Heaven

• Josie Walker, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2011

The world shimmered as the thin mist forming around me shifted and thickened. I had no form as I began to float above the devastation laid out like a child’s game of toy soldiers. All around bodies lay, broken, frozen for eternity with a look of agony plastered on their young faces under all of the scum and dirt mixed with the blood of their allies and enemies. What a soulless way to die, as one of the innocent exposed to the real world, murdered coldly by the metal of a bullet or the swipe of a blade. I kept floating for hours, slowly scanning the faces of the dead, and recognizing some of the friends I had trained with, laughed with, died with. To see their mangled bodies and to know that their families would not have to see this was relief but a torment just the same, knowing that these people would never get to say goodbye. If I had tears or even eyes to shed them I would feel a sort of relief. But no, all of these feelings and emotions would stay bottled up in my soul, never to be shed or expressed. The ground itself seemed to smoke and it was as though it was mother earths tears were falling from the sky, cleansing the bodies of the thousands of motionless heroes strewn across the ruined soil. I didn’t want to find my body, I knew it would be lying beneath another soldiers, covered in the same mud and blood that covered the rest of my comrades. So instead I allowed myself drift up and through the clouds that weren’t exactly clouds, more otherworldly, and into a place where I could be in peace.