ELTHAM HIGH SCHOOL ANTHOLOGY
Alsop Lane
Finn Marshall 2016
A Girl
A girl, lying in the ruins of her house. Her arm is badly broken and she shivers uncontrollably from cold and agony. She smells the burnt flesh of her parents that lie dead and broken beside her. All she hears is her own sobs and chattering teeth.
A girl, desperate for food, is forced to eat the only meat available to her. There is plenty of it and the original owners don’t complain. The salt from her tears mixes with her meal. She hates what she is doing but she must do it to survive. It’s what her parents would have wanted.
A girl, wandering alone through a devastated city. Her arm sticks out at an odd angle. Her bare feet are slashed from broken glass and singed from burning corpses. Her dress hangs off her withered body like a curtain.
A girl, her mind broken from trauma and the horrors she has witnessed. As she hallucinates, she sees the loved ones she wishes were alive.
A girl, exhausted from dehydration, finally collapses on a road littered with charred bodies and rubble. Her fragile body is racked with shivering as the cold seeps in. She feels oddly calm, despite the burning agony that consumes her soul.
A girl sobs to the desolate city, crying for her dead mother as she falls into a cold, eternal sleep…
Death
A child is born. When he is five years old his mother tells him he can be whatever he wants to be when he grows up. During high school the boy takes up smoking. No one wants to be around him because he smells. He never gets a job because the employers don’t like smokers. He dies young from lung cancer, unable to pay for his own funeral.
A little girl is orphaned. Her parents died in a bomb raid in which only her and her older brother survive. Her brother hugs her and promises to keep her safe. He leaves the ruined house to find food and never comes back. The little girl dies slowly of starvation and cold.
A boy, fleeing from a war zone with his family, gets on a boat. His father says it’ll take them to a safe place. As they approach land another boat comes and tells them to turn around. The little boy on a boat full of desperate people is sent back out to sea. The boat capsizes in a storm and the boy drowns in the middle of the ocean, his body becomes food for the crabs.
Nothing is promised in life except death.