Nightmares

• Saturday Ellison, Grade 10, Cronulla High School
• Short Story
• 2011

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

I ran through the hallways of the airport, dodging through foreigners and stumbling over suitcases. I didn’t know who I was looking for, but I was looking and I knew that if I saw her that I would just tell. My breathing became heavy, I wasn’t going to give up and I started calling her name. My momentum started slowing as from a distance I saw her, my heart became beating faster even though I was slowing down and for a second I felt like my heart was beating so fast that it felt like it stopped.
She didn’t look a cent less than poor, she didn’t look greedy or ill-mannered and she didn’t even look uneducated, but those were the categories that my mother had put her under, and it was if she was a curse to her and I had to rescue my sister from the battlefield that she was born into. She was only young, and had just turned thirteen without anyone giving her guidance. My half sister looked like a mirror image of me, and we had held a tight embrace for moments until we walked hand in hand out to the car parking lot.
I saw my father’s car in the distance drive up, and pull up awkwardly on the kerb of the airport parking lot, and rolled my eyes at my father’s fatigue in driving because it was unusual for him to drive this terrible. The back of the car door opened, and in seconds a hand had grabbed my sister, and without thinking I tried to pull her back, but it was no use. We began a wrestle, screaming and pulling as hard as I could to get my other half, my sister back in my arms, it had been seconds before we first met and I wasn’t prepared yet to see her leave. My eyes met with a masked stranger, in a balaclava, and I felt the panic that she was feeling as if our feelings were linked as one, and the car engine started, and the car started jerking forward with her still in it. It felt like a punch to the stomach, and it felt like a part of me was missing.
My screams turned into an alarm bell ringing and I woke up to my white walled bedroom, alone. The sunlight hit my face, like a spotlight shining into my eyes which made me hide under my bed covers in pain. A tear welled up in the crevasses in my eye, and I knew it would be another day without her; the nightmares kept rolling in constantly like an ocean wave reaching the shore. It hit hard, it hurt. Our barriers were stopping us, but I still had thoughts about the one day we might meet.