Kenzan never found any pleasure of staying in the lines. He pays his lip service to the authorities by baring his teeth and hissing, his eyes dilating into slits like an antediluvian creature, fingers flying around like birds, but he rarely listens to what the higher establishment has to say. To prove his point, he remembers when he attended elementary school and how the teacher had asked the class to draw a picture.
"Draw whatever you love the most," his teacher said and went on to list a number of recommended items to draw—your pet dog Fluffy and your daddy's big car and your grandmother's cookies (Kenzan had tuned her out by then).
The girl next to him had taken out crayons and colored pencils and sketched a placid portrait of her family standing in front of a box square house surrounded by flowers with disproportioned petals, trees with purple leaves, and a sun with a curved line to resemble a smiley face. Once she was done, the teacher framed her picture with a piece of construction paper and fixed it to the wall of their classroom where everybody could see and awe over her masterpiece. When the teacher asked her to explain her picture, the girl stood up and said with a big grin that her family promoted unity, the flowers portrayed beauty, the trees expressed originality and the sun shone with happiness.
Kenzan had taken out sharpie markers and drawn dinosaurs on his piece of paper. He drew a Godzilla-esque scene of a tyrannosaurus rex biting off people's heads. Streams of red for blood, dashes of green for the grass, gray for the buildings, purple for the sky...he didn't really care that all the colors were out of the lines. But it seemed like his teacher did because when she walked over to his desk, two hands flew up to her mouth. He was asked stand up in front of the class and explain what was the psychological meaning of his picture (his teacher's voice was thick with chagrin). Kenzan crossed his arms and huffed in front of the entire class.
"There's nothing psychological about this picture," he said bluntly. "There's a dinosaur eating a person. When you're dead, you don't need to think."
Nobody was surprised when the teacher folded up his picture instead of framing it and putting it on the wall. He was told to take it home and have his parents sign it. The other students pointed and 'oooh'-ed their little mouths off but in reality Kenzan didn't care about their giggling as far as he could throw each one of them out the window. All he did was suck it in, hold his head high and stare forward.