Darkened Outcast

Brooding Green

As Raven ran, the colours swirled and distorted in his impaired vision, the reds, blues and greens dancing in beams and ripples, sending off tendrils of colour and repeatedly gouging through his eyes. His tears refracted the sunlight as they dropped, one by one, onto the rough, mottled tarmac surface. No noise was heard to Raven, except for the pounding of his tired feet and the haunting laughing cackle from his oppressors that echoed around his skull. A teasing snicker that bounced off the inner walls of his head, vibrating in every cell. The hatred of the bullies grew hot and red in his mind. The blood flowed freely from his nose and trickled down his chin, staining his collar. A crimson stain smeared across the canvas of his brain. He drew ever nearer to his place, his safe haven. Green flooded into his vision and the leaves of the flowering oak trees bled cool light into his mind, flooding the anger and hatred from behind his irises. He entered the forest. Spears and knives of colour receded in surrender against the darkness as he headed deeper and deeper still into the thicket, until the grass reached his small, bony and bruised shoulders. The leafy blanket smothered the bright lights dancing in his mind. He slowed to a walk. This was his place. Alone. Dark. Quiet.

It was three hours before Raven left, before he ventured out again into a world of noise and light pollution that contaminated every cell in his body. In this place, Raven would hide from the world's most ugly traits: fear, wrath and cruelty. His truancy record was one of a kind and he had been through more schools that he could care to remember. To Raven, school was a prison, in which he was trapped and forced to succumb to the crushing pressure of the hard, cold light. Light that seeped into his bones, spreading a virus of panic, filling him until he couldn't breath. But here, under the canopy of the wood, he escaped the grasp of the light that set him on edge, that filled him with hatred; the distorted swirls that formed shapes around him and infuriatingly dissolved and reappeared before his eyes. "There is no cure," he was told. "It is an unknown condition," he was told. Harsh and harrowing whispers would roll over his shoulder into his red, embarrassed ears. He wished he was making it up. He wished that he could focus on the light for more than a second before he had to focus on something else. He wished somebody could understand just how alone it made him feel. He cried, begged for someone to understand. Understand how the light seem to have an agenda of its own, to distort his world and intrude his thoughts, making it impossible to concentrate, with its ever blurring shapes and with those constant daggers of light biting at his retinas. But how could they understand, he thought, if he didn't understand himself? It was this thought that kept rattling around in the confinement that was his body, fighting the reds and browns of the brick terrace houses down Solstice Road and the orangey-blues of the sunset sky.

It was a beautiful sky to anyone else, but to Raven even the small clouds posed a threat and almost dazed him as much as a regular foglight would do to any normal person. The only constant throughout his sullen walk home was the atramentous grey road, which held no daggers of light, no tendrils of colour and no threats to his eyes. He stared down as much as he could, wherever he was, looking up only when forced. Even with this tactic, he was still vulnerable. And he hated it. He hated the fact that small, miniscule lights could maim and mock him. And he was not the only one who knew it. The bullies. A favoured practice of theirs was to point a flashlight straight at his cringing corpse and watch him writhe. Squirming around in the muddy playground drew unnecessary attention, forming hoards of teenage sightseers and sycophants hoping to get in on some of the "action". Raven didn't know what was worse; the humiliation or the pain. Although the colours of the houses and lawns were in his peripheral vision, spikes of green clearly framed his next dread, standing solidly in the doorway. His mother.

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