The Color Of a Blackbird- Ch 1

Chapter 1



         I ran down a path, barely escaping the two bullets I’d had an eternity to doge. Tiny, razor-sharp fragments of water pelted my face and stung all bare parts of my body. The pain was minimal. It wouldn’t stop me.

         I looked down in time to see my reflection in a puddle before stepping through it and shattering my image. The sighting had been less than a few seconds but it fused into my mind and I suddenly recalled every tiny detail. My arms and chest were covered in colorful tattoos, my calm face accented with various piercing. The structure of my body was the same after all those years. Large chest and wide hips, only taller. Much taller.

         I rounded a corner and looking up from my boots, found myself in a familiar setting. A pedestrian ally set between tall stone buildings dripping with filthy rainwater and graffiti. They were still chasing me, I did not stop running.

         White. Then black. I sucked in hard taking in as much air as I could without gasping like I’d been the victim of an exorcism, but my bent position made it hard to take in much breath at all. I kept my head down, my eyes closed, and tried get my breathing back to normal before anyone could notice. I could feel Corall’s gaze on me. She knew exactly what had happened.

         The bell rang, but I wasn’t ready to get up yet. I straightened up so I could lean back and looked at Corall.

         Her feline-yellow eyes were fixed on me. She was anxious to know if I was alright, but she knew that annoyed me. I rubbed my clean, tattoo-less arms and concentrated on shaking off the feeling of cold, wet pin pricks. Corall glanced at our teacher who was eyeing us from her desk.

         “We should go,” she suggested.

         I groaned quietly.

         “Can’t move yet?”

         No, that wasn’t it. Corall understood.

         “Come on Enger,” She prodded standing slowly and taking her book bag from the floor.

         Reluctantly, I reached for mine, still sitting lazily. Corall shoved a text into her bag, then a note book, then a pencil. I stood. Since we were the last out of the class, Corall politely wished our teacher a good day as I followed her skinny body.

         Corall Lamose was four foot five, but her boots added a little more to her height. Her hair was jet black and went down to almost her waist. It was straight with just a tad bit of a wave, shiny as the girls have in shampoo commercials, and perfectly cut at the ends.

         We headed down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor of the school. The school was now mostly empty except for a few stragglers and the two of us. We walked out the big main doors and into the parking lot. There was a long black limo waiting for us and a frail looking girl stood off to the side.

         Raven Rockwell was one of my best friends next to Corall. She lived with her grandmother down the street from the school in the poorest of the two neighborhoods in Chobok. Her grandmother had a hard time keeping jobs and Raven struggled to keep her own job stocking shelves at the nearest grocery store. She got free food out of it from the things that were going to expire and damaged items, along with a small salary. It was just enough to get her and her grandmother by.

         “What took you guys so long?” Raven asked.

         “Enger had a vision in the middle of history,” Corall said. “I’m sure she’ll fill us in with all the juicy details in the car.”

         “I had a bunch of tattoos,” I said as Raven, then Corall climbed into the limo. I followed then continued. “And I was wearing Gradini Dragon Boots too.”

         Corall looked puzzled at first as if wondering how I’d ever manage to afford such expensive things, then she smiled as if I’d just announced I was getting married.

         “Cool!” She exclaimed. Raven looked slightly jealous.

         “I guess, if you don’t consider the fact that I was getting chased and shot at by a couple of VLH,” I said.

         Corall’s eyebrows furred again in confusion. Raven pressed her lips together.

         “Well, it can’t be in the near future. Obviously the tattoos will take a long time to be there. And why would you be on Earth anytime soon anyway?” Raven thought aloud.

         “That’s why I’m not worried,” I explained. It was really nothing to get worked up about.

         After some passive disagreement, Corall got me to verbally agree that I would go home first. She was giving Raven a ride to work and it made more sense to drop me off first then take Raven so I had no choice but to go home. I had never even wanted a ride home. I preferred to walk home on any given day just to stall getting there.

