Colourcaste A Dystopian Story

The enforcers shoved past me the second the latch was released, and made quick work tearing the place apart. They pried apart furniture, tore open bedding, broke my salvaged pots and containers. The floor being pretty much the only thing they didn’t destroy, though it was filthy and strewn with broken things by the time they left empty-handed, their jaded stares promising they would be back and left me standing outside the wreckage of my home.

The leaves were still buds of the trees the morning I was wokenat the crack of dawn one morning by hammering at the door. I stared blearily out at Endeavour City’s finest, two Green enforcers, on in police uniform and one from the military.  

‘Winter Bleach?’ As though they didn’t already know. Still, I nodded.

‘We have a warrant to search your home for items of illegal colour. Open this door or we’ll break it down.’

The day I first saw a rabbit and realised the snow was meting and winter coming to an end was a happy one. I looked forward to being able to support myself again without scavenging, to expanding my garden and trying out the makeshift fishing rod I had made from scrap wood and an old line found in a bin.

I stayed there all afternoon, filling my stomach with lukewarm tidbits and my pockets with more for the next day. I occasionally caught glimpses of my shadow on the edges of the crowd, it looked today like the same guy who had been sent to tidy me up but I couldn’t tell at this distance, they just looked like silhouettes.

I passed the rest of the winter in a similar way, the townspeople soon becoming accustomed to the vagrant in their midst and ignoring me, much as they did the greys who I sometimes found eying the same half drunk hot chocolate as me. Once I was brave enough to approach a young grey woman who I’d seen a few times, I’d let her take the pie, there was a lot left and I’d seen her before with a small child. But as I began to speak she looked nervously over her shoulder before fixing her expression to one of disdain and hurrying away.

The next day I wrapped my shrinking body in all my courage and walked into the center of town, purposely avoiding the paths which I’d always used before and refusing to shrink away from the busy streets. 

No matter how I did the maths, I knew there wasn’t enough. I wasn’t going to make it. Spring might come eventually but I wouldn’t be there to see it. Now, when I looked out at the world, I realised that not all of the shadows I saw were the Order of Black watching me, some were the holes in my vision where hunger was beginning to take it’s toll on my senses.

With perhaps a week to go until starvation I realised I had an option I hadn’t before, one what might save my life. When the town abandoned me, I’d hidden away, using my invisibility to establish myself away from the word which hated me. It didn’t want me, and I didn’t need its judgement, it was easier to get what I needed with nobody looking.

But now they were looking again, now I could not hide - so what was stopping me from once again entering their space, using their system to survive? 

If I hadn’t been looking for them I might have missed them. Missed him. The dark shadows who began to slip around the edges of my vision, following my movements, waiting for me to slip up

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

He shook his head mutely and returned to the car as I stood watching, glancing back once as if to check that he hadn’t imagined the whole exchange. I stood motionless, stony in my refusal to offer him or anyone else any sign of need or weakness.

Eventually the car pulled away, leaving me alone again, back to normal. But I knew that the visit had changed everything. I hadn’t done as I was supposed to. I was still alive and I wasn’t supposed to be.

And now they knew. Now I was a concern again and I was sure I’d be receiving many more visitors than I had in last few months. They would be watching me.

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

‘Hello’ I said, as the man clutched his chest and breathed hard, looking as if he’d seen a ghost which I suppose, in a sense he had!

‘Hello?’ I repeated. ‘Can I help you?’

The man gathered himself and tired to brush off his shock.

‘Um no. I mean yes…. Are you Winter Pearl Bleach?’ He managed.

I nodded.

‘Oh. I was sent…. Sent to check on you.’

I narrowed my eyes. I knew why he was there.

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

The day I heard the alien noise of tyres on the track leading to my home, I felt a sick sort of excitement alongside the usual fear - I knew they would come and I was ready to be tested. Tucking away the horticulture book I was reading I went to the window to see a city council vehicle; five months from abandoning me, they’d finally sent someone to see if the job was done. 

If I’d had any doubts that they wanted me dead, they were dispelled when I saw they’d sent the crypt-keepers, The Order of the Black dealt with life and death, not house calls, and the confirmation fired my fury. The young man approaching was not someone I recognised but vividly visible against the thick blanket of snow which had settled a week ago. His presence was a blot on my world.

Nose wrinkled at the state of my home,the young black man approached my door cautiously, muttering to himself and looking almost…. Nervous?

I wonder what kind of state he expected to find me in. He was about to find out

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

And so it was that when winter came I was ready, my home insulated with layers of bracken, hay and plywood scavenged from dumpsters around town. I’d rescued abandoned furniture and built other bits, rickety and primitive but fit for use. I painted it all white, the leftover tins from the erection of my shack abandoned by the builders. I whitewashed not from any desire to do so but so that should anyone come to check on me I had not broken the law, I had fought for what little I had and I refused to lose it. I also hid the books I borrowed, finding a cavity under a floorboard to keep them safe and secret .

To the unknowing eye my home looked as it ought to, the pitiful abode of an outcast, full of cast-offs and outfitted by dumb luck and survival instinct. But to me it was a triumph, each thing stained in my imagination by the colours of the knowledge which had brought it to me.

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

At first my reading was to help me survive. I learned to tend a garden, stealing lettuce plants and fully grown tomato plants from a park to keep me alive until my seeds grew to maturity. I found a guide to trapping small animals in the grey section, one of only thirteen books on that shelf, the thick dust telling me that it hadn’t been disturbed in some time. Greys did not have time for books, but I did, and I began to take pleasure in words, beyond the tools they gave me.

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

Those next few months were a daily battle, find food, read, find materials to improve my shelter and give me a chance once the snows began to fall. It was exhausting but for the first time in my life I had a purpose and I finally started to believe I had a place and a value in this strange universe, whatever the Credo of Colours said, or didn’t say, about White.

White didn’t belong in their world perhaps, but by excluding me so utterly from their structure, by isolating me they had removed any need I had ever felt to play by their rules or accept what they said. I had nothing to lose and nobody they could harm and so I lived outside of their regulations, I lived in technicolor and the careful boundaries that school had placed around my understanding of the world fell away.

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

As I walked home the dark truly set in making me self conscious as it always did. While most bad things disappeared in the night, dirt, decay and ugliness, I remained visible. Even the most diluted moonlight, faint starlight or a glow from the lit streets of town would find my pale skin and light me up for all to see. I hurried across the marsh, turning my face away from the white prison and finally reaching my white box.

COLOURCASTE: CHAPTER 1 – DESPAIR VS. DETERMINATION

The lower castes were my next stop, two books here, scrappily wrapped in a dark corner, far from the leather bound tomes of red. I took one on repairing household problems, Grey-bound and lonely on a dusty shelf and another, Brown, on growing food crops. Two books with the absolute basics for survival, and even these were separated. It made no sense.