabric was inches from my grasp when I heard a rumble from far behind me. I grabbed the piece of fabric quickly and stuffed it tight into my grip, and turned around expecting to see the headmistress had followed me to give me a scolding again. Instead in the distance there was a dark man. Angry and brooding he seemed to double in size as he came toward me. I froze not really knowing what to do. He came closer and closer and yet my body was refusing to move. Everything inside of me was yelling “Move!” but my body had gone deaf at that time. I closed my eyes praying this was only one of my daydreams. I was about to open them to prove that it was just a dream when a small firm hand grabbed my arm pulling me in the opposite direction then the man. The grab was so startling that it caused me to drop the cloth from my grip and my gaze centered on who grabbed me. A girl, who had to be a year or two older than me was motioning for me to follow her. Not just follow her to run, but why? I ran a dozen feet or so towards her then looked back. The man was closer now, I could see clearly now that he was carrying what looked like flashlight. It would have looked like a normal flashlight but this one was emitting a dark mist. The mist made the man even more terrifying as he took it out and shone the light onto the fabric far in front of me and the mist seeped out and overcame the cloth causing it to disappear before my very eyes. The girl tugged at me again, but before I ran too far I noticed the man’s whole body was emitting the mist. The pit of my stomach turned and I snapped around and ran almost passing the girl. I ran until my legs hurt and I ran some more too afraid to turn around to find the Dark Man still following me, his dark mist ready to engulf me no questions asked.