Bleak Issue #1

Chapter 1 - Gore

December 23th, 2011 [Violet POV]

The days past as the streets were filled with more and more hate and death where cannabis grew from the hands of every man or woman that wasn't touched by this devastation. The poor were all but immune to this disease, and the rich watched from the high rises to make sure that the illness of the streets didn't leak into their water and poison what little power they had over Chicago.

It was controlled by a man in a mask that hid his face so he would not be man. He wanted to be the ruler and the dictator of a city that was fallen. He was stopped time after time by a man that held power on his shoulders and carried that power to work and went everywhere with it because without it, he was man. It was his mask, my father's mask

My father did the most he could do to help the frail and weak by creating a business to reform Chicago and remove the weeds from their hands. That business sat on the power which he carried so high. Evil poked and and taunted him trying to make him fall and lose his power, but he didn't look at the evil that was trying kill the support he had created for reform, but this was his fault and where he tripped one day.

I was not ready to trip with him. He died one day, and the police said it was just an accident, but the poor and the weak knew that his mask was finally cracked and beaten mercilessly by the person who had a mask too.

I became dormant and shy after my father was killed and after I was paralyzed for six months. They beat me too, but I learned my lesson. My father could recite the lesson on the other hand. From that moment on he was no longer immortal nor was I a young girl only looking at the beauty of the world.

The man in the mask took my family and tired strings to the back of their necks and called them his little puppets. He used my mom as a speaker that preached his mask was of hope and love, but the poor and weak knew he was oh so evil which came out his eyes and out his mouth like the black parade.

My sisters were too young to understand that he was of those things. They thought he was the mighty and the powerful and was a friend of our father's. But they were wrong! They cared about a little man in a mask of steel that could shout words and even before he shouted those words you knew what he was going to say and you did it. My mother fell into this loop of helping him and hating him and loving him and denying him. She used a nail and a little hammer, then a mallet, then a maul, then she fell to the floor banging on it trying to break free.

She then was all dried and up and he could but a knew phrase or slogan to her lips, and she would repeat those words in an instance. No one saw this as normal, not even the rest of my innocent family. She wasn't mother anymore. Sage was now a neighbor that just lived a hallway away.

She was depressed the following year and became engrossed in the business to ignore that she was now a widow and that she was useless to the cause of plucking weeds from the poors' hands. She ended up ignoring her children. And the poison had reached the fingertips of another person made a pawn with her being moved from A5 to A6.

He made a game of chess out of a few people in the high rises and only moved Sage's piece back and forth day after day because he was just a man with a mask and loved and hated her.