Eccel Siastes, Meaningless!

• Isabelle Allen, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2009

"Meaningless!” said Eccel, as he slammed his two and a half kilo textbook onto the concrete with attitude. " Meaningless!……Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless. Why do we bother?” Eccel laid an elbow on his knees, but soon sensed a body approaching. He looked up. It was the school chaplain, asking if he could join him. “Yea.” Eccel replied, but the bell interrupted, leaving the conversation at a dead end.
“We will have this talk later, ok?” Eccel nodded and picked up his ‘paper brick.’ Jurik Hakks from the SRC rocked up, pushing out his muscly chest to display more clearly his new spanking sparkling badges on his perfectly pressed blazer.

“Needing a little counselling from the old rev hey? You haven’t got enough pleasure in your life, that’s your problem” he noted with a wink and a nudge as he pointed to a few girls just ahead. Eccel looked on contemptuously, remembering the time he lost his truest friend from disgust of doing just that, and replied with increasing volume, “You’ll never find a loyal girl like that Jurik!” but Jurik only smiled back with a cheeky grin.



Eccel gently fingered the cracks and the flaking green paint on the outside bench in the schoolyards, remembering the time he had slammed his textbook onto the diamond stiff concrete below. The wind blew his scarf around the wrong way, and slid his walking stick to a bang on the ground. No one was around, but the morbid leaves scattered along the pavement in a whirlwind. A twig snapped slowly as his dear wife stepped towards him, and enclosed her arm around his shoulders, giving him a kiss. She bent down to pick up the scarf and passed it to him. They smiled. Suddenly, a little creepy object landed on his shoulder! Eccel jumped back in fright, but instead of the courtyard being diamond hard, it was squishy. His wife slipped from his arms, “I’ll see you tonight then.” Eccel nodded and turned around.

“Aam, you’re stepping on my foot, Eccel.” But the face quickly broke into a smile.

“Jurik Hakks?” Eccel asked with his croaky voice, “What are you doing here?”

“Now I could ask you exactly the same thing……. I’m now the education overseer for the whole state, I’m rich, man!”

”You’re kidding!”

“Nope,” replied Jurik with his good old cheeky smile, and the two sat down on the authentic green flakes.

That night, as Jurik lay in bed, his eyes refused to close, as if he had forgotten how to sleep. With sleeping pills as his only form of night peace for the past…….lifetime, and long life to enjoy, alone, and a bursting wallet, but nothing to spend it on, he wondered for the first time. “My life, full of pleasures, is far more meaningless than Eccel Siastes’s. Maybe he actually figured out the meaning of life.” So, at one AM, he quickly picked up the phone, but there was no answer.