Lacey Peppermint

Once upon a time, there was a young girl with long green hair. She was as pale as the gray sky in the kingdom and had dirty brown eyes wetter than the street's mud. Her name was Lacey Peppermint, and she lived a lonely life. Orphaned at ten and working at the ever-so-busy printing press factory for the last few years of her teenage years; She had the scent of sadness and ink. Ink that stained her pale, skinny fingers for cold months underneath the roofs of newspapers. Lacey lived paycheck to paycheck, making a quarter a week. She made her wardrobe from the trashed away clothes for when kids grew out of their childish brown dresses into their new trendy pink laced ruffles. Food was vinegar-canned or caught fresh from the cleanest streams and ponds she could find. They were usually far out from the kingdom, where other hunters also competed for fresh rabbit's foot. Lacey also suffered from horrid nightmares on every dark night. Sometimes she would have to helplessly watch her parents die in a hellish loop or be tortured by walking weapons made of rust and oil. With the leftover ink from the press, she wrote her endless pain into a self-crafted journal sewn with a dirty leather cover.

The bored king demanded entertainment across the land. No jester, poet, nor the most talented dancer could satisfy the unimpressed royal. In a fit of rage after another failure of a performance, he stormed up from his sharp golden throne to the open, wide balcony, tiled with flowers and animals. He took the shiny crown from his gray head and held it firmly in a fist. With his other firm finger, he pointed to the hills of buildings and pollution. "Whoever my crown lands by shall be destined to free me from this insufferable boredom." His voice was loud and clear, and with a strong whoosh of an arm, the crown was gone from the high castle, into the slummy underbelly of the kingdom, its raggedy skirts of the sick and poor. The crown was like a yellow comet, streaking across the glum sky until it crashed on the head of a green rat. The green rat let out a frightful girlish cry, for it was a rat not at all, but Lacey Peppermint wearing a cape made from the furry skin of many cats. Black cats, spotted cats, even green cats, like her disgusting hair.

When the king heard the crash of his crown, he raced on his speediest stallion to the lucky victim. The elderly were hit, carriages piled on the cobblestone street, and babies cried from the king's chaos. He crossed the dirty sewer stream and finally reached the mysterious maiden with a horrible, wide yellow smile. Lacey was afraid of the king and was bleeding from the crown's impact on her own. "Is this yours? Have you come to retrieve it?" she asked meekly, hoping the king would disappear just as fast as he arrived. The king laughed with all his chest and picked the small girl up, forcefully setting her on the stallion. He said, "You can keep it. All I want from you is a special performance. Something new that no one has ever witnessed before. I deserve it, for I am king".

Glowing eyes in the shadows of the royal court watched her every move. The people were antsy for what this random peasant girl might desperately provide for the king's amusement. They exchanged whispers and mean glances with the other sharp shadows. Lacey paced lightly in circles on her circular stage, decorated with lazy stars and what she hoped was spilled reddish-brown paint. The King appeared, dressed in his finest velvet robe that dragged along the pristine silver floors. He sat most comfortably in his golden throne before waving his jeweled wrinkled hand, a sign for Lacey to proceed. "Introduce yourself, don't be shy", he said, but nothing about his voice was found comforting by Lacey. Her hands were fidgeting, sweating with more water than she drank this morning, and finally, she spoke to the room. "My name is Lacey Peppermint...I am soon to be eighteen and uh- I will be telling a story."

There were gasps and cringed shrieks, but most of all, in the end, there was a living and breathing Lacey Peppermint. She was a captivating storyteller who moved along the stage with such sorrowful feet that skipped from time to time with pathetic hope. Lacey stared at the king, her chin tilted down, but her nerves were rising above to the heavens. The applause was loud, then it faded to the slow beat of the king's clapping palms. He rose from his throne and approached Lacey with pursed, thin lips. "Your story was awful. I hated every word that came out of your stupid, dirty mouth." Then he turned away from her, "Drop her," he ordered, then somewhere a lever was pulled, and the circular stage opened up into darkness. A darkness full of sin and close, but not into hell. Lacey fell; her ink-stained hands grasped the edge of the opened stage floor while her nails broke with blood from the pressure. "WAIT! Don't kill me, please! I have more stories! I have more nightmares to dream of!" she pleaded, hanging on to her worthless life. The King leaned over the edge, watching her dangle with dwindling strength. He opened his mouth, then closed his lips into a disappointed frown. Two fingers came to brush across his short, thinning beard like some wiseman who came up with a life-saving solution for Lacey. Then he whispered only for her to hear, "Your nightmares are nothing, miss Peppermint"

Then suddenly, for the first time, she felt something worse than her nightmares. She felt truly offended and vowed to ruin the world with her nightmarish tales, as the world had done to her. Then she let go, falling like a wild green blade of grass into a dark rage.