One Moonlit Night.

• William Scott-murphy, Grade 7, SCECGS Redlands
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'Write As Rain 2014' competition

I can see a ghostly ship in a bizarre harbour on an eerie night. I can see a full moon, seemingly summoning the spirits of the dead. I only hear the waves lapping at my feet, like a frazzled dog guzzling down water after a tiring run. I can taste the fear in the wind, coming from inside the nearby town, like the scent of blood on the edge of a freshly used knife. I feel the roughness of the sand beneath my feet, shift as my body changes. I take my finally whiff of the salty spray before the wolf takes over. I hear my own ear-piercing howl as my senses turn off, my consciousness going deeper and deeper into the darkness of my own prison, made for protection against the beast inside of me. I wake up on the rolling hills of luscious green paddock stained red by the blood of victims of my beast-form, the unwilling change that happens in extreme circumstances and are beginning to become quite frequent. As I walk home, I wonder how many cast aside bodies I will find lying on the street that have the bloody black symbol of the wolf, my beast-form that was originally thought to be a werewolf or wolf man, now a symbol of bloody, mangled, heartbreaking death. Unnoticeable, a blue moon rises above my head. All the bodies on the ground are beginning to change. I realise I was changing too, as were all the people around me, and start to run. As the blue moon came to the middle of the sky, the world let the universe know it was going through a change. The multiplied screams reached from Hades to Heaven, like an elevator that is out of control. Nothing would survive this apocalypse.