Darn Deadlines

• Ella Hussey-simmonite, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2013

I am staring at the time in the bottom right hand corner of my computer screen. It is eight o’clock and I’m wondering whether deadlines are a good or a bad thing. I am just about managing to stay awake. It occurs to me now that narratives are harder to write than you would think, there are so many ideas that are running through my mind, but none of them seem good enough. I am really hungry so I begin to write my story about a chocolate bar…

“Someone hands me the gold, purple, shiny wrapper, I stare at it, unsure of what I have been given. I open the wrapper slowly and there in the palm of my hand is a hard, brown, rectangle called a fumdoodleumtious. I have never seen anything quite like it!”

No that won’t do. Clearly I have no good ideas. I am still stuck, wondering what topic I should choose. I only have until tomorrow to finish it. Deadlines must be bad things, then.

I close my eyes and forget entirely about my story and focus on the plump blue man that is walking towards me. I look down to see that I am wearing a honey comb outfit, I must be really hungry! My lips are bright red and my feet are bright purple, I laugh at myself, quite hysterically, then a man waltzes up to me practising a foxtrot. Well at least I think it was a foxtrot, he takes my arm and spins me around. He talks to me in his own little language. It sounds like something an emu would sound like. Have I ever heard what an emu sounds like? No, but my imagination tells me he is talking in “emu”, so that is what he is talking in. I cannot understand a thing as I dance with this blue bouncy man. He calls his friends with a French horn, suddenly there is a whole parade of blue plump people.

After the dance is finished I head over to someone that is surprisingly not blue, but with red lipstick and bright purple feet. I sense rather than know that she speaks English, not Emu. She looks at me utterly confused but she does, as I suspected, understand my question. She tells me that I am in the city of Imagination. I grin. Inexplicably, I now know that I am a queen, the ruler of this city called Imagination. A gown is placed over me, a crown placed on my head, and a secretary at my side, ready to be at my beck and call.

Then, something goes terribly wrong. The whole world is shaking, the plump people start to pounce, the red people start to roll, and all of the men wearing honeycomb suits are wrapped away. I wonder what is going on. I have a kingdom to run, but now my kingdom is ruined, there is a loud alarm sound. It sounds like a fire alarm.

I wake up with my head on my keyboard, pressing the alarm key. What a fascinating thought, blue plum people, honeycomb outfits. What was I thinking? It is 8:30pm. I have half an hour left. What I am going to write about? Deadlines are definitely a bad thing…