Paralysed Till The Last Cannon

• Britney Penpraze, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2014

The shots were fired one by one. The sounds of screams shattered my ear drums and sent electric shivers down my spine. The winds breath, sharp and strict, tangled up in my once wavy hair. The crowds before me were now separated in a million directions, running for their lives. Red, fiery smoke lingered around the clustered streets and clawed its way down my clenched throat. Car horns beeped furiously, leaving a constant echo that bounced around the city. Beefy-looking men began billowing out orders in an unfamiliar language.
I was lying paralyzed, faced down on the shattered pavement. In thirty seconds, my whole life had changed. My eyes lingered on a small boy lying motionless twenty meters in front of me. He was so young, so harmless. The rage, the betrayal, the hurt, it built up inside of me, crashing down my walls of pain. Slowly, bodies were flung to the ground like rag dolls. Blood of the innocent poured onto the road like a bottle of cheap red wine. This doesn’t happen to people like me, this only happens to others. You see them on television, you read about them in the newspaper; but no one cares. You change the channel, you flick to the next page, never in your wildest dreams imagining that it could happen to you.
Canons in various distances called out to the skies. Did human life mean nothing to them? I wanted to scream at them, to make them look me in the eyes as I died, to make them feel the pain that I felt. Another shot was fired, but this time on one of them. The young girl collapsed to the ground. As I looked up I froze. She couldn’t have been much younger than I was. She looked petrified. I could just hear the muffled words part from her lips “I’m so, so sor-rr-y.” A silent tear fluted from her eyes and down the right side of her cheek. Then there was nothing.
Our government had taken matters into their own hands and it quickly escalated into a battle of blood. The foreign soldiers thrown to the ground and stepped over like trash. The look in their eyes is something that one could never forget. It was almost like they were smiling. They were finally free. No more harm would come to them now...
There is a universal truth that we all have to face, whether we like it or not, everything eventually ends. The last day of summer, the final chapter of a great book, parting ways with a close friend. But endings are inevitable, leaves fall, you close the book. You say goodbye. But there is one thing that is certain, one thing that finishes before it even starts. War. In the end, no one wins war.