Unexpected

• Maryam Hosain, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2014

Things break all the time. Glass, and dishes, and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence and fever.
For the last few months, or years, I have been trying to think of a list of things that can be broken, in hope of forgetting what was surrounding me. The telltale smell of the burning flesh outside the mossy castle walls. The dim candle palpitating small doses of light into this room. The punishment that was waiting for me. My heart beat faster, my thoughts grew deeper, my hair grew longer, as I sat here, motionless, taking no action.
The sounds of their screams as their bloody heads departed from their bodies were like a melody to me now. The smell of fire, consuming everything that was young and beautiful, was now like oxygen and carbon to me. The sight of this perpetual, part-darkness, has become of second sense.
But, being light as a feather, with a heart, white and pure, I would never have gone wrong in life. Expect if there was wind, the neurotic whistles of air hugging my body. Caressing me. Blowing me to a hell, that has consumed many others. Towards the red-orange flames, hungrily guzzling everything within a few metres radius. The one that high-fived with the wind as they spread the terror and fear throughout.
The flames were coming closer, as I helplessly looked on; a vulnerable piece of paper. Not imagining this to be my fate, my destiny. Instead of being the paper that held ancient knowledge, to hold dark secrets, to be a mystery. Unexpected.