Coloured Targets: Black, Brown and Yellow Illuminations

I’d never really noticed the colour of anyone’s hair before. It wasn’t the sort of thing that ever crossed my mind. The fact that Tia’s was black, that Clancy’s was brown, that mine was yellow and that Olaf’s hair had a pasty white tint to it just seemed natural to me. Nobody cared. Nobody mentioned it. We were just different shades of human, each one of us trying to get along with everyone else as best we could – black, brown, yellow illuminations. We didn’t realise that we were skin coloured targets. 

Then the food shortages started. Everyone began feeling the pinch. I saw fights breaking out at the local market. It was ugly. Some people seemed to be better off than others. We all knew that the Snoops were well fed. They had rights and privileges. There was nothing we could do about that – unless of course we were looking for trouble. The truth is that nobody had the nerve to raise the issue with them. But rumours began circulating (probably spread by the Snoops themselves) that Safronika sympathisers were managing to store vast quantities of food for themselves while the rest of us starved. It was all lies of course, a crude attempt to find scapegoats in the midst of general suffering.

The problem for someone like me though was that as the food shortages got worse, people started believing the tittle-tattle that was circulating. They found the notion that criminals were stealing their food strangely reassuring. If only they could get their hands on the culprits, they would feel much better about life.

Safronika, as always, was the root of the problem. The Safronikans, so we heard, had somehow engineered the Anticlockwise famine by placing spies, infiltrators and double agents in our midst. Very soon anyone who looked as if they didn’t really fit in was looked upon with suspicion. That was me of course. I’m always a primary target when it comes to looking abnormal. But it was also Tia and Clancy. All Anticlockwisers have white hair you see. It followed that anyone with black, yellow or light brown hair had to be an enemy of the state. Painted in the colours we were, we were instantly classified as unscrupulous, subversive types hoarding all the food for ourselves. We became coloured targets.

Tia came round to see me one evening in tears. She’d endured several hours of verbal abuse at the Post Office. Even people whom she’d worked with for ages were now suspicious of her because of her black hair. Some accused her point blank of stealing the food from their babies’ mouths. She’d never been an object of hate before. It was a sobering experience. She didn’t like it. She was frightened. We all were. We had no idea where this was leading.

The next day an internet storm erupted. The black market, the twittersphere announced, had been monopolised by gangs of crooks with coloured hair living off the fat of the land while their white-haired neighbours were starving in silence. It was time for white-haired Anticlocks to fight back and reclaim their birth-right, the headlines screamed. I couldn’t believe the level of abuse and hatred that was circulating on the internet. All three of us felt like criminals on the run.

After these incidents I could no longer remain colour blind. I began to realise that living cheek by jowl with people who had different coloured hair is only possible in the good years. When the bad times come, when the shortages appear and people begin to suffer in their daily lives, those of us painted in the wrong colour stand out in a crowd. We’re like flashing lights at a busy junction. It’s as if we’ve got a coloured target on our back that attracts attention because everyone else is the same and we’re different.

So, I now know how important colour is. I’ve realised that I’ve been branded by the colour of my hair. There’s no escaping from it. Tia, Clancy and I had lit up the Globopolis sky with our black, brown and yellow illuminations.

Zeb Solitanu

© Zeb Solitanu

Zeb Solitanu sketch by Jill

Anticlockwise Journal – a compilation of Solitanu’s Blog posts – is on sale at Amazon

Learn more about Blog Fiction – follow Zeb Solitanu at Anticlockwise and SpirianA

Explore the full range of Fictitious Books at fibs, ZSol and Essays