Yellow Pencils

• Zachary Harris, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2018

Yellow pencils are superior to blue pencils. What’s not to love about yellow pencils? The luscious scent of a daffodil on a Sunday morning, the purge of my identity into the sunshine. Nobody likes blue pencils anyway, forbidden and despised for their intellectual capabilities to hold our society hostile while we sit and wander in the complexities of our own mind, forever lost in the safety blanket of our imagination. Yellow symbolises creative flair, dramatisation and the world saturated in sunshine. Blue pencils are simply what they are, another lifeless object used by uneducated people with a lack of imagination. Colouring in is encouraged, however the addiction that colouring in has caused upon my society is simply unimaginable, a society once poised above the rest lays now about as useful as a broken crayon sold at the market. My world has been suffocated under an unbreathable blue blanket of mediocre behaviour towards imperatively interesting things, however the influence that yellow used to have upon my society has since been forgotten, due to the lack of persistence from my society. Colouring in is now outlawed, another nameless feat desperate to win over the hearts of the community that I strive to serve. Alas, imagination is now a dangerous weapon, used for self-gain and another chance to spin the colour wheel.

The days of automated actions are behind us, self-made passports are all the roar right now, colour coded to ensure that we don’t colour outside the lines. The wasteful control of our natural resources has led to the deprivation of our two most treasured resources, paper and wax. Our society is gradually crumbling, pencilled out bare upon the Earth as an example of our downfall, held together by a single strand of crayon paper from Earth’s final tree.

By Zachary Harris