         “How long do you work tonight, Raven?” Corall asked.

         “I get off at ten,” Raven said. She pulled a small bundle of cloths from her worn out backpack. “Mind if I change in here?”

         Corall closed the window opening the space between the limo driver and us and Raven changed. I looked out the window until she was dressed in her work uniform.

         “I’d let you come over, but father has some big banquet tonight with the Council,” Corall said. I didn’t want to go there either.

         “And he let you go to school?” Raven asked, pulling her work shirt on.

         “Yes. He said as long as I didn’t need all day to get ready I could go.”

         “So he’s having you go this time?” I asked.

         “Well, he did say he wanted me to start going to things like this and to get used to them. Plus it’s customary for a princess so close to being Of Age to attend meetings and such.”

         We arrived at the entrance to the trailer park I lived in. The limo driver usually stopped at the entrance. I could see my house from it anyway. There was no car in the simple gravel drive-way, meaning Sherry was most likely at the club where she worked. It was a little early, but it wasn’t uncommon for her to go get a few drinks in before her shift.

         I said goodbye to Corall and Raven, then climbed out of the shiny black limo. It looked weird in contrast to the rest of the run-down neighborhood. I watched it drive off, then turned to the weatherworn mobile home I hated to call my house.          

         The entrance to the trailer park was a break in a chain-link fence big enough for a car to get through. There was a dumb old sign cemented into the ground with a few peeling letters on it. In the spring, the vines attacked it with vicious force. You’d never know it was there. In the winter, however, it stood bare and sad. I tried to ignore it when I could.

         I lived in near the Red-Light District; the second poorest neighborhood in Chobok. I lovingly referred to it as the Theme Park for Sluts, whenever possible. The housing districts were usually marked by class and social rankings. If you were rich, you lived in The Hills, and in contrast, if you were poor you either lived near the industrial district or near the Red-Light district.

         The Red-Light was the local hot sport for all things risqué and under the table. The dark streets were lined with strip clubs, night clubs, prostitutes and low grade tattoo parlors. Since my mother was a stripper, we lived here, in a shitty trailer park called Rusty Springs located just a few blocks from the Red Light.

         I took the key to the mobile home out of my pocket and unlocked the front door, locking it again once I slipped inside. I gracefully plopped down on our ugly, lumpy green recliner to watch TV. The TV had four channels, and two showed the news almost twenty four seven. The way Sherry spent the money she made did not include luxuries like cable. She hardly ever watched TV anyway. None the less, it was noise, and it helped me relax.

         My backpack sat next to me on the navy blue loveseat. The loveseat was lumpier than the recliner, and every time I looked at it for too long, a bad memory resurfaced involving a naked Sherry, and a naked stranger intertwined in vicious love making. I hadn’t touched the loveseat since and even my backpack was as close to the arm as I could get it. I took out my homework just to pass the time since it was too early to go to sleep.

         There was nothing to cook for dinner. Sherry hadn’t gone to the market in the few hours she was home, and neither had I, so tonight was leftovers. I chose the last piece of mushroom pizza and a can of soda. I pressed the button on the microwave, popped open my soda and stared at the messy kitchen debating if I should clean off a place to eat or just go to my room.

         I looked at the table. It was covered in tall piles of dirty dishes, wrappers and bits of food I couldn’t identify. The sink was full of dirty dishes too and the trashcan was full. Sherry’s dry cleaning was laid out on the bench connected to the table. I could tell it was hers just by the glittery fabric. Or the lack of fabric…

         I lifted up a pile of dishes and a roach scurried off to find a better place to eat. I set the dishes back down and went inside my room where I closed the door out of habit even though no one was home. My room was barely big enough for my bed to fit in it. There was enough room where I stood for a small patch of dirty cloths, bits of stale food and the door to my also small closet. I waded through the mess, kicking at dirty cloths, and climbed onto my bed.

