Lucille and the Moon's Stolen Balance

Lucille scrambled through the forest, weaving between the trees and bushes. She was trying to avoid capture by the guards. Her red hair was matted to her face and her clothes, once white, were now dark and torn.

“Red head!” a guard called out. “We know you’re in here somewhere. You can’t hide forever!”

Lucille turned to look back behind her. There was no one there. The guards were hiding among the shadows of the forest. Lucille looked ahead, but didn’t see any escape routes either. She heard footsteps approaching behind her and knew she had been caught. With a sigh, she dropped from her crouched position and laid down on the forest floor.

“She’s over here!” one of the guards called out as he approached Lucille. He bent down next to her with a smile on his face and pulled out a pair of handcuffs from his belt loop. “That all you got? I could hear your footsteps for miles!”

Lucille smiled, then lunged forward and bit into the man’s arm as hard as she could, drawing blood. The man howled in pain and lay down next to Lucille, who quickly crawled away from him onto her hands and knees. The other guards came running up when they heard their comrade yell out in pain and they immediately surrounded Lucille. She looked around at them, then back at the first guard who had tried to cuff her earlier. He was still curled up on the ground, cradling his arm close to his chest in an attempt to staunch the bleeding wound that Lucille had inflicted upon him minutes earlier.

The men surrounding Lucille drew their weapons and took aim at her. Lucille just smiled at them while they opened fire on her with their assault rifles, bullets ripping into her flesh and tearing great holes through her body until finally… silence fell over the forest as Lucille collapsed to the ground, dead at last from their barrage of gunfire that had riddled her lifeless corpse with thousands of small holes—each one only too eager to rip apart what remained of her skinless body in its search for blood—and now blood it found in abundance as every single drop of blood inside of Lucille’s body pooled on the forest floor beneath this lifeless girl who had lost more than half of everything she owned today for no other reason than she had chosen not to be born with brown hair like everyone else living in this world—a world where everyone has dark hair except a woman named Lucille who has red hair instead—and now she is dead at last because of it…