The Eleventh Hour

Her name was Millicent Sinclair and she was an awful human being.  Albeit a child, but an awful human being nonetheless.  She wore blue dresses constantly proclaiming that she would only find worth in a new color scheme when she found worth in the world.

Millicent learned at a very young age that it was an easy task to make others feel bad about themselves, to kick the downtrodden when they were already down and out. Despite her headmaster's steadfast advice that "It is far simpler to do good than to do evil," she found ease and comfort in causing the discomfort in others.

Each and every day at 11:46 in the morning, Millicent brushed her hair 47 times, once more than the number of minutes that had past since the top of the hour.  Eleven was a superior number to Millicent and she would remind the other children that eleven would be the sign of their demise.  Maybe not today but someday, it would be the beginning of their end.

"Do you know what the eleventh hour is?" she said to a child with her seemingly vast knowledge of time and its ubiquitous, ominous innards.

"Of course I do," the child said.

"What does it mean, then?" she dared the child to answer her incorrectly.

"It's just one more than ten, isn't it?" the child asked.

"That's what you do?  You answer a question with a question?" she said.

"Didn't you just do the same?"

"Didn't you?"

"That's not the point," the child proclaimed, as if he had outsmarted her once and for all.

"It means time is running out, you moron," she barked back.

"Maybe for you," the child retorted.

"That's where you're wrong.  I learned to be blue at a very young age," she said with a smirk.

"So?"

"So?"

"So what does that have to do with anything?" the child inquired out of habit and frustration.  And then fear.

"It doesn't," she breathed a sigh of relief just before slapping the child across the face, just enough to tarnish those cherubic little cheeks.  "You're all red, now.  These are the rules.  You're right this has nothing to do with anything.  And everything to do with everything else."

And then the child cried, first in pain, and then because he didn't understand who would want to see red the way she did.

And just when he was strong enough to speak up, he said, "You're color blind, Millicent.  Did you know that?"

And for the first time in her life, her nose bled, a deep purple and crimson red, and she let it drip all down her dress, and in the premature fissures around her kneecap, and onto her patent leather shoes.

She was tired of being blue.

So very, very tired.