Alberton Ward had the kind of face one would normally expect to see attached to a recently smacked arse. He was not a nice man, being particularly cruel to children and the elderly, which he felt bookended the process of life nicely.
Alberton lived by himself in a walk-up flat in the inner city. Every day as he walked home from the bus stop, he passed a children's playground, scowling as he did so. Alberton never noticed at first, but next to the footpath, there began to grow a small green shoot. Every day this sloot grew taller and taller, until it was the height of a man. Strangely, though Alberton began to notice it as it got larger, no-one else ever did, and it continued to grow unmolested.
One day, Alberton alighted the bus and saw that the shoot, which had been budding for about a week, had burst forth into a large flower, the petals of which held all the colours of the rainbow. As he saw the flower, Alberton stopped. Something inside him broke, and he knelt down on the footpath in front of the flower and wept. As he wept, a crowd gathered, humbled at the sight of a man openly weeping for no aparrent reason. Alberton looked up and saw them and cried, "Can't you see it? Can't you see the colours?" but none of them knew what he was talking about, as there was no flower there for them to see, and there never had been.
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