Paper Plane

• Lachlan McDermott, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2015

Thursday 10:44 AM
It was late. I could tell. But I stood outside on my balcony, waiting for the cool breeze to relax me. The stars shone brightly through the dark clouds of the night sky, and I felt the intense light on my face as I stared out into the distance. I turned my head to face the crescent moon. It was a yellowish colour, as though someone were shining a big torch behind it, but no one could be that big. It was small tonight, unlike the usual moon, which was large and right in the middle of where my balcony stretched out to. Sitting there was a little tree, and a small bench. I climbed the bench to get to the top of the tree. My roof wasn't much higher than the tree, so I inched myself towards that, grabbed the roof, and stood up. Now I could see the whole night sky without being blocked by anything. I walked towards the edge of the roof and sat down. I wasn't scared; I'd done this a few times before when Mum and Dad weren't home. As I looked above, one or two birds flew over my head towards the trees near my school one street over. I'd lived in this high rise apartment building nearly all my life, and never had the birds come this late. I wondered what they were thinking about; food, family, taking a dump on the nearest car windscreen? I wish I knew. I thought about joining them in flight. They seemed so free to do anything. My life hadn't been so easy. Mum could never keep a job for longer than a month, and Dad...well...
"One day," I told myself. "One day it'll happen."
I reached gently into my pocket and delicately tugged on a paper plane. It came out a little crinkled, but with a little smoothing out, it was fine. I had been making this for days. It was called "The Moth" on the internet, but I gave it a new name: The Whistler. It was named after Gilbert's Whistler, which is a bird found in this place a couple of times a year. They usually leave this part of Victoria before someone can actually find one. But they looked really cool to me and I thought their feathers were nice.
I stood up and aimed for the next building over. I always threw my planes over there, because they can never figure out where they come from, and it's funny watching them get angry and dump it somewhere.
I straightened out my arm and got ready to throw. I bent my arm back, thrusted it forward and let go. It went soaring straight towards the opposite building's window, it curved a little to one side, and as a breeze went through, the plane hit the balcony and fell towards the ground.
I let out a sigh of annoyance and headed towards my apartment door.
It was late anyway.