The Five Cent Coin

• Rhianwen O'Grady, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2007

“I am just going to play on the oval” I said to mum. It was a lovely Saturday afternoon and I didn’t want to stay inside the whole day so I grabbed my soccer ball and headed to the oval.
When I got to the oval I noticed that the grass was a rich green unlike the school oval. I saw something sparkling in the grass, I picked it up. It was a five cent coin someone must have dropped it but then I saw another five cent piece, another and then another. It looked like a trail to me, I followed the trail until it stopped, it reached an old gate, and the gate had some sort of symbol on the front, the only problem was it was in the section of the oval where grounds keeper Willy said not to go but the oval was deserted so I went into the forbidden part of the oval.
I could see nothing on the other side of the gate, so I decided to walk through the gate and what do you know there was a forest. I thought to my self that maybe my friends would like to see this. So I went back to the neighbourhood to get Mei. I saw Joseph and Wayne so I took them along as well.
When we got back to the forest, we started to walk up the hill. We all heard some rustling behind us, we just chose to ignore it but then we heard it again. Mei said in a worried voice “whose there?” There was no answer so we kept going then suddenly these weird fairy things flew out from the trees. They were mud in colour and had what looked like bat wings they also had tiny red eyes.
Wayne finally got up the courage to introduce himself but all of a sudden they yelled “CHARGE!” and they started stinging us. Joseph yelled “WHAT DO WE DO?” then yelled back “RUN!” we headed back to the gate, we saw grounds keeper Willy and it looked like he had some sort of stink bomb in his hand and then he hurled it at the fairies and they disappeared behind a cloud of smoke, we ran through the gate back onto the oval.
Grounds keeper Willy walked us home, telling us that we were never to go into the gate ever again. He never told us why. Then he also told us that we were not to pick up the five cent coins either.