A Place They Called Home

• William Bunn, Grade 6, St Patrick's School
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'The Text Generation 2014' competition

Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep. The noise spread across the rainforest like an infectious disease, finding its way into every nook and cranny of the Amazon. The thick and luscious canopies soak the noise in, all the Islamic green ferns, the thickly knotted camel hue lianas, the dense and extremely hydrated undergrowth, and all of the brazil nut and kapok trees that tower over the Amazon, each one competing to find the most sunlight, and now fighting for life. Even the vines slithering down the cliff face like snakes, seeking the pool of tepid water below. Every plant knowing their death is near as the sun strikes into a kaleidoscope of colour onto the forest floor.
The peaceful rainforest is now in chaos, rusty red howler monkeys shrieking at the top of their lungs calling and alerting the forest community. Tapirs no longer bathing in the turquoise hue streams, and anteaters no longer searching for ants that are marching in formation away from the forest. Lemon yellow, crimson red, olive green and cerulean blue poison dart frogs who used to be afraid of nothing now afraid of everything. Once secretive jaguars crawl out of their hiding places in the highlands, their mahogany brown, silky fur, their jet black spots and those majestic eyes could be seen pouncing over emerald green moss covered logs. Poor sloths too slow for the humans' machinery that was sounding louder and louder every agonising second.
Toco toucans perched on the peak of capirona trees while the rainbow coloured macaws soared above the disappearing rainforest. Vast areas of land now sprawling with machinery. Bare spots the size of football fields cover the Amazon like the spots on the ocelot now surrounded by log-covered earth.
Ten ton trucks carrying dying logs that were once a home to many animals, now they were on the back of a machine that both destroys animal houses and builds humans'. The convoy of heavy machinery forge through every oil brimmed stream and with exceeding numbers of mechanical giants, the rain forest quickly disappears. As the Amazon is digested by these colossal killers, mineral deposits appear, stadium-sized craters exploding with pollution. Smoke pouring out of gargantuan sized ships now pulling out of docks, readying themselves to surge through the open ocean taking communities of rainforest trees and dumping them in industrial cities of pollution and waste.
While fires clear out the rest of the rainforest, remaining animals flock to the cities of South America, macaws in the bustling city of Brasilia, leopards crawl out of sewers in La Paz, Buenos Aires waking up to the screaming of howler monkeys and all the cities of South America now home to some new residents. But as the last rays of sunlight set upon the beaches of Rio De Janeiro, the last rays of life set upon the lost animals.
There will come a time when the human race will end this destruction, that will be the new starting point for life.