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• Aaron Alldritt, Grade 4, Central Coast Grammar School
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'Write As Rain 2014' competition

Click. How many times I had heard that sound. The hole in the gate slowly turned, and click. Locked. Trapped for as long as it would take to be let back out again. To exercise us, to feed us, and then we rot some more. There was no escape, there is no escape, and there never will be, I thought to myself. The guard’s footsteps could be heard over the groaning and clanking of more jail doors, its captors, thinking exactly the same thing. A system, no, a machine for pigs, built by pigs, for pigs like us. But, I was not a pig. No, I was innocent, and soon, free.
It would be a grand plan, one so simple yet intricate enough to fool nine-hundred security guards and two thousand inmates. If only I could think of it. It would take months, years maybe, waiting for the right opportunity, planning, thinking, pondering the future. Click. A screech, and my cell became part of the surrounding complex. But, I didn’t move. All of my roommates had vacated the area, and yet I still stood still. Thinking. A grey uniform outside the rusted gate I sat behind yelled for something, then, nothing but footsteps. Suddenly, a black boot slammed into the side of my hip with all the strength and ferocity of a bear, trapped within his own stupid blind rage. I keeled, the world rolled, and the guard with it. And, as he slowly drifts away, I look down to see blood streaming out of my now purple waist.
The world spins, more and more. It’s dark, and I’m cold. The grey walls, plastered with lies of safety and graffiti too high to reach, withering away the same age as its dead creators. But, this was everywhere here. This was my every waking moment, and my every sleeping fear. The ones that rebelled were taken, to a place unknown by many and feared by all. They would tell me to behave, or face punishment of unspeakable proportions. But how could I? Without my family, without my friends, without my home, all taken away by the same people who promised safety. I’m so hungry, and there is a bakery across the street. I run, and, conveniently, I see a loaf of bread resting on the windowsill a few metres from the entrance. I take the bread, knowing that even with my homeless state with no money whatsoever, begging will not do anything. I turn around and run, but bump into them. They took me, and in one foul sentence, a life in prison.
I wake up in a hospital, wishing I had never had to relive that moment ever again. My bed is made of plastic, and my hip, now plastic too. But I feel able-bodied, and nobody is near me. I climb out of bed, and explore the building. It’s empty, apart from a few patrols of grey uniformed men. I sneak past them, and, find a door that appears to be an entrance. I realise this is the moment I spent thirty years waiting for. I touch the handle, and turn it. Click.