Pariahs

written by Felicia York

They sat huddled together in corners where the draft nor The Undertakers would catch them. Hiding in the darkness, they wept; some out of fear but others out of habit. Their tears could not be heard in the witching hours of the night.

"We must catch them all and make them pay!" he bellowed in the dusk to his men. "They're, they're...writers!" He spat the brown chewed up tobacco on to the gravel. The men took their horses searching with their lamps and when they found one, they would stamp out the imagination from each and every one of them with their steel-toed boots.

His mother held him close as her voice trembled. "You be safe now, ya hear?" He grasped his notebook in between them close to his chest. The ink smear apparent on his left hand. "You are the best of us, " she finished as she let him go down underground with the rest of the outcasts. He would run and hide in the shadows of the city, pretending by day to be a banker or lawyer and feverishly writing at night. She held her chest, feeling the ripping apart from her youngest child.

They burst into the door not moments after he'd taken the back way. They knocked her down. "Where is he?" they demanded. "G-gone," she replied, the tears streaming down her face as the slight smirk dared not reveal itself. They threw open closets and tore through drawers searching for some clue. Dissatisfied, they left her in chaotic peace. In her hand was a note he'd written. He said it was the most important words he would ever write. She opened itand smiled. "Mama, I love you forever. Mama, I'm free."