The Color Purple

The day was peppery. It was slowly snowing pepper. I was in my heavy, newly shined armor, walking with difficulty, making sounds like voooarch and grooanch. Black pepper flakes were starting to build up on my shoulders. With one swift flick of my wrist, I sweeped a bunch of them off. Perhaps swift-ish is a better word. It took me five minutes to do that, the armor was really cumbersome. My feet were crushing the grass underneath them like tiny bulldozers. The air smelled bitter; bitter and spicy like pepper. The slow, quiet fall of ground pepper had a sense of foreboding.

Far away, between the tall skyscrapers on the grass field, a purple mass moved. I squinted my eyes and looked carefully. Nothing. Nothing but the swaying and decending pepper flakes. Then, suddenly, a purple shadow crossed between the two skyscrapers. I tensed up. A purple head appeared above the buildings, followed by a long purple neck. There was no room for doubt, I was facing a purple dragon. My bottom was sweating. There was no way of reaching this itchy bottom through all the heavy armor. I clenched my jaw and took my racquet out of its zippered sheath. The dragon, with its disproportionately long neck, its purple, ellipsoid body, its tiny little wings -with no hope of lifting that huge body they were on-, its four short purple elephant legs and its long tail, started coming towards me. I had a pack of gummy bears that my grandmother had blessed with prayer. I threw one of those in my mouth and tightened my grip on the squash racquet. The pepper turned into a peppercorn shower. As the purple giant approached, I was starting to better comprehend its enormous size and lose the slim hope I had resting on the holy gummy bears. The mighty beast opened its jaws with anger, let out a terrifying shriek to let me know it was coming to spew all its rage on me, and increased its speed. My nerves gave up; taking advantage of the power gap, my spleen seized control of my body, and by its command I defyingly yelled "Cowabunga!" on top of my lungs.

The galloping dragon finally reached me, turned its open mouth on me and started spraying thousands of black squash balls. I was trying to rapidly return them with my racquet, but there was a constant torrent of rubber balls from the dreadful mouth. The balls bouncing off my armor were disrupting my balance, making me dizzy. Forehand, backhand, forehand again, I was fighting with all I had. My body was getting exhausted, my right elbow was starting to ache. Unfortunately, like all grand warriors, I too was suffering from the cursed disease called tennis elbow. Consumed by terrible pain, I was ceaselessly hitting the neverending balls bursting out of the monster's open jaws. Every time I hurled the racquet through the snowing pepper, I was feeling a little more depleted. The heavy armor was starting to become too much of a burden. My end was near, my eyes were fading out.

Then, all of a sudden, something unexpected happened. I had fallen on my knees, doing my final swings with my powerless arms, and one of the balls I returned hit the dragon in the eye. The creature, filled with pain, stopped spewing balls and sat down on its hind thighs. Its contact had slipped out of position. On top of that, when it was trying to reach the contact, pepper got in the eye, and the dragon growled with even more pain.

After fixing the contact with a nimble move of the eyeball, it turned to me, and with a voice like soft thunder, it asked "Your forehand is quite powerful; where did you learn to fight like that?" "I watched tapes of Roger Federer," I said out of breath. "You're a scary opponent, if your serve is this good as well," said the thunder. He politely introduced himself as Earl. "You're exaggerating, Mr. Earl," I said. We chatted for a while, we had liked each other. The pepper ceased as we talked. We went to a nearby Starbucks and had a couple of Frappucinos. Earl refused my offer to pay for the chair that broke when he sat down, and handled the situation himself. In the following months we had the opportunity to know each other better, and our feelings deepened. We applied to the municipality for matrimony, but we couldn't build the family we wanted because same sex marriages are still illegal. Our fight for equality and civil rights continues to this day.