         When I finished eating, I returned to the kitchen to put my plate in the sink and throw my can away. I looked up and remembered my backpack was still sitting on the loveseat. I decided it was best to rescue it.

         As I bent over to get it, I felt the familiar pains of a headache starting to come on.          I had only a few seconds to stand up straight and get to the loveseat before the headache hit me full on. I didn’t make it and the headache brought me to the floor clutching my forehead. It felt like it always did. Like my head was trying to split itself into two. The headache grew stronger and I swallowed back a scream. I had my eyes closed shut so hard it hurt.

         Then I started to hear the voices. It sounded like there were thousands of them.          Everyone’s thoughts in the area of the mobile home park. The voices were so mangled I couldn’t focus on just one. I held back another scream, and focused on trying to push back the voices or just focus on one.

         Suddenly, the world had vanished and everything was calm and quite. I was in the dark and couldn’t see anything. My headache was gone, vanished with everything else. I sat in the silence as color began to swim into my view.

         I was in an ally behind a small stretch of houses. The one in front of me was falling apart. Paint was chipped off in long big areas, weeds cluttered the house all around so you couldn’t see if the house had a basement or not. The house looked so small that it couldn’t have had more then two rooms a small kitchen and a bathroom. I checked my surroundings. Smelling the air, I could almost taste the pollution at the back of my throat.          I was near the industrial district.

         The house had no fence and since this was the back I couldn’t see the address nor recognize who’s house this might be. I took a few slow steps forward, then stopped. Something about the way my body moved made me look down. It wasn’t my body…

         Once I realized this, I came back to my senses. My eyes opened and I gasped as I came back from the vision. Back into my own house, my own body.

         I stood up breathing heavily. My heart was beating hard and my hands were shaking. I went to the fridge and took out a small pack of cow’s blood. It was all we could afford. Human blood was expensive because it was harder to get a hold of, but animal blood was cheap so it could be available to every vampire. Blood was a life line. If a vampire went too long without it, they went crazy with bloodlust and become violent.

         I’d only experienced the bloodlust once. It was a requirement in secondary school. Every vampire had to take a class called Vampire Life Training, or VLT. All through out the year they would randomly select five students at a time. The five would then have to stop drinking blood for 24 hours, then stay another 24 hours in a type of quarantine at the school. No one was allowed to leave until they had succumbed to the bloodlust for a few minutes. Then, they gave you enough blood to get you “drunk” and sent you home. It was a big event and your friends would pat you on the back for a week after. It was one of the scariest things I’d ever been though, and I’d been through a lot of scary stuff.

         I sank my fangs into the packet of blood. I didn’t let go until the package was crumpled and empty. I threw it down into the sink where a few more resided, my hands still shaking slightly.

         I had never had a vision where I wasn’t in my own body. The thought scared me. It was bad enough seeing what was going to happen to me, but I didn’t want to see

someone else’s future. I fought the urge to call Corall, but I knew she would be sleeping soundly in her giant king-sized bed by now. I decided to tell her tomorrow.

         I’d been having visions since I was ten years old. I vividly remember a horrible pounding headache and then passing out in the middle of a playground. When I came to, I was in the hospital with a nurse standing over me asking how I was doing without moving her lips.

         A few months went by before I learned two very important things. The first was controlling the mind reading, which proved very difficult for a ten year old girl who had no idea what she was doing. Whenever I even thought about someone near by, their thoughts intruded my mind. Sometimes even their memories came into my head becoming my memories. If I wasn’t careful multiple thoughts came into my head and became overwhelming. In those instances my only option was to get as far away from people as possible.

         This is where the second thing I learned came in. After a while, it became a problem for me to be running out of class every few hours. It wasn’t long before my teacher, Mr. Pucket, asked what the problem was. So I explained…and of course, he didn’t believe me.

