Monochrome

• Melissa Hadlow, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2017

A whirling multitude of spiralling colours falling haltingly, uncertain, glinting as the rans of sun stroke their veins, soft as velvet, peering through the voids, filling and lighting the the tunnel of trees. The crisp tang of decay and the crunch underfoot, signal the start of an ending and the beginning of a new cycle. The world goes into hiding, bracing for the test to come that will challenge and break it, make it suffer, only to have it come back fighting and stronger than ever before.

Despair, pain, hopelessness and resignation saturate the air. The oppression of the tryanny that comes every year without fail weighs down on each and every one of them, restricting every action, every decision, every hope and every dream. Is it the result, the punishment for the relentless catalogue of sins that grows bigger day by day? Greed, hate, envy, ignorance, indifference...does the list never end? This period that leaves the forgotten law lying trampled beneath the feet of those who upheld it. It's now, when the anticipation and apprehension are the highest and the air thick with tension, do the demons emerge and cut through to reach the powerless souls underneath. Their dreams controlled and dominated by their imagination forgone, as any semblance of conceivability is forgotten in the empty streets shrouded by the mists of vacilliation. At their most vulnerable, those dreams filled with the richness of life, are stolen.

All the clocks stop ticking, The silence left behind is deafening, taking away any semblance of life that there may have been before. As the people wake to the dawn of the next day, phantom pains rip through their heads, marking the absence of something vital now gone, dulling their world. Their lives now seen through a filter of a dismal day, overcast by tiredness. All their creativity and individuality is extracted, gone, leaving only an empty shell of who, along with what they used to be. Weeks pass by slowly, but they remain in the past. A black and white world devoid of any emotion. There are no memories, no sense of time as there is nothing special to mark the days and make them unique. They've halted, unable to move forward.

Days continue passing until on particular morning no different from any other, yet given meaning by those living it arrives. As the first rays peer over the jagged horizon, an inaudible sigh ripples through the town and the distinguishable sound of a tick tock fills the air. A girl sits up slowly and stretches, only to feel her cheeks wet with tears. A kaleidescope of emotions ripples across her face and she smiles without knowing why. The lost time will remain unknown to her, leaving only a sense of unease where the memory should be. Stumbling to her window she gazes outside, fixating her gaze on a single leaf falling. Tracking its movements, she watches it tumble and twist through the air before resting on the ground. It's green.