Historical Fiction in One Paragraph

Um, yes. I wrote this when I was fifteen, and fresh from a year of studying way too much Revolutionary War. The British soldiers sort of intrigued me, probably because they didn't have nearly as many stories about the British as they did the Americans. I never went anywhere with this, and it's probably a good thing I didn't, because I didn't do a lot of research and would probably have messed it up pretty badly. Anyways, dug this up out of Microsoft word and thought it was cute enough to put up. Sorry for the blabbing. I am slightly embarrassed about this story for some reason.

I first saw him walking through the big cemetery near our house. He wasn’t hard to miss – his coat was an eye-watering scarlet, a spot of vivid color that made everything around him look bland and colorless in comparison. It was too red to really be real.

This incredibly noticeable quality was what really caught my curiosity – that, and the fact that no one else seemed to see him. The street wasn’t all that crowded, and he was the only person in the cemetery.

I was looking for a good excuse to skip out on school – nothing was happening that day, and I wanted to be as far away from Mr. Kantz as possible after what happened yesterday – and so I gladly took this one. I broke off from the sidewalk and crossed the narrow street, and felt the hard cement turn to neatly trimmed grass underneath my grungy sneaker-clad feet. He wasn’t walking very fast – a sort of shamble, really, just dragging his feet slowly through the grass – so it didn’t take much effort to catch up to him. He didn’t notice me coming up close behind him. He didn’t seem to be taking much notice of anything, to tell the truth.

Looking at his clothes, I labeled him as one of the historical reenactment people. There were a lot of them that worked here in Boston, clad in Revolutionary War getup. It was the wrong time of year for them to be out wandering the streets, though – they kept to the museums and historical sites when it wasn’t the 4^th of July – but I guessed that since he was out in the old cemetery, he was doing some museum work or something. I never had much to do with them. In the eight years that I’ve lived here, I’d been smothered so painfully with Boston’s history that I tried to avoid even attending the 4^th of July celebrations when they rolled around.

He was very tall – I’d pin him at about 6’ 5” or more. His hair, as per 18^th century custom, was long and tied back in ponytail. He wasn’t wearing a wig, and his hair wasn’t powdered – it was black as black could get. You hear about blue-black hair – you never actually expect to look at the back of someone’s head and see a blue sheen when the sun hits it. He carried a very scratched-up looking musket propped against his shoulder, and the blade glinted in the sun, a little too shiny and sharp.

I was done with watching – time to do some bugging.

“Hey.”

The guy’s head jerked around. His pale eyes bugged out when they saw me.

“What’re you doing out here? Geneology, or what?” I asked.

He didn’t reply. He just whipped around and started walking more quickly.

“Hey, wait!” I shouted.