Undesired Life

• Rhiannon Fildes, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2011

Life moves pretty fast for all of us, but imagine every time you go to sleep, waking up 10 years in the future. Going to sleep every night and fearing what will be there when you wake up. Claudia lives that fear every day. Claudia was a Cancer patient and was not expected to live past three years old. On her fifth Birthday her Mum and Dad took her on a train ride around the city. Claudia loved trains and had always wanted to ride in one. The train was full of people. The train took off. Claudia loves the scenery, the horses and cows, the long fields of grass and the sky. She had never seen anything so beautiful. She wishes that she would live long enough to see it again. Just then, the train stopped. No-one noticed that the train had slowed down but now that it had stopped everyone was panicking. Claudia stayed still, wishing that she would one day be free of Cancer and would be able to stand in the big fields and play with the horses and cows. That’s when it all ended.
TRAIN BOMB TAKES 103 LIVES!
It’s Monday 22nd April 2041, 30 years after the train bomb killed 103 people, including Claudia’s parents. What no-one knows is that one five year old survived, Claudia. Back when the train blew up 30 years ago is a rusted old shed. In the shed is a fifteen year old girl with long, wavy, dark brown hair and deep blue eyes. Her jeans are new and her shirt still had the tag on, she’d just woken up. In her hands is a newspaper dating all the way back to Monday 22nd April 2011. The newspaper is full of the same thing, a train bomb that took many lives. On the 16th page was an article of three of the victims from the train bomb, a husband and wife with a five year old girl who had cancer. It was the little girls Birthday and the hospital have given her discharge for the day just so she could have her wish granted to go on a train ride. The article also goes on to say that she never got angry that she couldn’t do the things other kids could. On the ground by the girl’s feet is a photo. It’s a photo of the Cancer patient Claudia and her parents in the hospital. She is wearing a locket, the same locket that Claudia was wearing the day the train blew up. It has the name Claudia engraved on the front, and Claudia is wearing it. She survived the train bomb, but something happened that day that made her stay the age she was when she first woke up from the train bomb and when she goes to sleep, she wakes up 10 years later. This is the life she has now and she’s learning to live it.