Archive | August 21, 2014

Write On!

Well done to Dan, whose short story Brother was voted the best by our class to represent Stage 3 in the Board of Studies writing competition – Write On! Students used the stimulus image below to create a 500 word story. When completed we had an anonymous reading session of students’ short stories and then voted on the best piece of quality work. You can read Dan’s story below and fingers crossed for the competition!

competition-2014-pic
Brother

Yeh, that’s it. Get up and walk over to your Dora towel. I peeped out of my clean, big, thick lens binoculars. My Indiana Jones hat and short-sleeved blue shirt covered the remaining visible parts of me as I crouch down in the long blades of crisp, clean, grass. I can’t enter the land of boiling sand and water. I need to stay hidden in the thick plantation and trees.
I can’t go on the enemies land, the land of tans and bikinis; my sister gets up and sprints over to the water, kicking up bits of sand behind her. She dives in the crystal water and doesn’t emerge again, I think she drowned. Like a walrus that can’t swim, her walrus friends run after her again and do the same, jump in the water and don’t emerge.
I think the water is shallow so she wouldn’t have been able to go far, except drown, but even then, where is the body, and still, what about her friends, where are they?

Mission aborted; I throw my binoculars from around my neck on the ground, then sprint off on the hot sand, ripping my shirt from my chest, like spandex pants being stretched too much. The rags fall on the ground, my abs twinkling in the sunlight. I work out! I continue down the bank, towards the cold twinkling water, my skin fresh and cold from the undergrowth but growing hotter as the sun sieges it with the army of UV rays.
My body is officially warm, I can feel the sun already burning down the castle that’s my skin, tingeing and freckling it. But that warmth is quickly interrupted by the splash of salt water as it covers my back. I have dived in, and I am shocked, my eyes stinging underwater… a hand. A human hand. It comes out of the sand, only up to my elbow, and it drags me down. It grasps onto my left hand and pulls me into drenched sand.
Slowly, but steadily, I manage to pull it up enough to catch a rushed breath of air, inhaling the stuff. Then I get dragged into the doom hole, first my left arms go in, then my head and I end up getting sucked in head first. I’m a grape that is getting slowly sucked from its stalk by the hungry sand mouth. I will get indulged; it will roll me around in its mouth, playing with me with its tongue, drowning in slobber. Then it will bite me in half and suck the sweet juice from me, then spit my seed out and peel the green thin skin off with its teeth. That is how I’ll die- like a grape!
My lungs are bursting now. I am pulled down into a cavern. I fall… the wet sand forming a ceiling and then I see a shadowed figure emerge from the darkness. And it says: “You should not have come here, brother.”