My Roots [Open]

The day carried on as the young thirty-two-year-old auburn-haired woman watched the world awaken and slowly unfurl around her. Bright large yellow busses ambled slowly down the streets, tossing bright red octagons out from their sides with every stop. Dozens of children and teenagers of various sizes stood in congregation, vocalizing their excitement and their discontentment in a loud frenzied hum. When the bright yellow bus pulled up with a rrrrtttsh and tossed open its sliding doors with a skrreeecchhss, the children would climb onto the bus, bringing about peace to her busy neighborhood.

She slowly sketched the figures out onto the paper, creating a rough draft of the children as they gossiped back and forth to each other. Idrique drew long sweeping lines that she slowly transformed into powerful angelic wings on the smallest child. She would place impressive demonic horns on the tallest child. It was a pretty tall young lad who appeared to be in his later teens, but he spent majority of his morning laughing with his ‘little gang’ of idiotic boys and had noticeably shoved quite a few of the other kids around.

She started erasing two of the characters – a young girl she had drawn with medium-length curly brunette locks and a pipsqueak of a young boy with bright blonde hair. Instead, she recreated the character, transforming the young girl into a half-wolf half-human hybrid with powerfully long arms fixated with long, sharp claws and a snout that shot out from an otherwise normal human head with long, sharp teeth. The pipsqueak she made even smaller and gave him a long, whip-like rat’s tail and large rat-like ears. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but he went around either making up stuff about some unknown but named kids in the group, or he had been the primary culprit in spreading gossip. Some of the parents that hung around to see their kids had stepped in.

“No…” Idrique pursed her lips in a pout as she studied the paper. “That doesn’t look right…” Immediately, she gathered the work of art and began to fervently bundle it up inside of the palms of her hands. She tossed the balled up mess down the street corner, where a stray kitten of roughly six or so months pounced off and began chasing crumbled mess farther down the street. The blazing sounds of horns had Idrique worried for a split second. As the car passed by and she was able to catch sight of the grey-and-white feline within her dark-hued gaze, she released a sigh of relief. “Well…” She hummed with mild disappointment. “At least you liked it…”