Sam The Stick Figure

• Gadiel Dumlao, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2007

Sam the stick figure

One day, a bored kid in maths class started to doodle. At first, he only drew one stick figure. But once he started, he couldn’t stop. He drew and drew and drew until he had drawn an entire town. Except he was in maths class, and his teacher was the meanest in the school. ‘What are you drawing?’ he asked. ‘Uh, err-’ ‘DETENTION!’ shouted the teacher. The teacher crumpled the sheet of paper and threw it in the bin.
Meanwhile, on the sheet of paper, Sam the stick was beginning to move. He woke from his state of inanimation, and entered the state of pencilmation. As he started to think, just like a human, he wondered how the drawer drew. Even though he had just entered pencilmation, he decided to find out. Because he was a stick figure, stuck on a piece of paper, he decided to research about the drawer’s world and their means of creation. Just then, he felt a jolt. He did not know it, but they were emptying the recycle bin. He ignored it and continued examining a slightly overshaded sausage dog. He rubbed his stub(he didn’t have fingers, only a stub)against the dog, and found that it made his finger darker. He hypothesized that the maker used some kind of material that rubbed off easily to make patterns on some kind of backdrop. Then he just realised-he didn’t know what the backdrop was. He moved around on it, yet was joined to it.
At the recycling plant Sam was now face down on a conveyor belt, now wondering what the strip of rubber in front of him was. The paper got soaked in acid, and Sam got broken up into little pieces. When he got flattened out, after a long process of being spun around in a vat, he realised he was no longer whole. His head was in a normal piece of paper, but the rest of his body was in a Chinese takeaway box. He wondered what had just happened. As his head was wrapped up in a package(made of paper, of course) he started to roll around, hoping to get some kind of a clue to how drawers created. When he arrived on a shelf, his body got filled with rice and pork dumplings. He wondered how he still felt his body, and how he got separated in the first place. As a man bought him home, Sam got a feeling he was about to find the answer to his questions about drawers. As the man opened the package, and drew out the sheet of paper Sam was on, he saw Sam’s head, rolling all over the place. He gasped, then rolled Sam around just for fun. He drew a set of wheels under Sam, so that Sam started to roll around on his new wheels. Now Sam knew. They used pencils to form patterns that were stickmen, towns and other creative things.
The end.

By Gadiel Dumlao.