Kaleidoscope
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Jacqueline Huynh, Grade 10
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Short Story
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2015
Her face, a kaleidoscope of Mother Nature, is lit up by a tiny candle of electricity in the abyss. Rocking back and forth in her Parker Knoll, she falls asleep by the midnight stars. A teardrop cascades down her cheek, falling into the wick. This was what eight decades has come to. Having a face beautifully disfigured by the sheer chemical destruction of acid, the countryside was the only place that she could escape to for the last days of her life that would echo her sorrowful whispers.
Her whole life, a biographical extraordinaire, finally came to a mutter. Spending her life hiking across mountains, valleys and glaciers, away from the world – this was the only way she could live without the brutal scrutiny shot towards her appearance. Aged, battered and torn, Fiora could rest amongst her tears. Her face; a portrait of colours – the spectrum of exotic plums and numb blues – forever sticks.
The candle is blown out, and moon beams shine through the window, lighting up the icy crevices she had gotten from a mountain climb near her nose. A mind of rigour, tolerance and absolute stamina from climbs and swims, high and low, fades away through her quiet reflection on the window. English rain begins to sprinkle – washing all her impurities and imperfections away.
A sense of time is lost, with the dark ever so monotone. Grey lips, dried and shackled, she breathes one last mist of air into the journey of Nature’s panorama.