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Red glue had never been particularly appetizing to Henrietta. Since last Thursday she had been taking shakka lessons from Mister Marvelous, and , well, he really liked it . Just yesterday he had offered her some, and she had tried it , and it was good. She had wondered then- why do people shun this food just because of its name and colour? A year ago, Henrietta remembered, after the unfortunate mishap with Mickal Jorghensen getting bloated because he sucked on a scarlet sugarpipe without coating his mouth with blackberry juice, the government songwriter codename: Marky had first sung that repulsive but dominating tune, "Red will clap for you, but it will not sing for you". Now the colour red was hardly seen at all.
Henrietta wandered down the crowded winding streets, passing people in all colours of belden smocks, all colours but the colour of red. She glanced at a nearby fruit selling capsule and frowned. Whatever had happened to the apples? Apples had been HenriettaÕs favourite. When she was 5 she had seen her cousin Cellas for the first time, and the two families had gone up to Baalon Falls on the waterline for the Apple festival. There she had experienced the pure unadulterated glory of the power of red apples, sampling more than 450 different specialized apples, all red, if not in taste, always in colour.
"Pardon me, miss...,"Henrietta was knocked down by an extremely tall man in a cheese-coloured suit who at that moment seemed to have appeared out of nothingness. He had been running, very quickly at that, from an unseen thing. Usually people would just run on after knocking someone carelessly off their feet, but not this dear man. Henrietta looked up into his glowing violet eyes, and , sensing a true and steadfast kindness in this man's look, realized that he wished to apollogize.
"No problem at all, at least you stopped to say you didn't mean it. You didn't hinder my schedule, no, no, I was just puzzling over the fact that people nowadays have a tendency to despise red. Have you ever thought of that too? Are you in a hurry? Sometimes I'm in a hurry- But today I have a day of freedom. Do you want to know why? Well- yes, I remember! Katie said that since... I. .....Sorry!"
What in the way was she thinking? She had just spilled out a meaningless jumble of verbal stupidity into the nobility barrel of a perfectly strange tall stranger who had just knocked her over while wearing a cheese-coloured suit. Now, eeh?
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