One Blue Ribbon

• Molly McPherson, Grade 5, Mater Dei Primary School
• Short Story
• 2016

Excellence Award in the 'Word Zone 2016' competition

“Missey, wakey wakey, hurry up or we will miss the train. It’s grocery day, remember?” moaned my older sister Belle. She always had been the early riser and always would be. Eventually, I climbed up from my grass mat, did my hair in one plait and fastened in my only accessory, my one blue ribbon. I grabbed my slice of bread on the run so I could catch up to Belle who had already started to walk away from our one-room, straw cottage.
When Belle and I eventually reached the train station, Belle crossed the railways tracks carefully to pay the small train fare. The train took us in every Sunday to do our ‘groceries’ which you could hardly call groceries seeing they were only milk, bread and butter. But then it hit me. Belle had been working on the weekends so she had been getting double pay. Maybe today we had enough to buy some some sought of luxury item, like jam!
So I began jogging and was halfway across the railway tracks when my one blue ribbon fell out and landed in my sister’s hands. ‘Good,’ I thought to myself, ‘I will get that from her later.’ Then a fast wind hit me. Cameras were flashing. People were asking me if I could hear them but I couldn’t hang on. I let go. I was dead at 12 years old. I had left my sister with my one blue ribbon. My life was like a math’s test, you only get one shot and I had failed.
From that moment on, I promised myself I would watch over my sister from Heaven and I am so proud of her. She has started an organisation called the Blue Ribbon Foundation in honour of young people who experience loss. She was even offered $1000 dollars for my signature blue ribbon. $1000 dollars was enough to buy some proper groceries for a couple of weeks. Maybe even enough for her to start saving to move out of our cottage. But she didn’t take it. The cottage was too full of old memories. She turned it down just so she could keep that last bit of me, my one blue ribbon. In my heart, I know if it wasn’t for that one blue ribbon keeping us together, neither her or I would have made it through this sorrowful time. That one blue ribbon.