         No one believed me for a very long time and I soon discovered that I was on my own. Of course, Corall believed me, but it wasn’t enough to make me feel any better. I was about eleven before I was finally able to convince a number of people that I could read minds and had visions. That had been my biggest mistake.

         The realization spread. It took a while for people to truly believe it but when the fact hit home I was no longer an innocent eleven year old girl.

         You’d think that in a world where there is no religion, no one can be damned. I was. I earned a new nickname and lifetime status of being an outcast and un-trustworthy. Perhaps if I’d had money to throw, I could have become something of a hero. But my mother’s occupation and our house just seemed to make matters worse.

         I went to the bathroom and turned on the faucet. I splashed the cool water on my face until my hands stopped shaking then looked up. My own reflection watched me in the mirror. The water was still dripping from my face in little drops and rivulets.

I was so close to looking like my mother, but somewhere in there my father’s face showed as well. A scene popped into my head.

         Mommy and Daddy were fighting again. Daddy was so mad he was screaming in German. I stood in my doorway, allowing only my head to go beyond my door frame in case something came flying my way. I’d learned my lesson in a previous fight a few months before when a lamp flew past me missing my skull by mere inches.

         “I can’t understand a thing you’re saying you fucking bastard!” Mommy screams.

         There was more screaming and much more cussing until a final exchange.

         “I can’t take this anymore, Sherry. I’m so sick all your crap. I work so hard to support this family. You’re a whore! I regret everything about you. I’m leaving!” Daddy yells.

         Mommy stops in her tracks. Daddy turns away to head toward their bedroom. I duck back into my doorway to make room for him in the hallway. He takes out a suitcase and starts throwing cloths into it. Mommy follows him and stands in the door way to their room, blocking my view from Daddy.

         “So you’re just going to leave me like this? What about your daughter? Huh?”          

         Mommy sounds angry and surprised at the same time. “You can abandon me, but you can’t leave a five-year-old fatherless, you jack ass. How am I supposed to pay for food and all her school crap?”

         “Get a fucking job. I don’t care about the fucking kid. I’m leaving and that’s final,” Daddy says. He pushes mommy out of the doorway and storms out of the trailer. I hear the door slam shut and the car start up.

         The house is quiet except for Mommy’s soft sobbing.

         I walk up to her. There’s not much space in between me and her anyway.

         “What are you looking at you little brat?” Mommy asks.

         “Where is Daddy going?” I ask. My tiny arm is on Mommy’s leg.

         “Who the hell cares? Good riddance! I don’t need that fucking dick!” Mommy screams hysterically. There are tears running down her face and I am confused. She slaps my hand off of her and orders me into my room. I watch as she chugs vodka out of the bottle, then retreat into my room, closing the door softly.

         That was the last anyone had seen of my father. I was angry at him for leaving me here stranded with Sherry all these years. He had reason to leave. Sherry had cheated on him numerous times. He only knew about a couple.

         She’d only gotten her stripping job after she’d finally realized that he wasn’t coming back. Now she spent all of our extra money on cigarettes and liquor.

         The water had caused my black eyeliner to run from my green eyes. My hair was short and choppy and I hardly took the time to brush it. It ran on my head in large strands, few knots here and there. My bangs were longer than the rest of my hair and hid most of my face. I normally looked like I had just rolled out of bed, but now I just looked like I’d gotten into a fight.

         The pink white of my skin pressed hard against the black of the oversized sweater I was wearing. I pulled it off and threw it to the bathroom hamper to expose the black tank top I was wearing underneath. I was skinny, but I was also bigger boned then my friends so I appeared to have a little more weight than them.

         My eyes trailed down my body to my breasts. Large almost, again like my mother, but I was still convinced she had had some work done on those a few years back. It seemed like she never spent money on more practical things--like food.

         I tore my gaze away from the mirror and padded the water off my face with a towel. I left the bathroom leaving the light on, then headed back to my room and fell asleep.





Last edited 12-29-2011