Taken

Shadows are a strange color.

Somewhere between dark and light, good and evil, ancient and modern, they hold the key to night, when everything is shadow.

My bike leans on the rack right outside of the grocery store. A plastic bag full of candy and junk food hangs from my wrist as I unlock the wire on my bike. As soon as I sit on the bike,

I can feel it: The flat tires.

Sighing, I begin to wheel the bike home. It tires me out quickly. I take shortcut after shortcut, but my home seems no closer.

Remember when I said that shadows were the key to night?

That was not entirely true.

All is shadow at night, so a person's shadow is no different from the all-encompassing darkness.

So when someone comes up behind you, your only clue is the slight change in air current.

Then the hand closes over my mouth.

Large, muscular hands clamp around my arms and legs and hold me still. I kick and flail and scream, but my voice is muffled by the hand. Thrashing and writhing, my panicked body is still for only one second, but it is enough time for me to feel the pinch of a needle.

And I go limp.

Unconscious is an odd state of being. It combines the symptoms of being dead with the breath of life.

My unconscious is a blue tinted, hazy world where nothing is rough. The harsh is all smoothed out.

But there is a struggle in my unconscious. A struggle to wake and return to the world. Chemicals do their job well, though, so I use all my strength not to succumb to the drug and keep my bloodstream untainted.

I fail.

When the drug enters me, the blue tint fades to black and I am night.