EDGYTALES: HONEYCRISP

In the land of Vegetablia, every vegetable is subject to the control of the malicious Applesauce Factory. Rob is an innocent apple who lost her mother to the Applesauce Factory when she was young. When the Factory threatens to take her sister next, she is thrown into a world of revolution and turmoil. Her stepmother and father disagree, wanting her to stay inside and be their perfect little daughter, raised to served the Factory, but Rob has her own ideas... When she meets the charming and mysterious Geogre, her life is about to change forever...

Chapter 1
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I walk carefully through the twisted, cobblestone streets of the beautiful Red Deliciousia, lost in my twisting spiral of thoughts, while still keeping my pace. I stroll dramatically past the towering Food Pyramids, my eyes full of awe and admiration, stupefied as I peer cautiously at the striking symbol of power that the terrifying Apple Factory holds mockingly above our lowly heads. The corrupt, nasty, and cruel tyrants which control the stunning and populous Vegetablia with an iron fist strike fear into our meek and cowardly hearts. I lifelessly promenade carefully toward the school, a horrific institution designed to drill the harmful and malevolent teachings of the Apple Factory into our weak, impressionable, and youthful minds.

Everyday, shackles bound me like thorny briars, entwining. And they puncture me, and I scream when my blood gushes out of my body, spilling onto the ground, coating my surroundings. And the ether turns cerise and the clouds jet-black.

At night, I find myself twisting and crying. But no one hears me. Or maybe someone does- someone who doesn’t care about my painful caterwauls.

I hesitantly approach the school, a towering and imposing building that was 100 stories tall, and was designed to intimidate the miserable and pathetic beings who dare approach and enter. The narrow hallways direct the terrified pupils to their mundane, dull classrooms, where brainless and harsh teachers repeat the dreadful and horrendously trivial lessons of the Apple Factory endlessly. Do your duty. Accept your fate. Fit in. These regulations have consistently been instilled into our easily suggestible mindsets since our unfortunate our unfortunate births. The apples, who are unfortunately situated at the bottom of the rigid social ladder of Vegetablia, have sadly experienced the brunt of the cruel tyranny, have sadly experienced the brunt of the tyranny. We grow up. We are stolen from our births and from the pathetic life we have grown to tolerate. We die, and the wicked government sells our mutilated corpses to far-off lands for a measly profit, where terrible, terrible, things happen to humiliate us even after our tragic deaths. This is how it is, and how it has been for centuries.

Much to my crushing despair, I finally arrive my terrifying classroom, a dank and dreary prison of torture with stone walls and concrete floors. My terrifying teacher waits at the front of the room, directing us apples to seats at the back of the hall. The horrific lessons of the Factory are written, as per usual, on the dusty old chalkboard in the front. I am unfortunately situated directly behind Frank the Spinach, the son of two high-ranking Apple Factory officials. This detestable and utterly disgusting bully has always despised, hated, and disliked me, taking every opportunity to ruin my still-young life while he can, before it is snatched away from me at the small age of sixteen- if I make it that far. That is when all of us apples must go to the Factory, if we are not taken before then.

My kind is not respected. A failing grade can easily get us sent far away, into slavery or to the Factory, "where we belong", whereas someone like the fearful Frank cannot fail. The teacher will always make an excuse for every horrific deed he commits, to feign innocence, because he is a spinach. I am merely a weak and supposedly pathetic apple. Everyday of my sad and lonely existence, since I can remember, I have relentlessly toiled away at the immense amount of schoolwork I am given, and yet I openly but shamefully admit that I have come dangerously close to failing every single class. This is the life I was born into. This is the life I will have, for all too short of a time.

I turn sixteen in two weeks. I am lucky to have survived thus far, because my mere existence is nothing but dangerous risks and miserable, sorrowful misery. I just wish others of my kind were this lucky and fortunate, as so many poor young lives have been taken for no reasonable cause…...lives that could have been used to change the world in any other place than this miserable h-e-double hockey sticks. (Note: in this society we are subjected to live in, cursing, even accidentally is almost a guaranteed way to get to the Apple Factory if caught. Sometimes, I say h-e-double hockey sticks as a way of rebelling against this cruel world that we live in, but it is incredibly risky)

I am not as afraid to die as I am scared for what will happen to my poor sister once I have left this world for good. She has always been odd, strange, and different. For some reason that I simply incapable of comprehending, she loves, admires, and adores our disgusting, vile, and horrendous father along with his indifferent wife, but she has never understood that it is absolutely key that she tread carefully around members of the Apple Factory. My mother was an Apple, too, but my father is a Spinach who married her simply because it was expected. There was never any love between them, and certainly not even when my poor, darling, dear mother was banished, forced to face her fate of the Apple Factory, and never to return home to her beloved family again.

My single, sole, and only chance of survival is to become the best in my class, and I have a scant and negligible chance of that, purely because I live my life as an apple. Despite my constant perseverance and determination, I always fail. I constantly slave away at all the work that is forced into my hands, because I need to do well to survive, yet my cruel life always disappoints me in the most disgusting and horrible of ways. My beautiful mother managed to be a simply unparalleled student, despite the hardship and incredibly unlikely odds she faced. She was intelligent, beautiful, kind, everything one should be, but she only passed because my grandfather had chosen her to be married to an unworthy Spinach for the wealth and safety it most certainly guaranteed.

She doesn't understand the difficult struggles that we face every single day of our lives. We cannot be loved, we cannot survive, not unless we keep our eyes open and our mouths closed. We are the Apples. We don’t have rights.